"Dixie Lee McKeone - Tales of Uncle Trapspringer" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKeone Dixie Lee)

Dixie Lee McKeone
Tales of Uncle Trapspringer


This is a story about my Uncle Trapspringer. It seems that a long, long time ago ...

Chapter 1

In the great library of Palanthus, Astinus, the chronicler of the history of Krynn, was recording important
events on Ansalon....

The lobo wolf peered through the brush, his yellow eyes seeking enemies and prey, his sensitive nose
sniffing for danger on the breeze. He crouched beneath the bushes on an unnatural rise of tumbled stones
overlaid with earth and undergrowth and gazed at a place nature had no part in building.
Man-place, his senses warned him. A place of two-legs with their flying, wounding shafts. He had no
concept of structures, but he knew straight walls were no part of nature; they were man-work. His experience
also told him that man-work falling down, walls crumbling, was no longer the den of his mortal enemy. He had
seen other places where nature was taking back what the tall two-legs had left when they moved on to new
lairs.
Off to the right of where he stood peering through the bushes, he saw the dimness of a narrow entrance,
almost obscured by creeping plants. The darkness within suggested it was covered above. It called to him, its
shadowy depths promising safety from his enemies, even if he did not find food inside.
He crept through the brush, through the high weeds and across the new spring grass that separated the
man-place from the forest, sniffing as he went. He discovered the three-day-old trail of a rabbit. Fresher was
the trail of a mouse and the owl that had caught the rodent and made a meal of it, but no man scent. He
stopped at the dark entrance and noticed the scent of more mice. He crept into the shadows of the ruin,
found a bed of leaves that the wind had blown into the shelter and curled up to sleep.
The wolf felt safe because he knew the tall two-legs were gone.
He was wrong.
The ruin was not abandoned.
Two hundred feet below where the wolf slept, a heavy-boned man walked down the passage of an old,
deep dungeon. As he passed down the corridor, torches set in wall sconces burst into flame as he neared
them and magically died away after he had passed. The stones in the walls and the arched ceilings still
emanated an aura of the pain and suffering that had taken place in the dungeons of Pey. The horror had been
mortal and had no power to disturb Draaddis Vulter.
His torture came from a different source. Nothing fearful impeded his path as he walked to his work
chamber, but he dreaded making the journey. Once there he could be subjected to horrors only the most
twisted of minds could conceive, and his return trip would tax all his mental reserves.
He was paying the price of having offended his god.
The huge domed vault that served him for a laboratory had long ago been stripped of its tools of misery to
make room for a different kind of evil. It was now the laboratory of the black-robed wizard. Draaddis would
have preferred a tower, but to show himself openly would put his life in danger.
More than a century after the Cataclysm, wizards and clerics still hid and worked in secret. The people of
Krynn had never forgiven the users of magic for the disaster that sundered the world of Ansalon. The knights,
the wizards, and most of the clerics had not taken part in the destruction, but, in truth, they might have been
able to prevent it.
The responsibility for the disaster belonged to the King-priest of Istar and his followers. The clerics of Istar
had grown in power until neither the wizards of Krynn nor the priest-knights of Solamnia had been willing to
openly oppose them. As time passed the Kingpriest and his followers grew enamored of their own holiness.
In their conceit, they demanded an end to the balance of good and evil that held sway over Ansalon.