"Dragonlance - The War of Souls 03 - Dragons of a Vanished Moon - Tracy Hickman & Margaret Weis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dragonlance)

Mina regarded them both with a disdainful smile. "You are nothing without the magic. Look at youЧtwo broken-down, impotent old men. Fall on your knees before the One God. Beg her to give you back the magic! She will grant your pleas."
Neither Palin nor Dalamar moved. Neither spoke.
"So be it," said Mina.
She raised her hand. Flames burned from the tips of her five fingers. Green fire, blue and red, white, and the red-black of embers lit the Chamber of Seeing. The flames merged together to form two spears forged of magic. The first spear she hurled at Dalamar.
The spear struck the elf in the breast, pinned him against the wall of the Chamber of Seeing. For a moment, he hung impaled upon the burning spear, his body writhing. Then his head sagged, his body went limp.
Mina paused. Holding the spear, she gazed at Palin.
"Beg," she said to him. "Beg the One God for your life."
Palin's lips tightened. He knew a moment's panicked fear, then pain sheared through his body. The pain was so horrific, so agonizing that it brought its own blessing. The pain made his last living thought a longing for death.
2

The Significance of the Gnome
Dalamar had said to Palin, "You do understand the significance
of the gnome?"
Palin had not understood the significance at that moment, nor had Tasslehoff . The kender understood now. He sat in the small and boring room in the Tower of High Sorcery, a room that was pretty much devoid of anything interesting: sad-looking tables and some stern-backed chairs and a few knick-nacks that were too big to fit in a pouch. He had nothing to do except look out a window to see nothing more interesting than an immense number of cypress trees Ч more trees than were absolutely necessary, or so Tas thought Ч and the souls of the dead wandering around among them. It was either that or watch Conundrum sort through the various pieces of the shattered Device of Time Journeying. For now Tas understood all too well the significance of the gnome.
Long ago Ч just how long ago Tasslehoff couldn't remember, since time had become extremely muddled for him, what with
leaping forward to one future that turned out wasn't the proper future and ending up in this future, where all anyone wanted to do was send him back to the past to dieЧanyhow, long ago, Tasslehoff Burrfoot had, through no fault of his own (well, maybe a little) ended up quite by accident in the Abyss.
Having assumed that the Abyss would be a hideous place where all manner of perfectly horrible things went onЧdemons eternally torturing people, for exampleЧTas had been most frightfully disappointed to discover that the Abyss was, in fact, boring. Boring in the extreme. Nothing of interest happened. Nothing of disinterest happened. Nothing at all happened to anyone, ever. There was nothing to see, nothing to handle, nothing to do, nowhere to go. For a kender, it was pure hell.
Tas's one thought had been to get out. He had with him the Device of Time JourneyingЧthis same Device of Time Journeying that he had with him now. The device had been brokenЧjust as it was broken now. He had met a gnomeЧsimilar to the gnome now seated at the table across from him. The gnome had fixed the deviceЧjust as the gnome was busy fixing it now. The one big difference was that then Tasslehoff had wanted the gnome to fix the device, and now he didn't.
Because when the Device of Time Journeying was fixed, Palin and Dalamar would use it to send himЧTasslehoff BurrfootЧ back in time to the point where the Father of All and of Nothing would squash him flat and turn him into the sad ghost of himself he'd seen wandering about Nightlund.
"What did you do with this device?" Conundrum muttered irritably. "Run it through a meat grinder?"

Tasslehoff closed his eyes so he wouldn't have to see the gnome, but he saw him anywayЧhis nut-brown face and his wispy hair that floated about his head as though he were perpetually poking his finger into one of his own inventions, perhaps the steam-powered preambulating hubble-bubble or the locomotive, self-winding rutabaga slicer. Worse, Tas could see the light of cleverness shining in the gnome's beady eyes. He'd seen that light before, and he was starting to feel dizzy. What did you do with

