"Feist, Raymond E - The Riftwar Legacy 02 - Krondor- The Assassins" - читать интересную книгу автора (Feist Raymond E)

Step by step he approached the intersection of the two passages, and as
he reached the corner at which he would turn, he heard another sound. A
small scrape of metal against stone, as if a scabbard or sword blade had
ever-so-lightly touched a wall. He froze.

Even in the dark, Limm kept his eyes closed. He didn t know why, but
shutting his eyes helped his other senses. He had wondered at this in
the past, and finally stopped trying to figure out why it was so. He
just knew that if he spent any energy trying to see, even in the pitch
black, his hearing and sense of touch suffered.

After a long, silent, motionless period, Limm heard a rush of water
heading toward him. Someone, a shopkeeper or city worker, must have
purged a cistern or opened one of the smaller sluices that fed the
sewer. The slight noise was the

21 only mask he needed to resume moving, and he was quickly around the
corner.

Limm hurried, still cautious but now feeling the need to put some
distance between himself and whoever guarded the intersection behind
him. He silently counted his steps and when one hundred had passed he
opened his eyes.

As he expected, ahead was a faint dot of light, which he knew was a
reflection coming down from an open grating in the West Market Square.
There wasn t enough light by which to see well, but it was a point of
reference and confirmed what he already knew about his whereabouts.

He moved quickly and reached the crossway that ran parallel to the one
he had been travelling before encountering the silent guard. He eased
into the foul sewage and crossed the now-moving stream of refuse,
reaching the opposite walkway without making much sound.

Limm was quickly up and on his way again. He knew where his friends were
holed up and knew that it was a relatively safe place, but given the
time and circumstances, nothing was truly safe any more. What had once
been called the other Thieves Highway, the rooftops of Krondor, was now
as much an open war zone as the sewers. The citizens of the city of
Krondor might be blissfully ignorant of this silent warfare above their
heads and below their feet, but Limm knew that if he didn t encounter
the Crawler s men along the way, he risked the Prince s soldiers, or
murderers posing as Nighthawks. No man unknown to him was trustworthy,
and a few whom he knew by name could be trusted only so far these days.

Limm stopped and felt the wall to his left. Despite moving by his own
silent count, he discovered with satisfaction that he had been less than
a foot off estimating the whereabouts of the

22 iron rungs in the wall. He started to climb. Still blind, he felt