"Robert Jordan - Conan 02 - The Invincible" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jordan Robert)

He began to chant, and behind the altar a mist formed, red and golden, as a mist of flames. Beyond the
mist blackness stretched into infinity. The Ophirian's tongue was stilled, and his teeth chattered in their
place.

It was said that no human mind could comprehend the terrible knowledge contained in the book, or hold
a single word of it without madness and death. Yet Amanar had learned. But a single page, it was true,
before the numinous powers of it, wrenching at his mind, turning his bones to jelly, sent him grievously
wounded and howling like a dog out of the city of Khemi into the desert. And in his madness, in that
waterless waste beneath a burning sun, he had remembered that page still. Death could not come near
him.

In the mists, from the mists, a shape coalesced. The Ophirian's eyes bulged in silence-stricken terror. The
woman screamed into her gag. The golden head that reared above them in the swirling vapors-neither
quite serpent nor lizard-was surrounded by a halo of a dozen tentacles longer than a man. The serpentine,
golden-scaled body stretched back into the darkness, on beyond the reach of eye to see or mind to
know. A bifurcate tongue flickered between fangs, and eyes holding the flames of all the furnaces that
ever were regarded Amanar. Greedily, the mage thought, and fingered his amulet once more.

Across the sands he had stumbled, burning, drying, thirsting, remembering that page and unable to die. At
last he came on Pteion the Accursed, fear haunted and abandoned. In the days of dark Acheron, before
Stygia was aright but a stretch of sand. In the nameless, forgotten cavern beneath that city he had found
Morath-Aminee, bound there for rebellion against Set when those who now called themselves then
walked on all fours and rooted beneath stones for grubs. With his memories of that page-would they
never stop burning at him?-he found the means to release the god-demon, the means to keep it in rein,
however tenuously, and the means of his own protection. He had found power.

"Morath-Aminee," he half-chanted, half hissed. "O Eater of Souls, whose third name is death to hear,
death to say, death to know, thy servant Amanar brings these offerings to thy sacrifice."

He held out his hand. Sitha placed a golden-hilted knife, its blade gilded, in his grasp. The Ophirian
opened his mouth to scream, and gurgled horribly as Amanar slit his throat. At that instant the golden
tentacles of the god-demon struck at the man on the altar, clutched him where he lay amid the spreading
pool of his own blood. The tentacles avoided the proximity of Amanar.

"Eat, O Morath-Aminee," the mage chanted. He stared into the eyes of the sacrifice, waiting the proper
moment.

Horror grew on the Ophirian's face as he realized he was dying. And yet he did not die. His heart
pumped; his life blood poured from his ruined throat, the rubiate liquor flowing over ebon marble,
channeled to the golden vessel at the foot of the altar for later necromancies. But he was not allowed to
die.

Amanar heard in his mind the satisfied sibilation of the god-demon feeding. The Ophirian's pale eyes filled
with desolation as the man realized what was being taken from him besides his life. The mage watched
those eyes become lifeless though yet alive, empty windows on a soulless depth. With care he made a
precise slit in the twitching chest. His hand poised above it, and he met the Ophirian's despairing gaze.

"Thank me for the release of death," he said.