"Brooks - Heritage 2 -The Druid of Shannara" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brooks Terry)

encounter. Remember? he chided himself. Remember how con-
fident you were?

He convulsed as the poison burned into him. Well and good.

But where was his confidence now?

He forced himself to his knees and bent down over the open-
ing in the cavern floor where his hand was pinned to the stone.
He could just make out the remains of the Asphinx, the snake's

The Druid of Shannam 9

stone body coiled about his own stone arm, the two of them
forever joined, fastened to the rock of the mountain. He tight-
ened his mouth and pulled up the sleeve of his cloak. His arm
was hard and unyielding, gray to the elbow, and streaks of gray
worked their way upward toward his shoulder. The process was
slow, but steady. His entire body was turning to stone.

Not that it mattered if it did, he thought, because he would
starve to death long before that happened. Or die of thirst. Or
of the poison.

He let the sleeve fall back into place, covering the horror of
what he had become. Seven days gone. What little food he'd
brought with him had been consumed almost immediately, and
he'd drunk the last of his water two days ago. His strength was
failing rapidly now. He was feverish most of the time, his lucid
periods growing shorter. He had struggled against what was
happening at first, trying to use his magic to banish the poison
from his body, to restore his hand and arm to flesh and blood.
But his magic had failed him completely. He had worked at
freeing his arm from the stone flooring, thinking that it might
be pried loose in some way. But he was held fast, a condemned
man with no hope of release. Eventually his exhaustion had
forced him to sleep, and as the days passed he had slept more
often, slipping further and further away from wanting to come
awake.

Now, as he knelt in a huddle of darkness and pain, salvaged
momentarily from the wreckage of his dying by the voice of the
Grimpond, he realized with terrifying certainty that if he went
to sleep again it would be for good. He breathed in and out
rapidly, choking back his fear. He must not let that happen. He
must not give up.

He forced himself to think. As long as he could think, he
reasoned, he would not fall asleep. He retraced in his mind his
conversation with the Grimpond, hearing again the spirit's