"Foster, Alan Dean - End of The Matter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

"A teacher," she echoed, evidently impressed. "A private tutor, eh?" She let out a snicker. "What is it you teach? Pickpocketing, breaking and entering, or general theft?"
"Now what would I know about such things?" he countered in astonishment. "Is that how you brought me up?" They both chuckled. "No, I'm kind of a general-purpose instructor in basics."
"I see" was all she said this time, so he was spared the difficulty of explaining what kind of basics he taught) and to whom. Especially to whom; it was not time for Mother Mastiff or anyone else to know about the Ulru-Ujurrians, the race he had adopted and which had adopted him. The race that could turn this corner of creation inside out.
"Never mind me," he insisted, staring at her. "Here I take money and set you up in one of the fanciest shop districts of Drallar, with top-flight stock, and how do I find you? Like this!" He indicated her ragged clothes, torn skirt and overblouse, the ugly muffin of a hat perched precariously on long, straggly hair. "Out in the street in the rain and damp, clad in scraps."
Now it was Mother Mastiff's turn to glance away. They turned up a cobblestone street and entered a less frenetic section of the city.
"I got itchy nervous, boy, sitting in that fancy store all day. I missed the streets, the contacts, the noise-"
"The arguments and shouting," Flinx finished for her.
"And the gossip," she went on. "Especially the gossip." She eyed him defiantly. "At my age it's one of the few disreputable delights I haven't grown too old for."
Flinx indicated the street ahead. "So that's why we're not headed for the shop?"
"No, not that stuffy snuffbox, not on a beautiful day like today." Flinx studied the gray, overcast sky, blinked at the ever-present mist, but said nothing. Actually, it was a rather nice day for Drallar. It wasn't raining. He had been home for two weeks and had yet to see the sun.
"Let's go to Dramuse's stall. I'll treat you to lunch."
Flinx expressed surprise. "You buy someone else lunch? Still, after the profit you made on that bracelet ..."
"Pfagh! I could have gotten that callow stripling up to fifty credits easy. Knew it the second he set eyes on that bracelet. Then you bad to come along."
"One of these days. Mother, you'll go too far with some knowledgeable offworlder and he'll turn you in to the Ring's police. I broke in because he seemed like a decent man on his mating flight, and I didn't want to see him cheated too badly."
"Shows what you know," she snapped back. "He wasn't as ignorant as he made you think. You weren't there to see his eyes light up when I mentioned the street my shop is on and told him that's where it was stolen from. He knew what he was about, all right. Did you see him shout for the police? No, he was cuddling his hot property like any decent good citizen. Here." She stopped and gestured beyond a gate to tables covered with brightly dyed canopies.
They had entered the last of the concentric rings that formed Drallar's marketplace. This outermost ring consisted entirely of restaurants and food stalls. "They ranged from tiny one-being operations with primitive wood-fired stoves to expensive closed-in establishments in which delicacies imported from the farthest corners of the Commonwealth were served on utensils of faceted veridian. Here the air currents stalled, weaving languorous zephyrs of overpowering potency.
They entered a restaurant that used neither wood nor veridian plates and was somewhere between the opulent and the barely digestible in terms of menu. After taking seats, they ordered food from a creature who looked like a griffin with tentacles instead of legs. Then Mother Mastiff exchanged her gentle accusations for more serious talk.
"Now, boy, I know you went off to look for your natural parents." It was a sign of her strength that she could voice the subject without stumbling. "You've been gone for over a year. You must have learned something,"
Flinx leaned back and was silent for a moment. Pip wiggled out from beneath the cape folds, and Flinx scratched the flying snake under its chin. "As far as I know," he finally responded tersely, "they're both long dead." Pip shifted uneasily, suddenly sensitive to his master's somber mood. "My mother ... at least I know who she was. A Lynx, a concubine. I also found a half sister, and when I found her, I ended up having to kill her."
Food arrived, spicy and steaming. They ate quietly for a while. Despite the heavy spices, the food tasted flat to both of them.
"Mother dead, half sister dead," Mother Mastiff grunted. "No other relatives?" Flinx shook his head curtly. "What about your natural father?"
"Couldn't find a thing about him worth following up."
Mother Mastiff wrestled with some private demon, and finally murmured, "You've run far and long, boy. But there's still a possibility."
He glanced sharply at her, "Where?"
"Here. Yes, even here."
"Why," he said quietly, "didn't you ever tell me?"
Mother Mastiff shrugged once. "I saw no reason to mention it. It's an obscure chance, boy, a waste of time, an absurd thought."
"I've spent a year pursuing absurdities," he reminded her. "Give, Mother."
"When I bought you in the market," she began easily, as if discussing any ordinary transaction, "it was a perfectly ordinary sale. Still don't know what possessed me to waste good money."
Flinx stifled a grin. "Neither do 1. I don't follow you throuh "
"Find the dealer who sold you, Flinx. Perhaps he or she is still in business. There's always the chance the firm kept decent records. I wasn't too concerned with your pedigree. Might be there's some additional in- formation in their records that wasn't provided with the bill of sale. Not likely, now. But all I was interested in was whether or not you were diseased. You looked it, but you weren't." She sipped from a mug. "Sometimes those slavers don't give out all the information they get. They've got their reasons."
"But how can I trace the firm that sold me?"
"City records," she snuffled, wiping liquid from her chin. "There would have been a tax on the business, Try the King's tax records for the year I bought you. Waste of time, though."
"I've plenty of time now," he said cryptically. "I'll try it and gladly." He reached out across the table and patted a cheek with the look and feel of tired suede. "But for the rest of the day, let's be mother and son."
She slapped the caressing hand away and fussed at him... but softly.

