"Brian Daley - Jinx on a Terran Inheritance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Daley Brian)

and babel of tongues.
Alacrity raised his arm to see how much time remained before the Pearl was due to lift and realized that
his wrist was bare.
"Damn! Ho, our proteuses! We left them with Tilla!" Alacrity was racked by indecision but leaning
toward writing off the proteuses. The two had little money, and Blue Pearl was their only ticket
offplanet.
With a magician's flourish, Floyt drew the two instruments from the pocket of his robe. "I spotted them
while we were, um, visiting Tilla's rooms."
"Searching" was more the word. But Alacrity took his proteus gratefully; he had very few possessions,
but it was just about his most treasured, a commo device, databank, systems accessor and more, in a
wrist torc of overlapping, chitinous black metal plates tinged with verdigris. He ran a quick check. "It's
okay; she didn't tap into the protected stuff. I guess Tilla didn't mess with it."
"Same here." Floyt's was a very cheap, simple model provided for his off world mission by the
Earthservice. Alacrity hid a grin. There was little enough anyone could learn from Floyt's proteus, but
some of the secrets stashed in Alacrity's could command serious amounts of money and bring down
upon him enemies prepared to do a lot more than jinx him.
Just then the tram floated out onto the tower roof under the night sky of Epiphany. Frostpile lit the sky, a
shining faerie city. It was too bright to see many stars, but Epiphany's two moons, Guileless Giles and
the Thieving Magpie, were visible.
They were on the same roof where they'd disembarked from the Blue Pearl only four and one half days
before. The acreage of formal carpet was still in place, lustrous black, worked in thread-of-gold with
Weir insignia and symbols, the broken slave collar most prominent among them. The Pearl was
nowhere to be seen.
"Do you think they left without us, Alacrity? Redlock and Dorraine invited us along, after all. I mean,
even if Inst did get killed when we crashed the airbike, I thought—"
"They're still here, Ho." Alacrity pointed to where the shuttle was poised on the tip of a spiral
resembling a unicorn's hom, at the far side of Frostpile. It might have been the tower where Endwraithe
had cornered them before Alacrity shot the banker with one of Floyt's teeth.
Redlock's shuttle deserved her name. She was a glassy-blue sphere with a nacreous sheen, forty meters

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in diameter. She was lit from within; inside, shadows moved about.
"You two going with the gov'nor?" a ground crewman called from a low service dome.
"Yeah, what's the holdup?" Alacrity shot back.
The man trotted over to them. "The Pearl's waiting for the Severeemish, Queen Dorraine, and one or
two others. Then they'll light here for you two. You're that Earther groundling and the other one, right?"
"I'm the Earther; so what?"
Alacrity frowned, knobby fists clenched. He was lean but surprisingly broad through the shoulders; for
all the gangliness, there was a lot of muscle to him. He didn't like people giving his friends a hard time.
"I'm the other one." Floyt went along with it.
"Just checking, just checking. No offense meant. You can wait out here or inside, as you like." The
ground crewman seemed to recall something urgent, and left.
The two looked up to where the incandescence of Frostpile met the night of Epiphany. Air cabriolets and
sky gondolas, hover pavilions and skimmer pods, glided and drifted overhead, elegant and graceful.
"I'm going to miss this place," Floyt found himself saying. For him, at the very optimum, there would be
the claiming of Astraea Imprimatur and the irrevocable return to Earth, where he would live out his life.
"Me too," Alacrity agreed, throat taut and almost vertical as he watched the gorgeous fliers. "Oh, me