"Joan D. Vinge - The Storm King" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Joan D)

(I can give you that,) grudgingly. (Is that all you ask of me?)

Lassan-din hesitated. тАЬNo. One more thing.тАЭ His father had taught him
caution, if nothing else. тАЬOne request to be granted at some future timeтАФa request
within your power, but one you must obey.тАЭ

The dragon muttered, deep within the mountainside, and Lassan-din sensed its
growing distress as the water poured into the cave. (If it is within my power, then,
yes!) Dark clouds of anger filled his mind. (Free me, and you will have everything
you ask!) And moreтАФ Did he hear that last, or was it only the echoing of his own
mind? (Free me, and enter my den.)

тАЬWhat I undo, I can do again.тАЭ He spoke the warning more to reassure
himself than to remind the dragon. He gathered himself mentally, knowing this time
what he was reaching toward with all his strength, made confident by his success.
And the Earth answered him once more. He saw the river shift and heave again like a
glistening serpent, cascading back into its original bed; opening the cave mouth to
his sight, fanged and dripping. He stood alone on the hillside, deafened by his
heartbeat and the crashing absence of the riverтАЩs voice. And then, calling his own
strength back, he slid and clambered down the hillside to the mouth of the dragonтАЩs
cave.

The flickering illumination of the dragonтАЩs fire led him deep into a maze of
stone passageways, his boots slipping on the wet rock. His hair stood on end and
his fingertips tingled with static charge; the air reeked of ozone. The light grew
stronger as he rounded a final corner of rock; blazed up, echoing and reechoing
from the walls. He shouted in protest as it pinned him like a creeping insect against
the cave wall.

The light faded gradually to a tolerable level, letting him observe as he was
observed, taking in the towering, twisted, black-tar formations of congealed magma
that walled this cavern ... the sudden, heart-stopping vision they enclosed.

He looked on the Storm King in silence for a time that seemed endless.
 A glistening layer of cast-off scales was its bed, and he could scarcely tell
where the mound ceased and the dragonтАЩs own body began. The dragon looked
nothing like the legends described, and yet just as he had expected it to (and
somehow he did not find that strange): Great mailed claws like crystal kneaded the
shifting opalescence of its bed; its forelegs shim-mered with the flexing of its
muscles. It had no hindquarters, its body tapered into the fluid coils of a snakeтАЩs
form woven through the glistening pile. Immense segmented wings, as leathery as a
batтАЩs, as fragile as a butterflyтАЩs, cloaked its monstrous strength. A long, sinuous
neck stretched toward him; red faceted eyes shone with inner light from a face that
was closest to a catтАЩs face of all the things he knew, but fiercely fanged and
grotesquely distorted. The horns of a stag sprouted from its forehead, and foxfire
danced among the spines. The dragonтАЩs size was a thing that he could have
described easily, and yet it was somehow immeasurable, beyond his comprehension.

This was the creature he had challenged and brought to bay with his feeble
spell-casting . . . this boundless, pitiless, infinite demon of the air. His body began to