"Clayton Emery - Card Master" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emery Clayton)

hoots and screams and croaks, monsters tore at the apprentice, tried to
latch on, hold him. A demon with ragged yellow teeth snapped at his nose.
A scaly tentacle slithered around his neck like a snake's kiss. Byron lashed
out blindly, his hands slapping in slime and pus and drool.

His legs felt heavy, bogged down. The heat was roasting, and it was
hard to breathe for all the smoke. Demons blocked his sight on every side.
A monster with dripping jaws in its chest opened that hideous mouth to
swallow him.

Desperate, Byron kicked, screamed, dodged. Slick with sweat, he
squirmed free. Horrid hands yanked his hair and rasped his face as he
burst through the stinking crowd and ran on.

Glimmers of light, yellow shot with red, showed far ahead, and he
pelted that way. Perhaps it was daylight, an exit from this nightmare.
Demons couldn't stand sunlight, he'd heard.

His feet crunched cinders and bone fragments. Smoke from dimly
glowing pits suffocated him. He was freezing cold yet running sweat. He
ran harder, feet banging bare stone, jouncing his spine and innards. But
the glorious light loomed just ahead. He tore out of the tunnel.

The light was blinding. He squinted as his eyeballs dried. The tunnel
emptied into a huge cavern with a black ceiling too high to see, and a floor
that sloped down to the bowels of the earth. Fire roiled in the pit, and
burning molten jets erupted. Byron felt the heat of the pit scorching the
soles of his shoes. Drops of lava splashed him, stinging his hands and face,
burning holes in his clothes and setting them smouldering. Billowing
yellow-brown smoke made him cough and retch, his eyes water.

No escape. There was only this slope and nothing else.
 Demons burst from the tunnel behind.

Jiggling, bouncing, jouncing, a tangle of gray and festered flesh, they
slammed into the apprentice. The whole writhing mass, with Byron
trapped among them, tumbled down the slope.

More heat, and now flame, as they rolled through patches of burning
tar or metal. Demons screamed, sizzled, and died as gouts of burning
sulfur from the pit ignited fur and scales and wings, made them living
torches. They skidded headlong down the slope, unable to stop, the earth
hot enough now to scorch flesh.

Byron's clothes caught fire; then his hair, crackling and spitting around
his head, stinking and rank. His skin turned red, smoked, then burst into
flame. He watched his hands sizzle to bare white bones that charred black
as the screaming horde and the captive cardsmith toppled into the pit. A
boiling gout caught them in mid-air, fused human and demon flesh into a
burning pitchy mass.