"Paul S. Kemp - Forgotten Realms - War of the Spider Queen 06 - Resurrection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kemp Paul S)

He smiled. Being surrounded by his dead and his books always settled his mind. The library was his
retreat. The pungent reek of decaying flesh and the piquant aroma of parchment preservative cleared both
his cavernous sinuses and his cavernous mind.
And that was well, for he desired clarity. His research had revealed little, only tantalizing hints.
He knew only that the Lower Planes were in an uproar and that Lolth was at the center of it. He had
not yet determined how best to capitalize on the chaos.
He ran a mottled, long-fingered hand over the smooth skin of his scalp and wondered how he might turn
events to his advantage. Long had he waited to move against Kexxon the Oinoloth, Archgeneral of the
Blood Rift. Perhaps the time for action had come, during the Lolth-spawned chaos?
He stared into the bloodshot, pain-filled eyes of his walls but the corpses offered him no answers, only
lipless grimaces, soft moans, and agonized stares. Their suffering lightened Inthracis's spirit.
Outside Corpsehaven, audible even through the walls of pressed flesh and glassteel windows, the
scream of the Blood Rift's blistering winds sang their song of agonyтАФa high pitched, rising keen, similar to
that made by the dozen or so mortals Inthracis had personally flayed. As the sound subsided, Inthracis
cocked his head and waited. He knew that a planar tremor would follow hard after, trailing the wind's wail
with the same certainty that thunder followed lightning in an Ethereal cyclone.
There.
A slow rumble began, just a soft shaking at first, but building to a crescendo that shook the entire
fortress, a paroxysm that caused flakes of skin meal and dried hair to rain like volcanic ash from the high
ceiling of the library. Inthracis suspected that the entirety of the Blood Rift, perhaps even the whole of the
Lower Planes, was shaking. Lolth had torn the Demonweb Pits free of the Abyss, he knew, and raw,
purposeless powerтАФreified chaosтАФpoured into the Lower Planes and sent shudders throughout the
cosmos.
The multiverse, Inthracis knew, was in parturition, and the cosmic birthing was rattling the planes.
Reality had been reorganized, entire planes moved, and the Blood Rift, Inthracis's home plane, groaned
under the resulting onslaught of energies. Ever since Lolth had begun her . . . activities, the barren,
mountainous plane had suffered a plague of volcanic eruptions, blizzards of ash, and thunderous rockslides
that could have buried continents on the Prime Material. Fissures opened at random in the mountainous,
rocky landscape, swallowing leagues of earth. The churning, gore-filled flow of the Blood River, the great
artery that fed the body of the plane, roiled in its wide channel.
Given the upheaval, Inthracis had several times increased the magical protections that shielded
Corpsehaven from such threats, but still the danger gave him pause. Corpsehaven sat on a level ledge
sculpted from the otherwise precipitously steep side of the Blood Rift's largest volcano, Calaas. It would not
do for an unexpected landslide or volcanic spasm to send Inthracis's life's work skidding down the
mountainside.
The wind outside rose again, a low whine that grew to an unbearable keen before beginning to die.
Behind the wind's wail of pain, Inthracis could just make out the conspiratorial whisper of a word. He
sensed it as much as heard it, and it was the same word he had been hearing intermittently for days:
Yor'thae.
Each time the gust hissed its secret, the corpses in his walls moaned through rotted lips and decayed
arms loose from the wall squirmed to reach bony hands for rotted ears. With each utterance of the unholy
word, the entirety of Corpsehaven wriggled like a hive of abyssal ants.
Inthracis knew the word's meaning, of course. He was an ultroloth, one of the most powerful in the
Blood Rift, and he was versed in over one hundred twenty languages, including High Drow of Faerun. The
Yor'thae was Lolth's Chosen, and the Spider Queen was summoning her Chosen to her side. It infuriated
Inthracis that he had not been able to learn why.
He recognized that Lolth, like the Lower Planes, was undergoing a transmogrification. Perhaps she
would be transformed, perhaps the process would annihilate her. The calling of the Yor'thae presaged
events of significance, and the word was in the ear, on the tongues, and in the minds of all the powerful in
the Lower Planes: demon princes of the Abyss, archdevils of the Nine Hells, ultroloths of the Blood Rift.