"Troy Denning - Avatar Trilogy 3 - Waterdeep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Denning Troy)

made a pact to add Ogden to their short list of victims - though neither one had ever gathered the courage to attack the sergeant.
Now, they would never have the chance. Ogden's patrol lay a hundred yards north of Hermit's Wood, dead to the last horse.
The Purple Dragon, the crest of King Azoun IV, still glimmered on their shields, and their armor still gleamed whenever the moonlight
slipped past the stormclouds and played over their corpses.
Not that spit and polish mattered now. The jackals and crows had come yesterday, leaving a gruesome mess in their wake. Ira's
ears were gone. Phineas's toes had been gnawed off. Ogden had lost an eye to the crows. The rest of the patrol had fared worse.
Parts of their bodies were scattered all over the field.
Even without the scavengers, the patrol would have been a grisly sight. They had been riding through the field when the ground
started belching poisonous black gas. There had been no reason for the deadly emission. The field wasn't located close to any volca-
noes, near any fens or bogs, or even within a hundred miles of a cavern where fumes might collect. The black vapor was simply one
more example of the chaos plaguing the Realms.
That had been two hot days ago, and the patrol had been lying in the heat since. Their limbs were bloated and swollen, some-
times twisted into odd shapes where the riders had broken them. The sides of the bodies closest to the ground were black and puffy
with settled blood, while the sides closest to the heavens were doughy gray. The only sign of life that remained in Ogden's patrol was
the unsettling red tint that burned in their eyes.
Because their spirits had not yet departed, the soldiers were completely aware of their condition. Being dead was not at all what
they had expected. They had been prepared to take positions with the glorious hosts of Tempus, God of War, or to find eternal sorrow
beneath the cold lash of the Maiden of Pain, the goddess Loviatar. They hadn't expected their consciousness to linger in their
corpses while their flesh slowly decomposed.
So, when Ogden received the command to rise and form a line, he and his soldiers were relieved to find that they could obey.
The men and the horses stood, stiffly and without grace, but they stood. The soldiers took the reins of their dead mounts and ar-
ranged themselves into a perfect row, just as they would have done had they been alive.
The command to rise had come from the city of Waterdeep, where ninety apostles of wickedness and corruption kneeled in a
dimly lit temple. The room was just large enough to hold them all, and looked more like the inside of a moldy crypt than a temple. Its
stone walls were black with mildew and slime. The room was lit only by two oily torches set into sconces behind the huge stone altar.
The apostles wore brown ceremonial robes of filthy, coarse material. They stared at the floor, so fearful of disturbing the figure
at the bloody altar that they scarcely dared to breathe.
The man at the altar was tall, emaciated, and leprous. His deformed face was lined by deep wrinkles and covered with lumpy le-
sions. Where minor injuries had destroyed the diseased skin, patches of stinking gray flesh hung off his face and hands. He had
made no attempt to hide his condition. In fact, he cherished his maladies and left his affliction exposed for all to see.
This unusual attitude toward disease wasn't surprising, though, for the figure at the altar was Myrkul, God of Decay and Lord of
the Dead. He was deep in concentration, telepathically spanning the continent to give his orders to Ogden's patrol. The effort was tax-
ing on Myrkul's strength, and he had been forced to take the spirits of five faithful worshipers to give him the power he needed. Like
the other deities of the Realms, Myrkul was no longer omnipotent, for he had been exiled from the Planes and forced to take a human
host - an avatar - in the Realms.
The reason was that someone had stolen the Tablets of Fate, the two stones upon which Lord Ao, overlord of the gods, re-
corded the privileges and responsibilities of each deity. Unknown to the other gods and Ao, Myrkul and the late God of Strife, were
the ones who had stolen the two tablets. They had each taken one and concealed it without revealing its hiding place to each other.
The two gods had hoped to use the confusion surrounding the tablets' disappearance to increase their power.
But the pair had not foreseen the extent of their overlord's anger. Upon discovering the theft, Ao had banished the gods to the
Realms and stripped them of most of their power. He had forbidden his subjects to return to the Planes without the tablets in hand.
The only deity spared this fate was Helm, God of Guardians, whom Ao charged with guarding the Celestial Stairways leading back to
the Planes.
Myrkul was now a mere shadow of what he had been before the banishment. But, relying upon the spirits of sacrificial victims
for energy, he could still use his magic. At the moment, he was using that magic to inspect the patrol of dead Cormyrians, and he
liked what he saw. The soldiers and their horses, which were beginning to decompose nicely, were clearly corpses. But they were not
exactly inanimate. Myrkul had been lucky, for he had discovered the patrol before their spirits strayed from their bodies. These zom-
bies would be more intelligent and more graceful than most, since they had died a relatively short time ago. If the soldiers were to ac-
complish what Myrkul wanted, they would need those extra advantages.
Myrkul had Ogden point toward Hermit's Wood then gave the patrol its orders telepathically. There are two men and a woman