"Sniegoski, Thomas E - Outcast - 04 - Wurm War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sniegoski Thomas E)

WURM WAR
Outcast Book 04

Christopher Golden & Thomas Sniegoski




PROLOGUE
SkyHaven was falling, and it was all Timothy's fault.
The world of Terra ran entirely on magic. It was within everything and everyone, with a single exceptionЧTimothy Cade, the only person on Terra who had no capacity for magic. Behind his back, the mages snickered and called him the un-magician. It was a slur, an insult, but it was true.
Magic had no affect on him, and if he so much as touched anything enchanted, he would temporarily unravel spells that even the most powerful Wizards of Old could not have broken. Not only that, but recently he discovered that if he concentrated hard enough, he could stretch the nullifying field that surrounded him, so he didn't even have to touch magic to disrupt it.
Timothy had always thought of the effect he had on magicЧ and his inability to perform even the simplest spellЧas an affliction. But more and more he had been finding that it was what made him unique, and that there was strength in him that he had never known. Magic itself was pure, but if the intentions of the mage wielding it were cruel or evil, the magic became dark and deadly.
Never had there been a wizard as dark and cruel as Alhazred. Long thought to be dead, he had returned with an insidious plan. He had been kidnapping and killing mages so that he could absorb their magic. Worse, he had collected thousands of ghostfire lampsЧlights powered by the magical spirit essence of dead magesЧand was consuming the magic from their lingering souls. But that was only the beginning. Alhazred had begun to tap into the magical matrixЧthe very source of all the magic in the worldЧand once he took control of that, no one would be able to stand against him.
Timothy knew he had to do something.
Focusing on the tingling sensation of the magic as it slid over him, he pushed and felt the null field ballooning around himЧexpanding. It took every ounce of will and inner strength he could muster to force the field away from himself, spreading and stretching to encompass the entire massive chamber, and beyond.
Alhazred's eyes had darkened in anger as every ghostfire lamp, every piece of spell-glass in the room, shattered in a single moment, releasing the energies of the dead mages in a blinding flash. For the briefest of moments, Timothy felt triumphant.
And then SkyHavenЧan island fortress that floated above the oceanЧbegan to fall from the sky.
His mind cried out in panic. Through fear and instinct, he drew the null field back to himself, and the freefall of SkyHaven came to an abrupt and stomach-flipping stop.
The realization of what he had done gradually sank in.
I've disrupted the whole matrix, he thought. Everything must have winked out for a second, all of the magical power in the area . . . and maybe farther. . . .
Suddenly he was very afraid, distracted only by the dark wizard's pitiful howl of defeat. Timothy watched as Alhazred at last began to die; his gray flesh withering and crinkling like burning parchment. Darkness puffed out of him, and soon there was nothing left of the evil archmage but drifting ash on the floor.
And with Alhazred at last defeated, Timothy's thoughts painfully returned to what he had done, how he had reached out and touched the power of the world.
"Are you okay?" Cassandra Nicodemus asked from somewhere in the darkness of the chamber.
Timothy could not even begin to answer that question.
CHAPTER ONE
The intensity of the buzzing hum inside his thick, horned skull nearly forced Verlis from the sky above Tora'nah. He faltered and began to drop, but quickly regained his senses, flapping his leathery wings all the harder, and soaring upward again. His heart hammered in his broad chest, and alarms of danger raced through him. The last time he had experienced this hum, he had been wearing a helmet forged of MalleumЧthe metal tied intrinsically to his kind, the descendants of dragons known as the Wurm.
But now it appeared that he didn't need the helmet to feel this connection.
Verlis sped through the air toward the magical barrier between dimensions that separated Terra from Draconae, the world to which the Wurm had been banished many decades past. It was called Alhazred's Divide. On the other side was a Wurm civilization of savagery and tyranny, lorded over by a general called Raptus, who wanted nothing more than for his sorcerers to tear down the Veil so that he and his army could invade Terra and destroy the world of mages.
