"David and Leigh Eddings - [Dreamers 04] - The Younger Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

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.
There was one thing that was abundantly clear, however. Not only could "unknown
friend" erase memories, she could also break—or just ignore—some very important
rules. Zelana and her family were not permitted to kill things. "Unknown
friend," however, had manipulated the members of the Trogite Church with her
"sea of gold" and lured them into a confrontation with the Creatures of the
Wasteland. Then, when the two enemy forces were locked in what would almost
certainly have turned out to be a war of mutual extinction, "unknown friend" had
obliterated them all with an enormous wall of water that she'd pulled up from
about six miles down below the face of the earth.
It seemed that their friend had powers that Zelana could not even imagine,
although she was almost positive that their friend was using the Dreamers to
assist her.
The more Zelana thought about it, the more certain she became that Eleria's
flood and Yaltar's twin volcanos had also originated in the mind and imagination
of "unknown friend."
The involvement of the Dreamers had been confirmed when the children's shared
vision had mentioned "a fire unlike any fire we have ever seen," which had
produced the blue inferno that had obliterated what had almost certainly been an
entire hatch of the Vlagh.
That, of course, brought Aracia's idiotic attempt to conceal Lillabeth's Dream
right out into the open. Aracia had always been obsessed with her own divinity,
but now—probably because of the overdone adoration of those assorted indolents
who had identified themselves as her clergy—Aracia's mind had begun to slip, and
she seemed to be convinced that she was now the most important creature in the
entire universe. Her absurd attempt to conceal Lillabeth's Dream had been a
clear indication that sister Aracia's mind was starting to come apart.
The more that Zelana thought about it, though, the more she remembered that
Aracia had always been more than a little unwilling to go to sleep and