"Raymond E. Feist - Darkwar 3 - Wrath of a Mad God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Feist Raymond E)

done this without you.
 Raymond E. Feist

San Diego, CA 2007




CHAPTER ONE
Escape




MIRANDA SCREAMED.
The searing agony that seized her mind relented for the briefest moment, and in that instant she found
what she had been seeking. The preponderance of her awareness was occupied with the battle of wills
with her captors, but a tiny fragment тАУ a disciplined fraction of her consciousness тАУ had been readied.
Over the days of interrogation and examination she had used every respite to partition off this one sliver
of her intellect, to somehow overcome the blinding pain, and observe. During the last four encounters
with the Dasati Deathpriests she had achieved that detachment and willed her body to withstand the pain.
It was there, she knew, inflamed nerves protesting about the alien energies coursing across the surface of
her mind, probing it, seeking insights into her very being, but she had learned to ignore physical pain
centuries before. The mental assaults were more difficult, for they attacked the root of her power, the
unique intelligence that made her a supreme magician on her home world.

These Dasati clerics lacked any pretence of subtlety. At. first they had ripped open her thoughts like a
bear pulling apart a tree stump looking for honey. A lesser mind would have been savaged beyond
recovery on the first assault. After the third such onslaught, Miranda nearly had been reduced to idiocy.
Still, she had fought back and knowing there was no victory if there was no survival, she had focused all
her considerable talents first on endurance, then insight.

Her ability to shunt aside the terrible assault and focus on that tiny sliver of knowledge she had gained
kept her sane. Her determination to overcome her captivity and return with that knowledge gave her
purpose.

Now she feigned unconsciousness, a new ploy in her struggle with her captors. Unless they possessed
finer skills than she had so far encountered, her charade was undetected: to them she appeared
incapacitated. This counterfeit lack of awareness was her first successful conjuration since her captivity
began. She risked just enough body awareness to ensure that her breathing was slow and shallow, even
though she suspected the Deathpriests who studied her still knew too little about humans to understand
what physical signs to observe. No, her struggle was in the mind, and there she would eventually triumph.
She had learned more about her captors than they had about her, she was certain.

Individually the Dasati were no match for her, nor even for one of her more advanced students back
home. She had no doubt without the snare concocted by Leso Varen to disorient her, she would have
easily disposed of the two Deathpriests who had seized her. But Varen was a force to reckon with, a
necromancer with centuries of experience, and she alone would be hard pressed to best him: three times
one of his bodies had been killed that to her knowledge,' by multiple foes and taken by surprise, but still
 he survived. Between Varen and the Deathpriests, she had been quickly overwhelmed.