"David Eddings - The Elenium 3 - The Saphire Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

will savour this rude prayer of thine. Return again
On the morrow, and I will disclose my mind further
unto thee.'
As he trudged home with his goat, Otha vowed never
to return, but that night he tossed on his rude pallet in
the filthy hut where he lived, and his mind was afire
with visions of wealth and subservient young women
upon whom he could vent his lust. 'Let's see where
this goes,' he muttered to himself as the dawn marked
the end of the troubled night. "If I have to, I can always
run away later. '
And that began the discipleship of a simple Zemoch
goatherd to the Elder God, Azash, a God whose name
Otha's Styric neighbours would not even utter, so great
was their fear of Him. In the centuries which followed,
Otha realized how profound' was his enslavement. Azash
patiently led him through simple worship into the practice
of perverted rites and beyond into the realms of spiritual
abomination. The formerly ingenuous and only moderately
disgusting goatherd became morose and sombre as
the dreaded idol fed gluttonously upon his mind and
soul. Though he lived a half-dozen lifetimes, his limbs
withered, while his paunch and head grew bloated and
hairless and pallid-white as a result of his abhorrence of
the sun. He grew vastly wealthy, but took no pleasure in his
wealth. He had eager concubines by the score, but he was
indifferent to their charms. A thousand, thousand wraiths
and imps and creatures of ultimate darkness responded
to his slightest whim, but he could not even summon
sufficient interest to command them. His only joy became
the contemplation of pain and death as his minions cruelly
wrenched and tore the lives of the weak and helpless
from their quivering bodies for his entertainment. In that
respect, Otha had not changed.
During the early years of the third millennium, after
the slug-like Otha had passed his nine hundredth year,
he commanded his infernal underlings to- carry the rude
shrine of Azash to the city of Zemoch in the northeast
highlands. An enormous semblance of the hideous God
was constructed to enclose the shrine, and a vast temple
erected about it. Beside that temple and connected to it by
a labyrinthine series of passageways stood his own palace,
gilt with fine, hammered gold and inlaid with pearl and
onyx and chalcedony and with its columns surmounted
with intricately-carved capitals of ruby and emerald.
There he indifferently proclaimed himself Emperor of all
Zemoch, a proclamation seconded by the thunderous but
somehow mocking voice of Azash booming hollowly from
the temple and cheered by multitudes of howling fiends.
There began then a ghastly reign of terror in Zemoch.