"04 - Prince of Lies - James Lowder 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Avatar Trilogy)
The shades of the Faithful jostled Gwydion as he broke into an aimless run, their souls as tangible as his own strangely physical form. Some prayed more fervently as the gibbering sell-sword shambled by. Others turned their unblinking eyes on the lost soul. They were struck by the sorrow etched on Gwydion's face, but fearful to cease their own murmured prayers to comfort him, lest they, too, be cut off from their gods.
Gwydion stumbled through the milling crowd. The faces blurred before his eyes, and the prayers became a meaningless cacophony. He grabbed a young woman wearing a silver disk of Tymora and shook her roughly. Someone had to lift the curse! In reply to his gurgled plea, the woman knocked Gwydion's legs out from beneath him with a sweep-kick, then backed away.
"He looks like one of ours," came an inhuman voice.
"Nah. Just another of them cracked doommasters. Beshaba attracts that sort of trash."
The coarse, profane voices jarred against the sacred prayers, startling Gwydion out of his frenzy. He leaped to his feet and spun around, only to come nose to stomach with the most horrifying creature he'd ever seen. Its head had belonged to a huge wolf at one time, but the rest of its grotesque form had been patched together from a dozen other animals. Striped fur bristled in a mane that ran from between its pointed ears down its hunched ogre's back. Bright red scales plated the rest of the thing's body. It had a pair of human arms ending in hands that were little more than claws. These the creature rubbed together nervously. Four enormous spider legs waved and clutched the air beneath the other arms. Serpentine coils supported the monstrous torso, writhing and twisting beneath its bulk.
"You're cracked, Perdix," the beast said, saliva drooling from his wolfish jaws. "This one's for the city. It's obvious! Look at his face. He's been crying."
Perdix folded his leathery wings and hopped closer to Gwydion on a pair of skinny legs that bent backward at the knees. Rubbery yellow skin covered his body, which was as thin and wasted as that of a drought-starved child. With the single blue eye in the center of his wide face, Perdix looked up at Gwydion. "Well?" he asked impatiently, thin tongue flickering over gleaming white teeth. "Get praying, slug."
Frantically Gwydion tried to shove the little creature out of the way, but two sets of spider legs closed around his chest and pulled him backward. The wolf-headed thing glowered down at the sell-sword and placed clawed hands to either side of his head. "You heard Perdix," he hissed. "Let's hear your best holy day shout."
As before, a pitiful croak escaped Gwydion's lips when he tried to call on Torm.
Perdix shook his head. "For once you're right, Af. I was certain he was a doommaster. They're always getting into rows with Tymora's lot." He held out a set of night-black manacles. The iron rings clicked open, revealing sharp spikes pointed inward. "Now let's not have any trouble from you, slug."
One glance at the shades nearby told Gwydion he was alone in this. The others had turned their backs on him, leaving him to his two hideous captors. The Faithful close by formed a wide circle. They had their faces turned to the sky, their hands clenched together in white-knuckled devotion or crossed devoutly over their unbeating hearts.
Gwydion cursed them wordlessly and struggled against Af's implacable grip. His panic had subsided to a slow-burning dread, allowing him to think a bit more clearly. The endless hours of drill on Suzail's parade grounds came back to him then, his training in hand-to-hand combat. He laced his fingers together and pounded Af in the jaw. At the same time, he drove both heels down on the creature's snaking coils.
Af growled in annoyance at the blows, but silently reminded himself there would be trouble if he twisted the prisoner's head off. Instead, the denizen bit down on Gwydion's hands as he raised them to strike again, clamping his jaws just hard enough to pierce the flesh.
In that instant, Gwydion realized the giant's axe hadn't liberated him from pain.
"Tsk. Isn't that always the way?" Perdix sighed. "No matter what I say, you slugs try to fight anyway." He hopped high off the ground and clamped the manacles onto Gwydion's wrists.
As the iron rings clanked shut, their spiked interiors bit into flesh. Then, as if the taste of the shade's essence had suddenly woken them from rusting slumber, the spikes twitched to life and burrowed deeper still. They dug into bones, twisted sharply, and shot straight up Gwydion's arms. Blinded by the pain, the shade screamed a long, yowling wail of agony.
For the first time since Gwydion's arrival on the Fugue Plain, the sounds from his throat rang clear and true.
* * * * *
When the haze of pain cleared from his eyes, Gwydion found himself in a noisy crowd gathered outside a great walled necropolis. His whole body ached terribly, but the manacle spikes seemed to have stopped driving into his arms. Af had a clawed hand clamped on one of Gwydion's elbows. Perdix held the other in cool, webbed fingers. A charnel house stench hung over everything. Gwydion found tears streaking down his cheeks, not from the pain in his wrists, but from the choking smell of death and decay seeping into his nose and mouth.
The gates towering before him would have dwarfed Thrym or any other giant in Faerun. Dark and foreboding, they reached up into a sky swirling with red mist. To either side, past the hulking gatehouses, high, pale walls stretched to the horizon. He was too far away to be certain, but Gwydion thought the walls were moving. It was almost as if each brick were shifting constantly, writhing as though it were alive.
All around the sell-sword, the crowd of whimpering, bawling shades pushed closer to him. Each had been bound at the wrists by manacles, and, like a reluctant steer before a slaughterhouse, every damned soul was herded along by a pair of monstrous denizens. The creatures were kin to Perdix and Af, but only in their sheer grotesqueness. They'd been formed by insane mixings of animals and men, plants, or even gems and metals. They flew, slithered, and crawled along, prodding their prisoners with suckered fingers or jabbing them with sharp spines.
