"Clive_Barker_Tortured_Souls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive - Coldheart Canyon)

Lucidique was the daughter of a Senator who had been lately complaining in open forum about the fact that the city was running into a state of decadence. The Perfetto Dynasty was using the people's taxes to fund its own pleasures, the Senator argued: it had to stop.
The order quickly came down from the Emperor: rid me of this Senator. Cascarcllian, not giving a damn about the philosophical issues, but happy to oblige his Emperor, sent Kreiger out to kill the political troublemaker.
Kreiger went to the Senator's estate, caught him in the garden amongst his roses, gutted him and carried him inside. He was in the act of arranging the Senator's body on the dinner table, when Lucidique entered. She was naked, having just come from bathing. But she was also prepared for the intruder. She carried two knives.
She circled Kreiger, an he stood amongst the blood and the innards of her father.
"If you move I'll kill you," she said.
"With two table knives?" Kreiger said, slicing the air with his scythes. "Go back to your bath and forget I was here."
"This was my father you just murdered!"
"Yes. I see the resemblance."
"I would have thought a man like you would have thought twice about taking a knife to my father's throat. He wanted to overthrow the Empire so that you and your like would not be exploited."
"Me and my like? You don't know anything about me."
"I can guess," Lucidique said. "You were born in filth, and you've lived in filth so long you don't even see what's going on right in front of you."
Kreiger's expression changed. "So perhaps you do know a little," he said his voice uneasy. The woman's confidence unnerved him. "I will leave you to mourn your father," he said, retreating from the table.
"Wait!" the woman said. "Not so quickly."
"What do you mean: wait? I could kill you in a heartbeat if I wanted to."
"But you don't want to, or you would have done it."
"What's your name?"
"Lucidique."
"So then, what do you want from me?"
"I want you to come with me, into the filthiest streets of Primordium."
"Believe me, I've seen them."
"Then you show me."

IV
It was the strangest walk a man and a woman ever took together. Though Kreiger had washed the Senator's blood from his face, hands and arms he still stank of murder. And here he was, walking beside the daughter of the man he'd just murdered, wrapped in dark linen.
Together, they saw the worst of Primordium: the disease, the violence, and the grinding, unrelieved poverty. And every now and then Lucidique would point to the walls and the towers of the Emperor's Winter Palace, any one room of which contained sufficient wealth to clear the slums of the city, and feed every starving child.
And for the first time in many, many years Kreiger felt some measure of real emotion, remembering circumstances of his own up-bringing, left to sit in the open sewers of Primordium's streets while his mother sold her drug-riddled body to one of the guards of the Emperor's guards. There was anger in him as he walked. And it steadily grew.
"What do you want me to do?" he said, frustrated by what he felt, and his own helplessness. "I could never get to the Emperor."
"Don't be so sure."
"What do you mean?"
"You're right, the Dynasty is untouchable as long as you're just a man; a scabby little assassin hired to kill overweight Senators. But suppose you could be more than that? Then you could bring the Dynasty down."
"How?"
Lucidique gave Kreiger a sideways glance. "It's nothing I can show you here. Besides, I have a father to bury. If you want to know more, then meet me tomorrow night outside the Western Gates. Come alone."
"If this is some kind of trap..." Kreiger said, "...some way to revenge your father...then before they take me I'll cut out your eyes."
Lucidique smiled. "You make such pretty love-talk," she said.
"I mean it."
"I know. And I wouldn't be so stupid as to conspire against you. Quite the reverse. I believe we were meant to know one another. I was meant to walk in on your killing my father, and you were meant to hold your hand off and not kill me. There's some connection between us. You feel it, don't you?"
Kreiger looked at the dirty street between them. The night had been filled with feelings he had not anticipated experiencing. And now here was another; admitting to the strange intimacy he felt for the daughter of the man he'd murdered.
"Yes," he said. "I feel it." Then, after a long silence: "What time tomorrow night?"
"Sometime after one." Lucidique told him. "I'll be there."

V
The following day the streets of Primordium were alive with gossip and speculation: the death of the Senator had started all kinds of rumours. Was this murder the first indication that the Emperor would put up with no more moves towards democracy in the city? Believing this to be the case many members of the Senate left Primordium hurriedly, in case they were next on the Emperor's hit list. There was a general sense of unrest, everywhere.
And in Kreiger, a profound sense of anticipation.
He had barely slept, thinking of what had happened the night before. No, not just the night before. Thinking about his life: where it had led him so far, and where-—if Lucidique's promise were a true one-—it would go after this.
Every now and then he'd glance towards the walls of the palace (which had twice as many guards patrolling them today as yesterday) and wonder to himself what she had meant about finding a way for one man to bring down a Dynasty?

VI
At one o'clock in the morning, a mile outside the West Gate of Primordium, he sat on a stone and he waited. At nine minutes past one, a pair of horses approached (not from the city, from which direction Kreiger had expected her to come, but from the Desert, which lay, vast and largely uncharted, out to the West and South-West of the city.)
They drew nearer, and dismounted.
"Kreiger..."