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

Now she knew the Deathpriests for what they were, necromancers of a sort. Throughout her life,
Miranda had chosen to ignore clerical magic, as was common for most magicians on Midkemia, as being
some sort of manifestation of the gods' powers. Now she regretted that oversight. Her husband Pug had
been the only magician with whom she was familiar who had some insight into clerical magic, having
made it a point to learn as much about it as he could, despite the tendency of the various orders to be
secretive. He had learned a great deal about this darkest of magic because of his repeated encounters
with the Pantathian Serpent Priests, a death cult with their own mad ambitions. He had confronted
several attempts on their part to wreak havoc throughout the world. She had listened indifferently to
several discussions on the subject, and now she wished she had paid closer attention.

Now, however she was learning by the minute; the Deathpriests were clumsy and imprecise in their
investigation and often revealed as much about their own magical nature as they learned about hers. Their
lack of subtlety worked in her favour.

She heard her captor leave, but kept her eyes closed as she slowly let her consciousness return to the
upper levels of her mind, every instant clinging to the insight she had just achieved. Then clarity returned.
And with it, pain. She fought back the urge to cry out, and used deep breathing and mental discipline to
manage the agony.

She lay up on a slab of stone, but stone that had its own evil nature, a sense of energy alien to Miranda.
Simply touching it was uncomfortable, and she was strapped to it without benefit of clothing. She was
drenched in perspiration and nauseous. Her muscles were threatening to cramp and with her limbs
restrained, the additional pain was unwelcome. She employed every trick at her disposal to control the
urge, calm herself, and let the pain flow away.

For almost a week she had undergone the Dasati examination, enduring humiliation as well as pain, as
they sought to learn as much about her and the human race as possible. She was secretly grateful for their
heavy-handed approach for it provided her with two advantages: they had no experience with human
guile and they vastly underestimated her.

She put aside her speculation on the Dasati, and turned her attention to escape. Once trapped by Leso
Varen and the Deathpriests, she had quickly realized that her best course of action was to give her
interrogators just enough truth to make credible everything said. Varen, his malignant consciousness
currently inhabiting the body of the Tsurani magician Wyntakata, had not appeared since she had been
taken, a fact for which she was grateful, as he would have given the Dasati a far greater advantage in
dealing with her. She knew he had his own mad agenda and had only been in league with the Dasati for
as long as it suited him, and cared nothing for the success of their insane ambitions, only for his own.

She opened her eyes. As she expected, her Dasati captors were gone. For an instant she had worried
that one might have lingered quietly to observe her. Sometimes they spoke to her in a conversational
manner as if chatting with a guest, at other times they subjected her to physical violence. There seemed
little pattern or sense to their choices. She had been allowed to keep her powers at first, for the
Deathpriests had been supremely confident and had wished to see the scope of her abilities. But on the
fourth day of her captivity, she had lashed out at a Deathpriest with the full fury of her magic when he had
presumed to touch her naked body. After that, they had reined in her powers with a spell that had
frustrated every attempt at using her magic.

The screaming nerves of every inch of her body reminded her that they were still in torment. She took a
long, deep breath and used all her skills to lessen the pain until she could ignore it.