"Chalker, Jack L - Demons of the Dancing GodsUC - #2DG" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

him, as if, somehow, these great colors were some sort of
liquid, here reaching a great drain.

And, in fact, it was so, for through him passed the souls of
the damned, screaming in terror, unable not to press forward,
reaching the great swirling mass of magical energy and falling
in, their cries and pleas for a mercy now forever denied them
cut terribly short as they were sucked down the great outlet
from the real world in which they had forged their fate to Hell
itself.

Not that Hell was actually so terrible. He had visited there
on two occasions and found it more a place of curious fasci-
nation than the abject horror of the old tales and mystic reli-
gions. Yet it was still an unhappy place, fueled with hatred
and revenge, its most terrible punishment a constantly available
vision of the glory and beauty of absolute perfection that could
always be seen but never experienced. They walked in Hell,
always avoiding the vision, their eyes averting from it as men's
eyes averted from the sun; yet they were always aware it was
there, a place of indescribable joy and beauty that was held
tantalizingly before them, just out of reachЧalways out of
reach. It was this vision that had been denied him on his visits,
for no living being was permitted to see such a sight as Paradise,
lest, it was said, he be consumed in the light and desire nothing
else. This did not really bother him; everybody in his past
whom he knew, liked, or admired was in Hell anyway, along
with all the other interesting people.

The swirl was changing now, becoming more irregular, as
if disturbed by some great power or form arising within it,
going, as it were, against the flow of the thing. It was less a
drain now than a spiral. He saw the four arms of the turning
swirl break from the main mass and fly upward above it, then
form in a diamond. The light of these four shapes was no
longer nebulous, but instead took on the form of wraithlike
faces, demon faces, looking down upon him with cold interest.
Now from the center of the magical mass shot two more bright
lights, out and up into the diamond-shaped phalanx of faces,

JACK L. CHALKER 5

the demonic captain and the equally demonic sergeant of the
guard.

Finally, out of the mass, so large it almost was the mass,
walked a vaguely humanoid form. The creature was terrible to
behold, one who had once been a creature of near perfection,
an angel, distorted by hatred and an unquenchable thirst for
revenge into a vaguely manlike thing that oozed the rot of long-