Filled with a terrible dread, Verlis spread his wings and hovered before the barrier. The light of Alhazred's Divide shone from ground to sky, from horizon to horizon, as it had for centuries, but now its ethereal light had dimmed. The hum in Verlis's skull increased and he hissed in pain, flinching away from the magical barrier.
As it winked out, all the magic in Tora'nah cut off for just a moment.
A moment was long enough. The barrier fell with a sound like breaking glass, the spell at last destroyed, and with a murderous roar of triumph, the barbaric Wurm that had been trying to break it down from the other side began to come through. The sky beyondЧthe sky of DraconaeЧwas filled with dark, winged figures, the Wurm gathering like storm clouds as they realized what had happened.
The first wave emerged on foot, cautiously, from the large rip that had been torn in the fabric of reality. The edges of the dimensional tear hissed and sputtered. Verlis watched them come, for a moment unable to believe that the barrier had been broken, and then he remembered the mages at the mining operation nearby, digging for the precious metal Malleum, and realized their safety was now in jeopardy.
Spurred to action, Verlis swooped down out of the sky toward the invaders. He opened his massive jaws and a stream of liquid fire erupted from his gullet, bathing them in flames as he flew past and away. They were his kinsmen, these Wurm, but not like him at all. They had waged a civil war upon his clan, who wanted only peace. To him they were the enemy.
Two of the Wurm soldiers roared in pain as Verlis's fire engulfed them, and the others were distracted by his attack, some even hesitating on the threshold of this world. But Verlis knew that this was at best a temporary distraction. He only hoped that it would provide him enough time to warn the workers at the mining operation that what they had feared most had happened.
Wings pounding the air, Verlis soared over the ancient home of the Dragons of Old, desperate to reach his human comrades in time. He flew low above the mages' encampment, finding it deserted as expected. Most of the workers would still be toiling at the mines, and he redoubled his speed, hurrying toward them. The mages were excavating dangerously close to the burial grounds of his ancestors, but he had kept them away from the actual graves of the ancient dragons.
The air was filled with the droning, grinding noise of the digging machine Timothy Cade had designed, and as Verlis swooped down toward the mining operation, he saw the metal thing burrowing into the hillside, boring a hole from which the mages would excavate tons of Malleum for weapons and armor to fight against the Wurm.
Or, at least, that had been the plan.
Time had suddenly run out.
Verlis caught sight of Walter Telford, the project coordinator, who stood talking animatedly with a pair of miners. They all wore troubled expressions, and Verlis understood. They wouldn't know yet that an attack was under way, but they were suffused with magicЧthey would have felt the magical matrix flicker.
"Walter!" the Wurm roared, smoke furling from his nostrils, the wind whipping past him.
Telford glanced up and lifted a hand. "Greetings, Verlis," he cried over the sounds of the digging machine. "I see you felt it as well. Do you have any ideaЧ"
"The Divide has fallen!" the Wurm bellowed over the noise of the excavation, streams of fire leaking from his jaws.
Telford stepped back, the look upon his face showing that he wasn't sure he had heard correctly The coordinator's eyes bulged as he turned to another worker, saying something into his ear. The worker ran to stand beneath the Burrower, waving his arms to shut the noisy machine down.
"Are you sure, Verlis?" Telford called. As the site fell silent, all mining operations ceasing, the men and women gathered around. "Absolutely certain?"
"I saw the barrier fall with my own eyes," the Wurm growled. "Whatever interrupted the flow of magic gave Raptus and his sorcerers the opening they needed. Alhazred's Divide has been torn down. The Wurm of Draconae are invading!"
The coordinator's body seemed to diminish in size; his head slowly hanging low. "We're not ready. There are no weapons, no armor, except what's at the Forge right now."
From the distance came a sound that could have been the rumbling of a distant storm, but Verlis knew otherwise.
Telford heard it as well, craning his head to listen. The others began to mutter worriedly, some already starting to move away from the machine and the mine, searching for some kind of cover. In the distance Verlis saw the workers from the Forge, wearing their heavy gloves and thick aprons, begin to emerge from the building where the Malleum was being processed.
"That's not a storm, is it?" Telford asked, looking up and out of the valley at the slate gray sky.