vinogradova: переводы

→Saphira hastened her flight toward the citadel’s massive gate. Below them, Eragon heard shouts of fear and astonishment, but he paid them no heed. Murtagh and Thorn were the ones he was worried about, not the soldiers.

→The girl shuddered. “Pain. Great pain. And anger too. If he could, he would kill every creature he met and burn every plant, until there were none left. He’s utterly mad.”

→Eragon glanced back the way they had come, then returned his gaze to the arch. The jagged structure made him nervous, and Saphira as well. He tried to read the glyphs, but they were too jumbled and too densely packed to make sense of, nor could he detect any energy stored within the black structure. Yet he had difficulty believing that it was not enchanted. Whoever built the tunnel had succeeded in hiding the latch spell for the doors to the outside, which meant they could have done the same with any spells they had placed upon the arch.

→The inner surfaces of the doors were perfectly smooth, and no matter how he pushed and pounded on them, they refused to budge. “Blast it. We should have used a log or a boulder to wedge them open,” he lamented, berating himself for not thinking of it beforehand.

→The doors ground to a halt, and the clearing fell silent again.

→Once the outline was complete, the doors swung outward upon hidden hinges, scraping aside the dirt and plants that had accumulated before the spire since the doors had last opened, whenever that had been. Through the doorway was a huge vaulted tunnel that descended at a steep angle into the bowels of the earth.

→It ran upward fifty feet and then split in two and arched down to either side, tracing the outline of two broad doors. Upon the doors appeared row after row of glyphs limned in gold: wards against both physical and magical detection.

→<i>Because … I’m lucky enough to be bonded with you.</i>

→Eragon sheathed Brisingr and walked over to her. She lowered her head until it was at his level. He stroked the line of her jaw, and then pressed his forehead against her hard snout and held her as tightly as he could, her scales sharp against his fingers. Hot tears began to slide down his cheeks.

→<i>If they’re just ordinary animals, then why didn’t my wards stop them? asked Eragon. At the very least, I should have been warned of approaching danger.</i>

→<i>And what did I say is the first law of hunting, younglings? </i> asked Glaedr.

→As his laughter subsided, Eragon poked at the snail with the tip of his boot. <i>It’s been so long since there were dragons on Vroengard, it must not have realized what you were and thought to make an easy meal of me.… That would have been a sorry death indeed, to end up as dinner for a snail.</i>

→Saphira parted her jaws in a toothy approximation of a smile, and she made a soft choking sound in her throat. <i>You are very odd sometimes, Eragon. </i>He could feel his merriment infecting her. She sniffed the shell again. <i>Some mead would be nice.</i>

→She maintained the flame for no more than a second or two; then she picked up the smoking, steaming snail between her jaws—as gently as a mother cat picking up a kitten—carried it over to Eragon, and dropped it at his feet. He eyed it with distrust, but it appeared well and truly dead.

→Lowering his gaze, Eragon saw four more giant snails farther down upon the rise. One of the creatures had retreated within its shell; the others were hurrying away upon their undulating, skirtlike bellies.

→When he could see the meadow and the blue of Saphira’s scales between the trunks of the evergreens, he turned aside and walked to the brook. Moss covered the bank of the stream, so he stepped from log to stone until he was standing on a flat-topped rock in the midst of the water.

→Whatever had been chattering in the forest was not worth risking his life to find—especially since he suspected that there was worse than the grubs lurking among the trees. His palm kept itching, and from experience, he knew that meant there was still <i>something</i> dangerous close by.

→Eragon shivered and loosened Brisingr in its scabbard. He had never before been in a forest that felt so menacing. It was as if the trees were <i>angry</i> and—as with the apple grove earlier—as if they wanted to reach out and rend his flesh from his bones.

→Eragon used the burbling of the brook to determine his bearings as he worked his way deeper into the forest. Now that he was close to them, he saw that the evergreens were unlike those from the Spine or even from Du Weldenvarden; they had clusters of seven needles instead of three, and though it might have been a trick of the fading light, it seemed to him as if darkness clung to the trees, like a cloak wrapped around their trunks and branches. Also, everything about the trees, from the cracks in the bark to their protruding roots to their scaled cones—everything about them had a peculiar angularity and a fierceness of line that made them appear as if they were about to pull themselves free of the earth and stride down to the city below.

→The dragon acknowledged him, and Eragon carefully made his way across the meadow to the forest, doing his best to be quiet so as not to disturb Saphira. Once he was at the trees, he quickened his pace. Although there were plenty of dead branches along the verge of the forest, he wanted to stretch his legs and, if he could, find the source of the chattering.