"Ed Greenwood - Forgotten Realms - Elminster 4 - Elminster In Hell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenwood Ed)

devils but could cook and doom a mortal man.
Elminster swooped and drank in that dragon fire, setting his teeth and grimly riding out the fierce but
brief pain, quelling its heat with his own gathered magic.
Clasping, he prevailed. The Old Mage was full almost to bursting now. His body trembled with the
effort of holding such force. He was no longer its vessel but its heart, wrestling with its surges and flows
merely to move as he desired to and not be torn apart by its raging.
Or by draconic jaws. The great red dragon, thrice the size of any he'd seen on Toril-even old
Larauthtor, who'd filled the sky like a moving mountain-swooped, fangs gaping.
Elminster threw his hands behind him and let tiny jets of flame spurt from his fingers, hurling him up,
forward, and away-beyond the reach of even a frantically twisting wyrm.
 It clawed wildly at die air in its haste to turn. Snapping its jaws vainly at him the dragon flapped its
great wings so hard that the air cracked like thunder. Caught in a trio of rift bolts, the wyrm stiffened,
scales melting into smoke. It was too racked with pain even to scream as it died. Its eyes burst into flame
and smoke that trailed from dark sockets and loosely flapping jaws. The wyrm fell away into the jagged
darkness below.
None of this was getting Elminster back to the task of healing the widening rift, looming like a
weeping eye in the sky of Avernus. Elminster called up a half-remembered snatch of a bawdy song as he
banked on wings of his own spell flames. He raced, singing merrily but badly, to meet his doom.
Bolts stabbed out to meet him. He spun chains of snarling magic around them and dragged them
around in roaring, sky-shaking arcs. They plunged back toward their source-a racing flood in which he
joined. Falling headlong into the blinding brightness, he thrust his hands out before him.
All sound died away in the echoing roar, Elminster became a racing dart among mighty flows of
force. They rolled ponderously past him, a great chaos of surges that battered and tore at him,
threatening to whirl him away into bone-shattered, bloody pulp.
When searing force burnt away his fingertips, he sent forth spellfire to cleave it and master it,
plunging on to the roiling edge where Toril began. He plucked and swooped and wove, surfing surging
torrents of force to knit the blue sky together again.
Devils screamed as they were torn apart or blasted to shreds somewhere behind him. Elminster
scarcely heard them. He gazed hungrily at the world he must wall himself away from to save. He looked
longingly down at Shadowdale, a little green gem far below, ere he flung himself across the sky, stitching
its ragged edge in his wake with teeth-jarring, surging force.
"The bards could never find words for this," he gasped. Red sky and blue slipped and slid and
battled for supremacy overhead. He raced along the raging line. Sickening force slammed through him
like the sword that had once plunged down his throat and out his backside in one icy momentтАж
Long ago, that had been, and with rather less hanging in the balance. A memory among few too
many, always beckoning him for a wander among their shadows. The offers were more enticing as
Elminster grew ever more tired- and weariness rode his shoulders like a heavy, clinging cloak these days-
Suddenly he was done. Energies veered away to complete what he'd begun, reshaping what had
been shattered and cloaking bright Toril from his view. The roar of the sky died, and he was felling, a
dwindling star, into the deep ruby gloom of Avernus.
He'd done it. Dazed and exhausted, he knew that much. Toril was saved and his own doom sealed,
"Have my thanks, Great Elminster," he told himself with dark humor, toasting himself with an
imaginary goblet as black fangs of rock rushed up to meet him. "Fair Faerun has seen thy greatest
victory-though none know it, or care. Welcome to the waiting dunghill."
With the last of his weary will, Elminster made himself into a lump of stone and hurled to one side,
so that his fall would become a plunge deep into what was probably the lake of Blood. Let its warm and
fetid waters take his fell. The rotting flesh that cloaked its bed would hide him. Perhaps he could lie
unnoticed there, until he had strength enough again to-
After such a fall, even a stone hits water as hard as a smith's hammer. His brutal shattering of the
surface would have made Elminster gasp-if he'd had anything to gasp with. Warmth bubbled past as he