"David Eddings - The Dreamers 04 - The Younger Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

burning.

And yet once again, our beloved Mother screamed in agony, and we who serve her also screamed.


So great was Mother's fury that she listened to a suggestion of one of the seekers—a suggestion she
would not even have considered had she been more calm. The seeker declared that since there was only
one part of this land that was not blocked, the man-things would certainly know that Mother's warrior
servants would attack them from that direction, and their numbers would be enormous. "You will need
many, many warrior servants to overcome the man-things, beloved Vlagh," she said. "Can you possibly
spawn out more this time than you did when we attacked the other directions?"

"Many, many more," dear Mother replied. "I will bury the man-things in freshly hatched spawn. I will
have the land of the sunrise, and my children will feed on the remains of all the man-things that
contaminate this entire land that is—and always will be—mine."

We did not wish to remind beloved Mother that a spawn of that size would severely reduce any future
spawns to the point that there would hardly be enough new care-givers to see to her needs, and seasons
uncountable would pass before she could spawn more. We tried as best we could to bring this to her
attention, but she paid little heed and commanded us to carry her straightaway to the spawning chamber.
And, since it is required, we did as she commanded.

Should disaster come again, however, the children of future spawns will be so limited that as the seasons
plod on by, the nest of our beloved Mother will have few—if any—care-givers to see to her needs, and
in time, it may be that she will dwell here alone.


MOUNT
SHRAK

Chapter One




It was well past midnight, and Zelana was standing alone on the balcony of what big brother Dahlaine
called his "War Chamber." It seemed to Zelana that those fancy names had always been one of
Dahlaine's failings. For some reason he seemed to feel a need to give almost everything some kind of
stupendous title. If he'd spend as much time solving a problem as he usually spent coming up with a
name for it, things might go a bit smoother for him.

Right now, however, Zelana was trying to swallow some very peculiar events. It seemed that they had a
mysterious helper who could pull miracles out of her hat—or sleeve—without any kind of warning at all.

Down in baby brother Veltan's Domain, Longbow had been plagued with a series of very peculiar
dreams which were being rammed into his mind by an entity he always called "our unknown friend,"
despite the fact that he'd told Zelana and the others that he recognized the voice—but he couldn't quite
attach a name to the speaker. Zelana knew that Longbow's mind was too sharp to start getting fuzzy
about something that important, so it was quite obvious that "unknown friend" had been tampering with
him in ways Zelana could not even begin to comprehend.