"Ed Greenwood - Band of Four 02 - The Vacant Throne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenwood Ed)

library, a book floating immobile in each.
Something moved among those pillars of glowing nothingness. It shuf-fled often into the nether reaches
of the shafts, to stand looking up vainly for silent hours before lurching over cracked and scorched
flagstones to the next shaft, and the next. It was something that might once have been a man, though it
looked more like the mottled brown reassembled remnants of a bad and once-shattered sculpture of one,
with spindly arms of differing lengths, lopsided shoulders, and a head that was too long, thin, and jagged.
None of which kept it from lurching and shuffling its slow, eerie way around the ruins, returning always
to the library, and those six silent shafts of lightтАФjust as it was shuffling into the northernmost column of
glowing air now.
To stand as always, head turned up to the books floating beyond reach, the books impervious to its small
magics ... just as they were "not there" to every rock and branch it had contrived to throw up, atтАФand
throughтАФthem.
Yet it had nowhere else to go, no other magic to sustain it but the end-less glow at the heart of
Indraevyn, and little magic at its command when it moved out of the libraryтАФso here it stood again, waiting
with a patience that owed less to sanity than to burning hunger.
The rags of robes not its own hung from its shoulders, as tattered as the flesh beneath. Withered flesh
and sinew as brown and as dry as old fallen leaves clung to its shattered bones, though someone who'd
known the wiz-ard in life would have had to stare long and hard at the withered brown skeletal thing to
recognize Phalagh of OrnentarтАФthough he was closer to his old vigor now than when he'd died, torn to
glistening gobbets pattering bloodily down into the pit that had held the Stone of Life for so long. Time
enough to leave behind weird weavings that had reshaped a man with ago-nizing slowness, building bone
and rotting flesh together in a rising heap that had one day stood, and lifted arms, and climbed.
Up into the shattered hall above the pit where Phalagh had died the silent thing came, to endlessly,
almost mindlessly, stumble around its gloomy rubble, exploring. Examining every crack and corner, every
fallen stone and collapsed shelf, for days upon days it shuffled, until it knew them.
Basking betimes in uncovered magics as if they were warming pools of sunlight, it stretched forth
sudden hands to work faltering magics, raising a wall here and the fallen rubble, like a shower of rock in
reverse, springing upward in an eerie flow, to restore an arc of the dome there.
It was rebuilding the place where it had met its death, as if raising its own mausoleum. And all without a
word uttered, and no sound but the lurchings and shufflings of its lopsided journeying.
That silent something now turned its head suddenly, stiffening like a dog that has scented something.
Two cold and tiny points of light kindled in empty eyesockets. Some-thing was comingтАФsomething had
disturbed its warding spells. The death-less skeleton that had been Phalagh shuffled forward a few paces,
and then drew back into the nearest shadows like a thief disturbed by returning owners.
 Two men stepped into the roofless library, their cautious strides almost as soundless as those of the
skeletal thing whose eyes now glittered watch-fully in the gloom. One was a short, slender, graceful man,
the other a hulk-ing warrior as tall and wide as many a door, the sword in his hand almost as long as his
companion stood tall. Two others followed these forefarers, and all four moved warily, looking around at
ruined walls and tumbled shelves as they came.
All of the Band of Four remembered well their last visit to this place. As they came to where they could
at last see the shafts of light clearly, Craer even murmured, "Almost getting ourselves slain last time wasn't
enough, Lady? You've brought us back to try again, until we do it properly?"
Even as the lone woman in the group twisted wry lips to frame a reply, the deathless wizard in the
shadows raised clawlike hands, the radiance of a building spell flickering around them. Dark red and black
were those glows, hues that betokened nothing good. As their angry leapings flared, the glit-tering eyes
behind them flickered red and black too. The undying thing that had been Phalagh seemed to grow, standing
taller as destroying magics raged up and down its arms, and skeletal fingers spread to point at the four
intruders. ...

"Your Majesty," the Tersept of Helvand said, almost snapping his words, "I cannot speak for the