"Ed Greenwood - Forgotten Realms - Elminster 5 - Elminster's Daughter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenwood Ed)

his gaze to Hammuras, he held out a beckoning hand.
Grimly, the spice merchant produced a small coffer of his own, displayed the
rubies it held, and slid it along the table.
It stopped within reach of the moneylender, but Caethur made no move to take it
up. Instead, he turned his expectant gaze to Nael. Who sat as still as stone and as
pale as snow-marble. "Well?" Caethur asked softly, into a silence that was suddenly
very deep and yet as singingly tight as a drawn bowstring.
Nael swallowed, lifted his chin, swallowed again, then said, "I've brought neither
gems nor my deed here with me, but—"
Without waiting for a signal, one of the crossbowmen fired, and Aldurl Nael's left
eye was suddenly a bloody profusion of sprouting wood and flight-feathers. The
brass-merchant reeled in his seat, head flopping back and mouth gaping, and did not
move again. Crimson rivulets of blood spilled from his mouth, seeking the floor.
 "—but how unfortunate," Caethur said mildly, finishing Nael's sentence for him.
"For Nael, and for all of you. After all, we can't have any witnesses to such wanton
butchery, can we?"
The other guard calmly fired his crossbow, and Hammuras died.
As the three surviving merchants shouted and surged desperately to their feet, both
guards tossed their spent crossbows aside and plucked cushions off a shelf affixed
to the back of Caethur's chair. Four more hand-crossbows gleamed in the lamplight,
loaded and ready. Coolly the guards snatched them up—and used them.
Kamburan groaned for a surprising long time, but the rest of the room was still in
but a breath or two.
"The bolts my men use, by the way," the moneylender told the corpses
conversationally, "are tipped with brain-burn, to keep prying Watchful Order mages
from learning anything of our meeting—and how you happened to so carelessly end
up wearing war-darts in your faces. After all, we wouldn't want to start one more
irresponsible city fashion, would we?"
Caethur rose from his chair, nodded to his two guards, and waved a hand at the
gem-coffers on the table. "When you're done stripping the bodies of all deeds and
coins and suchlike, bring those."
As he strode to the door and slipped out, he took something from a belt-pouch. It
looked like a beast's claw: a grip-bar studded with a row of little daggers. When
Caethur closed his hand around the bar, the blades protruded from between his
fingers like a row of sheathed talons. With his other hand, the moneylender drew a
belt dagger and used it to cautiously flick away the sheaths that covered every blade
of the claw. Something dark and wet glistened on each razor-sharp point.
Thrusting the dagger through a belt-loop and putting the ven-omed claw behind his
back, Caethur waited, humming a jaunty tune softly under his breath.
When his two laden bodyguards came to the door, he gave them a frown as he
blocked their way and pointed back into the room.
"You've missed something," he said sharply.
His bodyguards gave him astonished and displeased looks but whirled to look at
the dead merchants; the moneylender was not a master to be crossed.
The moment they turned Caethur took a swift step, slashed them both across the
backs of their necks with his claw, and sprang away to avoid the thrashing spasms
he knew would follow.
The guards were young and strong. After they stiffened with identical grunts of
astonished agony, they managed to whirl toward their master, glaring, and claw at the
air wildly for some seconds ere the venom stilled their limbs, and sent them toppling