"David Eddings - The Dreamers 02 - The Treasured One" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

burns in its shell, and the burrower spoke of hot light spewing up from the mountains
and red liquid hotter than fire running down through the burrows below the face of
the ground, consuming all that was in its path. And then the burrower said that which
should never be said. ‘They are no more. The many which went through our hidden
burrows toward the land of the sunset have all been consumed by the red liquid hotter
than fire, and we are all made less because they are gone.’

And then the burrower’s task was complete, and it died.

And our beloved Vlagh shrieked in agony, for the word of the burrower had torn
away the urge to spawn. And all of us were made less by those words, for the many
were now fewer, and the lands beneath the sunset were now and forever beyond our
reach. The grief of our Vlagh was beyond our understanding, and that grief brought us
rage.

Now it came to pass that the servants with strange forms and venomous fangs
which had gone forth to seek knowledge in the lands of the man-things conferred with
one another. The seekers of knowledge are unlike the true servants, for their task has
altered them. The seekers of knowledge go beyond our Vlagh’s immediate
commands, and they consider the knowledge which they have found and even
sometimes offer alternatives when they carry the knowledge which they have found
back to the nest.

And so it was that the seekers of knowledge agreed, each with the others, that the
lands of the sunset were now and forever beyond the grasp of the burrowers and the
warriors by reason of the liquid fire which was coming forth from the mountains, and
they offered the alternative which the knowledge they had found had suggested to
them. Might it not be better, they said, to expand toward a different direction than we
had before? The mountains above the land of longer summers are quiet, and the need
to spew forth liquid fire is not stirring in those mountains, and there are many more
things to eat in the land of longer summers than there had been in the land of the
sunset. Since the presence of things to eat arouses our Vlagh’s urge to spawn, should
we not seek out a land where there is much to eat? Should we do so, the urge to
spawn will grow much greater, and there will soon be even more of us than there had
been when the burrowers had opened the passages below the face of the ground which
had led down to the land of the sunset. And thereby the awareness of the overmind
which we all share will be increased, lifting it to heights which it has never reached
before.

And our beloved Vlagh communed with the overmind concerning the virtue of the
alternative offered by the seekers of knowledge, and the overmind found much that
was good in that alternative, for it had learned much during our attempt to occupy the
land of the sunset. The warriors of strange form had encountered many different
creatures as they had moved toward the sunset, and the overmind perceived that those
different forms might prove to be most useful in our encounters with the man-things
in the land of longer summers, for the man-things are most tenacious and difficult to
push aside as we move toward that which is our goal. Then, however, the overmind
warned our beloved Vlagh that the greatest danger we would face in the land of
longer summers would be - even as it had in the land of the sunset - not the man-
things who stood in our path, but would rather be sleeping infants and peculiar stones.