"03 - All Shadows Fled - Ed Greenwood [1.0]" - читать интересную книгу автора (Avatar Trilogy)

Away, Shadows, away! I grow tired of slaying theeЕ
and presently I shall grow angry. Then you'll be sorry!
The Simbul, Queen of Aglarond - Said in spell-battle before all her court
Year of Shadows
PRologue
Three living heroes and a ghost dared to take an enchanted blade out of the
world, hunting shapeshifters in their ancient Castle of ShadowsЕ
For centuries, the Malaugrym had been dark figures of legend, fey sorcerers who
could take any shape they chose. They came to Faerun to impersonate kings and
reavers and archmages, to entertain themselves with the havoc they could
wreakЧand to seize mortal women as breeding slaves, carrying them off across the
planes to the place they called Shadowhome.
When the famous archmage Elminster of Shadow-dale caught Malaugrym in Faerun,
they paid with their lives. Twice he journeyed to the Castle of Shadows to
humble the House of MalaugЕ but no mere mortal had ever made such a foray and
returned to Faerun to tell of it.
Until Lady Sharantyr, Knight of Myth Drannor; Bel-kram and Itharr of the
Harpers; and the ghostly remnant of Sylune, Witch of Shadowdale, went up against
the shapeshifters armed with the Sword of Mystra. And with that sword, Sharantyr
cut her way back from the brink of death and out of the Castle of Shadows,
slaying many of the evil shapeshifters as she went.
Unfortunately, most of them still lived, and vowed revenge on four new foes.
More entered Faerun with the returning heroes and escaped to wander the Realms
at will.
Even worse, Faerun was much as they'd left it: in the throes of the magical
chaos, bloodshed, and lawlessness of the Time of Troubles, when the gods
themselves walked the Realms, no magic could be trusted, and fire and fury raged
across the lands.
It was a time for heroes, and the four who'd escaped the Castle of Shadows found
Elminster, the Old Mage, waiting for them, with orders to undertake still more
perilous tasks in the desperate work of saving civilized Faerun.
And the Malaugrym were waiting for them, tooЕ
If Begins with a Flame
Faerun, Daggerdale, Kythorn 20, Year of Shadows
The wind rose and whistled through the stones of a roofless, ruined manor house
on a grassy hillside in Daggerdale. The trampled slope was strewn with
tenta-cled, jellylike, eye-studded nightmare bodies.
Three weary, wild-eyed rangers and a ghostly lady hastened up the hill from the
monsters they'd slain, running like starving men to a banquet table. They
hurried toward a man who sat in the ruins.
The gaunt, white-bearded old man sat on what was left of a crumbling wall and
serenely smoked a pipe. He looked at them all, smiled, and spat out this smoke
belcher. It rose smoothly upward to float by his ear, spouting wisps of smoke
that curled away to be lost in the quickening breeze. *Te deserve
congratulations for one thing, at least," he announced.
After the silence had begun to stretch, Itharr sighed and asked in tones that
were just respectful, "And what, Lord Elminster, would that be?"
"Keeping thyselves alive," Elminster told him dryly.
"I heard an 'at least' in there," Sylune put in. Her silvery tresses hung still