"Barbara Hambly - Sun Wolf 3 - Dark Hand of Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

He smelled the acid of their bodies, as he knew they smelled his flesh.
With desperate effort, he wrenched his mind free of sleep. The blurry haze of
the poison had lessened, which meant the pain was sharper, and with it the
nauseated weakness of shock. Above him the sky was black opal, save when he
turned his head to see where the blue turned to violet, the violet to pink,
and then amber where it touched the cool citrine of distant sand. Moving his
head again, he saw his own right arm, stretched from his shoulder to the
rawhide strips that bound his wrist to a stake in the ground. A foot beyond
his fingertips was an anthill four feet across, its top nearly the height of a
man's knee.
He nearly threw up with horror. There were two others visible beyond it;
raising his head, a movement which sent renewed shoots of agony down every
screaming muscle of his body, he could see another between his spread-eagled
feet and others beyond that. It must be the same around on his blind left
side.
For an instant shrieking panic swelled in him; then the calm that had gotten
him out of a hundred traps and ambushes in his years as a mercenary commander
forced the horror away. Calmly he closed his eye, and began sorting in his
mind everything Yirth of Mandrigyn had told him, as if he had all the day
before him, item by item ...
And the spell was there. A spell of slipping, of loosening, of the fibers of
the uncured leather growing damp, gathering moisture from the air, stretching
gradually ...
The breathless air warmed where it touched his naked belly and chest. He
opened his eye to see that the sky had lightened. As he felt the rawhide that
cut the flesh of his right wrist loosen a little, his glance went beyond it to
the crown of the hideous hillock, and he saw the gritty sand glow suddenly
gold. Each pebble, each grain, of the filigreed pit edge of its top was
feathered with the long black crescent of a tiny shadow where the first
sunlight hit it. The pebbles moved and shifted. Stiffly, an ant crawled forth.
Sun Wolf's concentration failed in a second of horror, and he felt the rope
bite again into the bleeding flesh. Like the clenching of a fist, he clamped
his mind shut, forcing himself to think only of the spells of undoing, of the
dry air turning moist on the leather, of oily knots sliding apart ... It'll
never work in time ...
Other ants were moving about on the mounds now, big soldier ants, bulbous
bodies an inch and a half in length, mandibles dangling from heads like
shining coffee beans. Sun Wolf fancied he could feel the spiked tickle of
their feet on his bare flesh, twisted at his bonds in panic, and felt the
rawhide tighten again as the spell's slow working slacked ... Not now, pox rot
it ... !
His mind groped, slid. It would take too long; they'd scent his flesh in
moments ...
But what would it smell like?
It wouldn't work for long-he was too weak, the pain of his wounds too
insistent, and if he blacked out again he was dead-but in a split second of
clear thought he called to his flesh the searing illusion of heat, poison,
fire, burning oil, anything, and threw it around him like a cloak at those
tiny, vicious, mindless minds. Dust, smoke ... that's what they'd smell ...
the crackle of flames where he lay twisting frantically at the ropes that held