"Julian May - Boreal Moon 2 - Ironcrown Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)
May, Julian - Boreal Moon 2 - Ironcrown Moon
I knew who they were, what they had beenтАФthose shining abominations who had fed on pain!
The people of High Blenholme gave them various names: the Beaconfolk, the Coldlight Army, the Great Lights. Their domain is the far
north, the arctic barrens and the island in the Boreal Sea from which I had been banished. Never had I seen the Lights during my enforced
sojourn on the southern mainland. Early on in my exile, when I had cautiously questioned my manservant Borve about folkloric beliefs in
this part of the world, he made no mention of terrible sky-beings in the local pantheon of demons and demigods. Yet here they were,
transforming the night of subtropical Foraile into a facsimile of the incandescent heavens above the northland. Was it possible that I was
dreaming? I hardly thought so, but it would not be the first time that nightmares provoked by the evil ones among the Beaconfolk had
tormented me.
Still less did it seem they should be able to manifest themselves here, so far south! Their once-mighty powers were circumscribed now,
pent-up and curtailed so that the pain-eating predators among them might no longer slake their obscene appetites upon humans and other
ground-dwelling beings. And yet I seemed to feel something reaching for me, grasping my poor pounding heart with claws of ice and
slowlyтАФso slowlyтАФtightening its grip. The chest spasm was tentative and entirely bearable, but my feeble old legs now refused to
support my body and I subsided onto my knees, eyes still locked on to that dreadful blazing sky.
I have said that the night was strangely quiet. I was aware of this anomaly almost at the same time that I realized it was not quite true. A
ghostly sound was discernible at the very limit of audibility, a sibilance that ebbed and flowed like surf, all the while overlaid with a
complex rustling that almost resembled speech. I had first heard its like some sixty years ago, as I lay dying on the Desolation Coast of
Tarn. The Coldlight Army had blazed above me then in all its awful strength, jeering at my mortal frailty, ridiculing the notion that a
pathetic creature such as I might be able to frustrate its devilish entertainment.
тАЬBut I survived in spite of you!тАЭ I managed to croak, shaking a fist at them. тАЬI used your own twisty rules of magic to thwart your
schemes. Do you want to know how? ItтАЩs simple: I never told you my true name! IтАЩm Snudge, but IтАЩm not Snudge. What dтАЩyou think of
that, Lights?тАЭ
Above me the luminous draperies and glorious colored beacons flared in response to my puny effort at defiance. The faint crackling
sound intensified momentarily and I felt a crushing agony behind my breastbone. The pang subsided almost at once and I slowly exhaled,
sagging back onto my heels, then sprawling sideways to rest against the trunk of a small tree, my eyes shut tight to banish the sight of the
inhuman torturers.
Was the pain really of their doing, or was my aging heart simply giving out at last as I dreamed of my old enemies? I waited motionless,
in fearful anticipation of a more violent attack that would finish me; but none came, and at length I relaxed, reassuring myself that the
lethal capabilities of the Lights were indeed extinct. They could do me no serious harm. I, Deveron Austrey, nicknamed Snudge, would
live.
I opened my eyes, and saw that the sky was empty except for the rich expanse of southern stars.
==========
The grand scheme to unite the four disparate realms of High Blenholme into a single Sovereignty was conceived by my first master,
Conrig Wincantor, later to be called Ironcrown, while he was still very young.
Growing up as Prince Heritor of Cathra, the richest and most powerful of the island realms, Conrig idolized his remote ancestor Emperor
Bazekoy, the towering personality who first vanquished the great Continental nations of Foraile, Andradh, and Stippen, then set out to
wrest control of Blenholme from the Salka and the other nonhuman monsters who had inhabited the place since the dawn of time. The
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