"Andre Norton & Lackey, Mercedes - Elvenbane 1 -The Elvenbane" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

image Father Dragon had imparted to the younger shamans. Home was a
place no one wanted to return to, a world of savage predators fully a match
for a grown, canny dragon; of ice storms that blew up in a heartbeat and left
the hapless dragon caught in them to freeze to death within moments of
shelter, of ruthless competition for food. Their shape-shifting abilities had
been forged of necessity, hammered into shape by competition, and honed by
hunger and fear. Life was brutal, ruthless, and all too often, short. Then, one
day, one of the Kin discovered something odd in the depths of a cavern he
was exploring with an eye to making it a Lair.

One of the entrances off the main cavern gave off, not into a side cave, but
into another world. And such a world! A place of green, growing forests,
long, lazy summers, an abundance of food--and nothing, seemingly, large or
savage enough to threaten them.

And yet not all of the Kin chose to escape through that Gate, after
Shonsealaroni had stabilized it with one of his precious hoard-gems. Some
stubbornly insisted that Home was better. In the end, perhaps half the Kin
passed through--and the moment Shonsea took away his gem, the Gate
collapsed.

By then, however, the Kin had learned how to create Gates of their own.
Some of them had taken a liking to the place. Though accident and murder
were the common shorteners of life among the Kin, if violent death could be
avoided, a dragon lived a very long time indeed. In the new world, which
they named "Peace," they discovered how long, and that the one common
bane to the long-lived is boredom.

That was when some of the Kin took to world-hopping, seeking challenges
and amusements.

There was certainly enough to keep them occupied here! Once Father
Dragon discovered the elves and their slaves...

The first Gate had probably been a construct of the elves or something like
them, or of a mage ill taught.
Father Dragon suspected that it was, indeed, these elves, in an attempt ill
directed to bridge the worlds, that bridged instead Home and Peace.

For when the Kin found the elvenkind, they learned that the elves themselves
were alien to this place, and had built themselves a Gate to take them from a
place in which their lives were imperiled to a place where they would be the
masters. It was somewhat ironic that the Kin had been gifted with a Gate and
thought only of escape, where the elves who had constructed it thought only
of conquest. Father Dragon, who had studied the elvenkind the longest of
any dragon, speculated that the peril the elves had found themselves in was a
peril caused by their own actions. Alara had never yet seen nor heard
anything to disprove that, and many things seemed in accord with that
theory. The elvenkind occasionally spoke in Council of Clan Wars, the
destruction of vast stretches of land, of strife by magic "until the rocks ran