this device? Run it through a meat grinder? were exactly the same words-or very close to themЧthat the previous gnome had said in the previous time.
To alleviate the dizzy feeling, Tasslehoff rested his head with its topknot of hair (going only a little gray here and there) on his hands on the table. Instead of going away, the uncomfortable dizzy feeling spiraled down from his head into his stomach, and spread from his stomach to the rest of his body.
A voice spoke. The same voice that he'd heard in a previous time, in a previous place, long ago. The voice was painful. The voice shriveled his insides and caused his brain to swell, so that it pressed on his skull, and made his head hurt horribly. He had heard the voice only once before, but he had never, ever wanted to hear it again. He tried to stop his ears with his hands, but the voice was inside him, so that didn't help.
You are not dead, said the voice, and the words were exactly the same words the voice had spoken so long ago, nor were you sent here. You are not supposed to be here at all.
"I know," said Tasslehoff, launching into his explanation. "I came from the past, and I'm supposed to be in a different futureЧ"
A past that never was. A future that will never be.
"Is that... is that my fault?" Tas asked, faltering.
The voice laughed, and the laughter was horrible, for the sound was like a steel blade breaking, and the feel was of the slivers of the broken blade piercing his flesh.
Don't be a fool, kender. You are an insect. Less than an insect. A mote of dust, a speck of dirt to be flicked away with a brush of my hand. The future you are in is the future ofKrynn as it was meant to be but for the meddlings of those who had neither the wit nor the vision to see how the world might be theirs. All that happened once will happen again, but this time to suit my purposes. Long ago, one died on a Tower, and his death rallied a Knighthood. Now, another dies on a Tower and her death plunges a nation into despair. Long ago, one was raised up by the miracle of the blue crystal staff. Now the one who wielded that staff be raised upЧto receive me.
"You mean Goldmoon!" Tasslehoff cried bleakly. "She used the blue crystal staff. Is Goldmoon dead?"
Laughter sliced through his flesh.
"Am I dead?" he cried. "I know you said I wasn't, but I saw my own spirit."
You are dead and you are not dead, replied the voice, but that will soon be remedied.
"Stop jabbering!" Conundrum demanded. "You're annoying me, and I can't work when I'm annoyed."
Tasslehoff's head came up from the table with a jerk. He stared at the gnome, who had turned from his work to glare at the kender.
"Can't you see I'm busy here? First you moan, then you groan, then you start to mumble to yourself. I find it most distracting."
"I'm sorry," said Tasslehoff.
Conundrum rolled his eyes, shook his head in disgust, and went back to his perusal of the Device of Time Journeying. "I think that goes here, not there," the gnome muttered. "Yes. See? And then the chain hooks on here and wraps around like so. No, that's not quite the way. It must go ... Wait, I see. This has to fit in there first."
Conundrum picked up one of the jewels from the Device of Time Journeying and fixed it in place. "Now I need another of these red gizmos." He began sorting through the jewels. Sorting through them now, as the other gnome, Gnimsh, had sorted through them in the past, Tasslehoff noted sadly.
The past that never was. The future that was hers.
"Maybe it was all a dream," Tas said to himself. "That stuff about Goldmoon. I think I'd know if she was dead. I think I'd feel sort of smothery around the heart if she was dead, and I don't feel that. Although it is sort of hard to breathe in here."
Tasslehoff stood up. "Don't you think it's stuffy, Conundrum? I think it's stuffy," he answered, since Conundrum wasn't paying any attention to him.
"These Towers of High Sorcery are always stuffy," Tas added, continuing to talk. Even if he was only talking to himself, hearing
his own voice was far, far better than hearing that other, terrible voice. "It's all those bat wings and rat's eyeballs and moldy, old books. You'd think that with the cracks in these walls, you'd get a nice breeze, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I wonder if Dalamar would mind very much if I broke one of his windows?"
Tasslehoff glanced about for something to chuck through the windowpane. A small bronze statue of an elf maiden, who didn't seem to be doing much with her time except holding a wreath of flowers in her hands, stood on a small table. Judging by the dust, she hadn't moved from the spot for half a century or so and therefore, Tas thought, she might like a change of scenery. He picked up the statue and was just about to send the elf maiden on her journey out the window, when he heard voices outside the Tower.
Feeling thankful that the voices were coming from outside the Tower and not inside him, Tas lowered the elf maiden and peered curiously out the window.
A troop of Dark Knights had arrived on horseback, bringing with them a horse-drawn wagon with an open bed filled with straw. The Knights did not dismount but remained on their horses, glancing uneasily at the circle of dark trees that surrounded them. The horses shifted restlessly. The souls of the dead crept around the boles of the trees like a pitiful fog. Tas wondered if the riders could see the souls. He was sorry he could, and he did not look at the souls too closely, afraid he'd see himself again.