The crowd surged forward, pressing Gwydion up against the closest of the twin gatehouses. The tower's surface was hard and dark, and it felt oddly warm against the sell-sword's face. He pushed away to get a better look at the small, roundish blocks. They weren't stones, he decided, but fist-sized lumps of ... something. He peered closer, then recoiled in horror. "Hearts!" he shrieked. "The tower's made of human hearts!"
"Oh, leave him be," Perdix said. "He doesn't look like a priest to me. They're the only ones who care about such trivia."
"Cowards' hearts," Af gloated, ignoring Perdix completely. "They don't make as good a wall as heroes' hearts, but then, we don't get many heroes here."
Perdix shook his head in disgust. "Tsk. You're so proud of the blasted things, you'd think you built them yourself."
"I did!" Af bellowed. "At least, I was around here when they was first put up!"
Gwydion finally found his voice. "Torm, save me!" he shrieked.
Every denizen in earshot turned to Gwydion, and a webbed hand clamped over his mouth. "None of that, slug," Perdix hissed. "There's one god in the City of Strife, and he don't like his subjects calling out to any of the others. We don't care if you get in deep with him the first day you're on your own, but right now you're our charge. This reflects bad on Af and me."
"And we certainly don't need the grief," the wolf-headed denizen grumbled. He balled one taloned hand into a fist and brought it hard against Gwydion's jaw. Bones shattered. Teeth spilled from the shade's mouth like marbles from a torn bag.
Perdix frowned. "You're our own worst enemy, Af," he sighed, wrapping one leathery wing around Gwydion to shield him from further blows. "If he can't speak, they'll be really miffed at the castle. Remember what happened last time, when you twisted that shade's head off?
Af slithered sideways on his coils. "Aw, this'll heal before he gets in to see him. 'Sides, he was calling on another power. You know the rules about that."
Reluctantly Perdix agreed but was careful to impose himself between Gwydion and Af until the gates opened. Horns sounded from high in the gatehouses, and the dark doors creaked apart just wide enough for three men to pass through, shoulder to shoulder. Denizens shoved their wards through the gap, then followed close behind. The shades tried their futile best to resist these last few steps into the City of Strife. The matter was always decided by the steady push from the thousands of damned souls milling behind the reluctant prisoners.
A straight boulevard led away from the gates, lined on both sides by hundreds of skeletal guardians wielding pikes and spears. The undead soldiers existed solely to abuse the newly damned and their captors. With their razor-sharp weapons, they sliced off chunks of flesh that were quickly ground into paste beneath the mob's feet. Along the boulevard, hungry things with haunted eyes waited impatiently in the shadows, hoping to recover some morsel.
Had anyone passing through the gates needed to breathe, the press would have suffocated him before he'd gone a dozen steps. A constant drone filled the air. This wasn't a tapestry of prayers, as on the Fugue Plain, but a shrill curtain of vile curses and anguished cries. Near the gates, the noise was so great no one bothered to speak below a shout. Thankfully, the twisted, scarred, ten-story brown-stones that made up the skyline muted the sound as the mob approached the city's center. Time blurred for Gwydion as he made his way with countless others to the heart of the City of Strife. Only the steady healing of his jaw marked the passing of the hours.
He could feel the bones knit, the new teeth pushing through the raw gums. The pain still plagued him, blurring his vision and scattering his thoughts, but it had lessened to a continuous, throbbing ache. Gwydion wondered dully if his capacity to feel such mundane agony had been stunted. After all, the pain from the spikes buried in his wrists had diminished, too. In his heart, though, the sell-sword knew better than to hope he'd be immune to torture after this. The denizens would invent new kinds of pain for him if the old ones wore thin.
Finally the mob crossed the living bridge that spanned the gurgling black ooze of the River Slith, then dashed through the open gates of the great palace at the center of the necropolis. Hemmed in by defensive walls newly built of the purest diamonds, the shades were allowed to rest. Most of the damned collapsed, exhausted by the run. Not Gwydion the Quick. He stood, unfazed by the marathon, staring up at the shadowy heights of Bone Castle.
The keep reached high into the red sky. Its lowest floors were wrought of skulls that looked out sightlessly on the courtyard. Higher up, other bones found their way into the architecture, forming fantastically spiraling frames around windows, sturdy braces for balconies. Winged denizens used these balconies to enter the palace or launch themselves into the mist swirling around the upper stories. Higher still, the tower's jagged peak disappeared into a thick miasma of smoke and fog.
"Awright," Af barked. "Time to go."
The keep's front door had opened, and the denizens were scrambling around the bailey, roughly rousing the shades. Gwydion was still on his feet, so he was the first to be ushered forward.
"Please," the sell-sword said miserably. "I think there's been a mistake." His jaw clicked painfully with each syllable, and his teeth felt loose, but at least he could talk again.
"See," Af chimed. "I told you his jaw would heal before we got in to see the prince."
Scowling, Perdix grabbed the chain between Gwydion's manacles and yanked him toward the keep. "What kind of mistake? You think you don't belong here, slug?"
"I don't even know where here is!" Gwydion shouted.
"Ho ho! One of the Faithless, eh?" Af rubbed his spider legs together gleefully as he slithered alongside Gwydion. "Then it's into the wall for you."
"He isn't one of the Faithless," Perdix scoffed. "He cried out for the Fool outside the gates. That's why you busted him in the jaw, remember?" The denizen turned his lone blue eye on Gwydion. "You believe in the gods?"
"Of-of course," he stammered. "Someone cast an illu-sion that caused my death. I was a warrior of-"
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