"Briggs, Patricia - Sianim 3 - When Demons Walk" - читать интересную книгу автора (Briggs Patricia)

her, then she turned to her work.

Gold was the easiest of all of the metals to work magic upon, so it didn’t take her long to melt Altis’s
cat from the back of the coins. Two of them she left blank, but on the third she drew a rune that invited
bad luck upon the house.

She held the third coin over the star on the cat’s forehead and covered the green eyes with the other
two, blinding the cat. Pressing her thumbs on the eyes and her index fingers on the star, she muttered
softly to herself until the golden coins disappeared, leaving the cat mosaic apparently unchanged.

She stepped back and rubbed her hands unconsciously. The rune magic she used was not black, not
quite—but it was not precisely good either and she never felt quite clean after working it. Not that it
would do much harm: Ill luck took a particularly tricky rune. Still, the Old Man could have made it
function for several years; the best that she had done was ten months—but she was getting better.

At the thought of the man who was her teacher, Sham reluctantly put her hands on the invisible coins
and placed a limit to the physical harm the rune could work so that no one would be permanently injured
as a result of the spell. Since she was doing this for him, she needed to follow his rules.

It had taken her years to discover who had been on the jury that had sentenced her mentor to
darkness and pain for the remainder of his days. The records that were kept in the early days of
occupation were skimpy and difficult for even the most innovative thief to get her hands on. The Old Man
wouldn’t tell her—he was a gentle man not given to vengeance.

One night though, he’d cried out a name as he thrashed in a nighttime reliving. Sham used that name


to question an old court scribe. From him came three other names. She questioned others and offered
money for information until she had the names of all fifteen members of the court who decided
unanimously to cripple the sorcerer’s hands and blind him. The Cybellians who had seen the King’s
Wizard fight had not been able to sustain their disbelief in magic’s power, and they had struck back out
of fear. Only later, after Southwood’s mages had learned to hide themselves, could the Easterners
dismiss it as superstition and delusion.

If she’d known the names of the Old Man’s torturers at first, doubtless she would have destroyed
them all, but the Old Man’s gentleness had done its work. Certainly he would be upset about what little
she’d managed to do—if he ever found out.

It was enough for her that she exacted a price from them, a price they might never miss. The bad luck
that would haunt them for a while was nothing akin to the pain the Old Man would suffer for the rest of
his life. They would shrug it off and go on with their lives, but she would know that they had paid.

The gold she took she kept safely hidden, and soon now she would have the resources needed to
buy a small farm in the country. The Old Man had been born and raised in the fields of northern
Southwood and he lived in the city perforce. He had given her a reason to live after her parents had been
killed when the Castle fell. This was something that she, with the unknowing help of his destroyers, could
give him back.

She exited the mansion by the front door, using her magic to trip the locks behind her. Squeezing
under the hedge again, she made sure that the street was deserted before completely leaving the