"Clayton Emery - Netheril 03 - Mortal Consequences" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emery Clayton)

exploding.
Meekly, Knucklebones picked after him. She reflected that Sunbright too was hard, for the tundra
had made him so. And being driven from his tribe, surviving on his own, had hardened him more, until
he was tough as tempered steel. But even steel could shatter under tension, and the constant
disappointments galled him, she knew. Seeing Dorlas die, losing Greenwillow, being dragged to the
future against his will to be chased and abused, failing to find his tribe, being refused hospitality by
dwarves he'd pledged to visit....
"Hard lands and hard people, yes," she murmured, "just please don't turn bitter on me, Sunbright.
Don't harden your heart...."
*****
The casura hung in the air, dozens of mouths working; scores of eyes glaring; spidery hands
threatening, pitching rocks, sticks, bones, and shafts and blades of broken weapons. The ghost argued
with itself, for it was composed of many, many creatures thrown together by violent death, and they
hated one another.
Yet the sound of scratching feet stilled it. The casura turned to the noise, for that meant life, and
more than anything the collective ghost hated anything that lived.
Onto the littered floor of the cavern trod the flint monster. Its horny feet, sharp-edged as granite,
crunched underfoot a hundred bones, hooves, horns, jawbones full of fangs, rib cages, segments of
tails without flesh. That hundreds had died here meant nothing to the monster, for it was obsessed with
its own goal.
"... This way out. Must be the way out. Must be. Need to get free, and kill my enemies ..."
The monster glanced around, sniffed through nostrils that were mere slits in its stony face. With the
stirring of the high ghost came a graveyard reek, dead flesh and turned earth. Too, the dark air of the
cavern resounded with sinister rattling, knocking, scratchings, and skittery, uneven footsteps. Yet none
of these warnings deterred the flint monster, for it sought only a way out of the endless, winding caves.
Suddenly, in the darkness, loomed a host of eyes, all sizes and shapes and colors, all flaming with
hatred. Their baleful glare was so intense the cavern was bathed in yellow-white light that flickered
along the broken walls like firefly glow. The casura was nothing but eyes and mouths and rootlike,
spidery hands, the whole flung together like chopped grasshoppers caught in a threshing basket. The
gathered ghost stretched thin in spots, held together as if by fish glue, while other parts were clumps of
eyes and hands and mouths. The fiend was a sticky web dancing in the air, clinging to the walls,
touching the floor in spots. An awful and impassible barrier.
The casura's burning glare sparkled on the monster's flinty hide, yet the monster's round, staring
eyes showed no fear. The flint monster hated with a deeper passion than even the ghost, for it hated all
souls: living, dead, or in between. Without eyelids, the exposed eyeballs were a shocking blue in its
dark carapace.
Yet there was recognition here. Ages ago, it seemed, the casura's many dead creatures had been an
unholy army: imps, ghouls, ghasts, blind giants, barbed fiends, things without names. Together they'd
battled the enemies of Prinquis, arch-fiend of these pits. Until treachery brought down the balor of the
Abyss, ancient, deadly enemies who'd descended with joy and crackling whips to slay everything
moving in this vast throne room.
And the flint monster had been one of those enemies. And still was.
A howl echoed from the casura's hundred gibbering mouths. Writhing hands snatched rocks, skulls,
and broken blades, and flung the lethal lot at the flint monster. Yet nothing harmed it, not the missiles,
nor the stench, nor the screaming noise, nor the rolling waves of hatred. The flint monster had lived
with pain for so long, nothing outside could hurt it.
Raising two long, misshapen arms, curling fingers like shards of glass, the monster retaliated. From
one hand exploded bolts of pure darkness, shafts blacker than moonless night, that stabbed amidst the
spider-web ghost. Eyes popped into jots of gore, twisted hands were splintered to fragments, mouths
had teeth smashed out and knocked to the four winds. From the monster's other hand spun a whirlwind