"Andrew J. Offutt - Cormac 06 - The Undying Wizard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Offutt Andrew J)

17
The Wizard Strides
18
Steel Against Sorcery
19
Doom-heim



The Undying Wizard
Andrew J. Offutt
ACE FANTASY BOOKS
NEW YORK
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to express thanks to Robert Adams and Chuck Holst and others who helped with
information and books (including the authors of 131 books and encyclopedic articles); and Kirby; and, for
letting him see and feel what itтАЩs really like:
HRM Albert Von Dreckenveldt,
Baron Wurm Wald, MK, KSCA, OL
Sir Polidor Haraldsson, KSCA, OL, OGW
тАФand others of the Middle Kingdom



Prologue

The enormous reptile lay in a cavern passage, eerily lit by some means surely preternatural; sorcerous,
perhaps. Walls and ceiling glowed. The strange illumination was dim, pearly, hardly akin to that of torch or
lamp, much less the sunтАФwhich could not pierce the cavernтАЩs ceil of earth and rock beneath the man-made
pile of masonry that capped the thick natural layer. The pale light emanated from the very walls of the
world-old tunnel itself.
In this weird luminous emanation from a source not visible the great reptile lay, a green monster twisted as a
vine on rocky soil.
Several times the length of a man the creature was, and nigh as thick. It lay motionless in a great lake of
red-brown cruor. The blood had thickened and crusted over in coagulation, so that it shone as if glowing,
reflecting the wall-light. The serpent was still. Its eyes, the colour of new flax and large as a manтАЩs eyes, were
filmed over.
Yet it gave off no stench, nor was it bloated. There was no sign of putrefaction. Nevertheless, the monster
was dead. Its great twisted tree-trunk of a body bore the many wounds that had ended its life. It had been
stabbed and hacked, sliced and chopped. No juices remained in that prodigious corpse; the number of
wounds and its own volcanically violent death throes had seen to that.
It was fearsome, even in death. No ordinary man had brought red death upon this haunter of subterrene
passageways.
In a somber cavern beneath the earth beneath a towering castle of extraordinary antiquity, the reptile that
appeared to be the father of all snakes lay dead.
And... it moved.
Only the hint of a shudder was that movementтАФbut no, it was a shimmer, giving but the weird illusion of
motion. A Something stirred within the corpse. Some... thing was struggling to gain freedom from its prison of
death.
In the whelming silence of a tomb, the air stirred about the great snout. Slowly, above the moribund shell of