"03 - Waterdeep - Richard Awlinson 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Avatar Trilogy)

Kill him.
Cyric hurled the sword off his knees and watched it clatter to the rocky ground. The words had come unbidden to his mind in a wispy, feminine voice.
"You're alive!" Cyric hissed, the cold biting his ears and nose for the first time.
The sword remained silent.
"Speak to me!"
His only answer was Fane's pitiful groan.
Cyric retrieved the sword and immediately grew warm. The desire to kill Fane washed over him, but he made no move to act on the urge. Instead, the thief sat back down and laid the sword across his knees again.
"I have not decided to kill him," Cyric said, glaring angrily at the weapon.
Before his eyes, the blade began to pale. Hunger and disappointment crept into his heart, and the thief found himself completely absorbed with pangs of hunger. As the blade grew more pale, Cyric became increasingly oblivious to his environment. By the time the weapon had turned completely white, he was aware of nothing else.
At Cyric's back, a girl's voice said, "I'm hungry."
He stood and spun around. An adolescent girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, stood before him. She wore a diaphanous red frock that hinted at ripening womanhood, but which also betrayed a half-dozen protruding ribs and a stomach distended with starvation. Black satiny hair framed a gaunt face, and her eyes were sunken with fatigue and desperation.
Behind her stretched an endless white plain. Cyric was standing in a wasteland as flat as a table and as featureless as the air itself. The boulders on which he had been sitting were gone, as were the mountains that had surrounded him, and even the sword that had been lying across his knees.
"Where am I?" Cyric asked.
Ignoring his question, the girl dropped to her knees. "Cyric, please help me," she pleaded. "I haven't eaten in days."
The thief didn't need to ask how she knew his name. The girl and his sword were the same. She had moved him into a sphere where she could disguise her true form and assume a more sympathetic one.
"Send me back!" Cyric demanded.
"Then feed me."
"Feed you what?" he asked.
"Feed me Fane," the girl begged.
Though the plea might have shocked Midnight or Kelem-vor, Cyric did not recoil from its hideousness. Instead, he frowned, considering her request. Finally, he shook his head. "No."
"Why not?" she asked. "Fane means nothing to you. None of your men do."
"True," Cyric admitted. "But I decide when they die."
"I'm weak. If I don't eat, we can't return."
"Don't lie to me," Cyric warned. An idea occurred to him. Without taking his eye off the girl, he turned his attention inward. Perhaps she was manipulating his imagination and he could break free by force of will.
"I'm dying!" The girl staggered a few steps and collapsed at the thiefs feet.
The girl's scream broke Cyric's concentration. They remained in the wasteland. The young girl's skin had turned gray and doughy, and it truly looked as though she would perish. "Then, good-bye," Cyric said.
The girl's eyes glazed over. "Please. Have mercy on me."
"No," the thief growled, returning her gaze with a cold stare. "Absolutely not."
Whatever the sword's true nature, there was no doubt it was evil and manipulative. Cyric knew that to give in to its plea was to become its servant.
The girl buried her head in her arms and began to sob. Cyric ignored her and looked at his feet, trying to visualize the jumbled, gray rocks upon which he had been sitting. When that didn't work, he turned his gaze to the sky, trying to see the soft, curved lines of clouds in the barren bowl above.
The sky remained a white void.
Cyric stared at the horizon, searching for the towering peaks that had encircled him just minutes ago. They were gone.
As if reading his mind, the girl said, "Disbelief won't save you." Her voice had grown deeper, more sultry and mature.
Cyric looked at her. She had become a woman, her red frock now clinging to a full, round figure. As he watched, the void upon which she lay formed itself into a white bed and lifted her off the ground.
"You're in my world now," the woman purred. "And it's as real as your own."
Cyric didn't know whether to believe her or not, but he realized that it made no difference. Whether she had truly transported him or was only playing games with his mind, he could not leave this place on his own. He had to force her to return him.
"I'm yours," the woman cooed.
Despite the dark circles beneath her eyes, she was voluptuous, and Cyric might have been tempted had he not known that she was trying to lure him into servitude.
"Every gift has a cost," the thief said. "What is the price of yours?"
The woman tried to redirect the conversation. "I'll keep you warm when others are cold. When you're wounded, I'll make you well. In battle, I'll give you the strength to prevail."
Her promises interested Cyric, for he would need magic in the days to come. Still, he resisted his desire to go to the bed. "What do you want in return?"
"No more than any woman wants from her man," she replied.
Cyric did not respond. The meaning of such a statement could easily be twisted. He was determined to master the sword, not be indentured to it through some vague covenant.
"Let's be more specific," he said coldly. "Ill feed you only when and where it pleases me. In return, you'll serve me as your master."
"What?" the woman screamed. She twisted her face into a grotesque mask of rage. "You dare to suggest that I become your slave?"
"That's your only choice," Cyric replied. "Serve me or starve."
"You're the one who'll starve!" she snarled, baring two long fangs.
A crash sounded behind Cyric and he spun around. A dirty gray wall stood where moments before there had been nothing. Then another wall slammed into place on his right, and a third to his left. The thief turned around again, just as the fourth wall and a ceiling appeared. The floor turned hard and dirty, and the thief suddenly found himself standing in a prison.
Beneath her blood-colored robe, the woman's body had withered into a grotesque and frightening parody of womanhood. Her sunken eyes had grown cold with hatred and malice. A pair of silvery manacles appeared in her hand. She stepped toward Cyric. "Give me Fane."
With her sinewy muscles and clawlike fingers, the woman looked as though she could disembowel Cyric in seconds. But he didn't retreat or show fear. To back away was to surrender, to become her slave— and he was determined to rot in the foulest dungeon before serving someone besides himself.