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

All opposing cults were ruthlessly extirpated. Sacrifices
of the newborn and virgins numbered in the thousands,
and Elene and Styric alike were converted by the sword
to the worship of Azash. It took perhaps a century for
Otha and his henchmen to totally eradicate all traces
of decency from his enslaved subjects. Blood-lust and
rampant cruelty became common, and the rites performed
before the altars and shrines erected to Azash became
increasingly degenerate and obscene.
In the twenty-fifth century, Otha deemed that all was in
readiness to pursue the ultimate goal of his perverted God,
and he massed his human armies and their dark allies upon
the western borders of Zemoch. After a brief pause, while
he and Azash gathered their strength, Otha struck, sending
his forces down onto the plains of Pelosia, Lamorkand and
Cammoria. The horror of that invasion cannot be fully
described. Simple atrocity was not sufficient to slake the
savagery of the Zemoch horde, and the gross cruelties of
the inhumans who accompanied the inv' ading army are too
hideous to be mentioned. Mountains of human heads were
erected, captives were roasted alive and then eaten, and
the roads and highways were lined with occupied crosses,
gibbets and stakes. The skies grew black with flocks of
vultures and ravens and the air reeked with the stench of
burned and rotting flesh.
Otha's armies moved with confidence towards the
battlefield, fully believing that their hellish allies could
easily overcome any resistance, but they had reckoned
without the power of the Knights of the Church. The great
battle was joined on the plains of Lamorkand just to the
south of Lake Randera. The purely physical struggle was
titanic enough, but the supernatural battle on that plain
was even more stupendous. Every conceivable form of
spirit joined in the fray. Waves of total darkness and
sheets of multicoloured light swept the field. Fire and
lightning rained from the sky. Whole battalions were
swallowed up by the earth or burned to ashes in sudden
flame. The shattering crash of thunder rolled perpetually
from horizon to horizon, and the ground itself was torn
by earthquake and the eruption of searing liquid rock
which poured down slopes to engulf advancing legions.
For days the armies were locked in dreadful battle upon
that bloody field before, step by step, the Zemochs were
pushed back. The horrors which Otha hurled into the fray
were overmatched one by one by the concerted power of
the Church Knights, and for the first time the Zemochs
tasted defeat. Their slow, grudging retreat became more
rapid, eventually turning into a rout as the demoralized
horde broke and ran towards the dubious safety of the
border.