"Ed Greenwood - Forgotten Realms - Shadow of the Avatar 3 - All Shadows Fled" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenwood Ed)

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
En GREENWOOD
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, too.. . .
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 around her eerily translucent face despite the gusting wind. Beside her,
the blood-spattered lady ranger Shar shot her an amused look
ED GREENWOOD
through her own wind-whipped hair.
Elminster glared severely at the ghostly Witch of Shadowdale. "There is a
little matter of bringing a trio or more of Malaugrym into Faenin, and
allowing'them to wander off untraced and untrammeled, to work their wanton
wills across the land."
" *Work their wanton wills' ... I like that; 'twould fit nicely into a purple
Harper ballad," Sylune replied serenely. "My choice, Old Mage, was between the
lives of these three heroesтАФnay, no wincing, now; they've more than earned the
titleтАФand those of a few shapeshifters. / think my decision was the right one
. . . and if you disagree so strongly, why did you not take action yourself?
You must have been here watching us."
"Been here, aye. Watching, no," the Old Mage replied, eyes on the hillside
below themтАФwhere, at his magical bidding, the horribly distorted bodies of the
Malaugrym were rising into the air and catching fire. "I was tossing meteor
swarms over the turrets of Telflamm, half a world away."