"Cook, Glen - Black Company 09 - Glittering Stone 03 - Water Sleeps" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cook Glen)

keep him from becoming anyone's spoiled baby. But Goblin
insisted on treating him like a favorite son. He was trying to tutor the
boy.



Goblin's command of written Taglian was more limited than he
would admit. There are a hundred characters in the everyday
vulgate and forty more reserved to the priests, who write in the
High Mode, which is almost a second unspoken, formal language. I
use a mixture recording these Annals.



Once Tobo could read, "Uncle" Goblin made him do all his reading
for him, aloud.



"Could I do some more buttons, Sleepy? Mom thinks more would
get more attention in the Palace."



I was surprised he talked to her that long. Boys his age are surly at
best. He was rude to his mother all the time. He would have been
ruder and more defiant still if he had not been blessed with so
many "uncles" who would not tolerate that stuff. Naturally, Tobo
saw all that as a grand conspiracy of adults. Publicly. In private, he
was amenable to reason. Occasionally. When approached
delicately by someone who was not his mother.



"Maybe a few. But it's going to get dark soon. And then the show
will start."



"What'll we go as? I don't like it when you're a whore."



"We'll be street orphans." Though that had its risks, too. We could
get caught by a press gang and forced into Mogaba's army. His
soldiers, these days, are little better than slaves, subject to a
savage discipline. Many are petty criminals given an option of
rough justice or enlistment. The rest are children of poverty with
nowhere else to go. Which was the standard of professional
armies men like Murgen saw in the far north, long before my time.