Chapter Two

The following day dawned well. The morning ram was light, and the cloud cover actually snowed some signs of clearing. Flinx was spared the shocking sight of sunlight in Drallar when the clouds thickened after he started toward the vast, rambling expanse of official buildings. They clustered like worker ants around the spines of their queen, whose body was the King's palace.
Damp, cool weather invigorated Flinx. Moist air felt familiar in his lungs; it was the air of the only home he had ever known. Or could remember, he corrected himself.
He stopped to chat with two side-street vendors, people he had known since childhood. Yet at first neither of them recognized him. Had he changed so much in one year? Was he so different at seventeen from what he had been at sixteen? True, he had gone through a great deal in that year. But when he looked in the mirror it was no stranger he saw. No fresh lines marred his smooth brown skin, no great tragedy welled out of cocoa eyes. Yet to others he was somehow not the same.
Possibly the crashing kaleidoscope that was Drallar simply made people forget. Resolutely he shut out the shouts and excitement of the city, strode past intriguing stalls and sights while ignoring the implorings of hawkers and merchants. No more time to waste on such childish diversions, he instructed himself. He had responsibilities now. As the leader of an entire race in the Great Game he must put aside infantile interests.
Ah, but the child in him was still strong, and it was a hard thing to do, this growing up ...

Like a granite ocean the myriad walls of Old Drallar crashed in frozen waves against the sprawling bastion of bureaucracy which was the administrative center of Drallar and of the entire planet Moth. Modern structures piled haphazardly into medieval ones. Beyond lowered the King's palace) spires and minarets and domes forming a complex resembling a gigantic diatom. Like much of the city, the building looked as if it had been designed by a computer programmed with the Arabian Nights instead of up-to-date technologies.
Flinx was crossing the outermost ring of stalls when two striking figures passed in front of him-a man and woman, both slightly taller than Flinx but otherwise physically unimpressive. What was striking about them was the reaction they provoked in others. People took pains to avoid the couple, even to avoid looking in their direction. But they did so carefully, to be certain of not giving offense.
The couple were Qwarm.
Barely tolerated by the Commonwealth government, the Qwarm were a widely dispersed clan of professional enforcers, whose services ranged from collecting overdue debts to assassination. Despite being shunned socially, the clan had prospered with the growth of the Commonwealth. Since the beginning of time, there had always been a market for the services they chose to provide.
Flinx knew that the two walking past him were related in some fashion to every other Qwarm in the Commonwealth. Both wore skin-tight jet-black jump- suits ending in black ankle boots. Those boots, he knew, contained many things besides feet, A decorative cape of black and rust-red streamers fluttered from each collar to the waist, like the tail of an alien bird.
Having heard of the Qwarm but never having had the opportunity to see one, Flinx paused at a small booth. Pretending to inspect a copper-crysacolla pitcher, he surreptitiously eyed the two retreating strangers.