"S. Andrew Swann - The Dragons Of The Cuyahoga" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swann S Andrew)

Synopsis:
It all started about a decade ago, when the Portal suddenly opened up over the
stadium right in the middle of a game. Cleveland just hadn’t been the same since,
what with electronic devices pretty much useless — unless you were willing to spend
a fortune in digital protection and redundancy equipment — and all the dragons,
elves, gnomes, dwarves, gargoyles, etc., who’d come through the Portal to take up
residence with the areas covered by the Portal’s magical field. For Kline Maxwell,
City Hall reporter for the Cleveland Press, magic-based Cleveland had long since
become the status quo. At least until a fellow reporter named Morgan came down
with a case of eyeballs growing all over his body. The diagnosis: stay out of Portal
territory and he’d be just fine. But that meant Maxwell and all the other reporters
were going to have to take up the slack. And Maxwell hated the thought of doing
“fuzzy gnome” stories. Still, he took his job seriously, and when he was assigned to
cover a dragon’s death by crash-landing into the Cuyahoga, he headed over to the
accident site with only a modest number of curses. But what should have been a
simple accident report soon led Maxwell in search of a much bigger story — one
that would see him kidnapped by elves, framed for murder, holding secret meetings
with dragons, and fleeing not only from the cops but from pretty much everyone...




The Dragons of the Cuyahoga
By
S. Andrew Swann
Copyright © 2001 by Steven Swiniarski.

This is dedicated to a poor little guy named Henry.


I want to thank all the hamsters
in Cleveland who saw this MS
and tried to improve it.
 Prologue
I DIDN'T witness it, but I imagine it happening like this. . . .


The name he is given in English is Aloeus. He weighs over fifteen tons. A hundred
feet from nose to tail and a wingspan half again that long. Muscles ripple under
leathery black skin with every wing beat, as each sweep hauls his serpentine bulk into
the sky.
Aloeus is unconcerned about the fact that his soaring is impossible by the rules of
Earthly physics. His flight is as much through the forces that pour through the Portal
as it is through the mundane air. More than any other creature, Aloeus is a creature
of those forces. His mind is knit by strands of magic, and magic— as much as
muscles and sinew— holds his wings against the biting wind tearing across the sky
three thousand feet above the city of Cleveland.
He sees those forces as he soars above the city. Where a human being would only
see sky and clouds, a brilliantly lit skyline, and the roiling clouds by the lakeshore—
the constant vortex marking the Portal itself— Aloeus saw in a spectrum that humans