"Barbara Hambly - A Night with the Girls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Starhawk and Battle-sow and accepted their word that the little gang of armed men with the
was under their protection. Butcher met them just inside the camp itself. "We built the pyre,
like you instructed," said the physician. "The wood's soaked in all the Blue Ruin gin I could
find at short notice, and the things you told Teryne to fetch are laid on it. I take it," she adde
drily, "that they'll keep our agglomerative pal from taking the fire into herself like she takes
everything else?"

"Well," said Starhawk, "let's hope so. But you know it's only a matter of time before som
idiot pitches a torch at it anyway." She glanced over her shoulder. The smell of the wight h
grown as they'd approached the camp, the bubbling, angry mutter of it clearly audible in the
darkness all around them. It dogged them through the velvet black among the tents and
tent-ropes, the banked watch-fires and the carts: angry, hungry, wanting.

She hoped she'd have time to do what she needed to do. Sun Wolf was a lot more
convincing at this kind of thing than she was.

Prince Chare was no happier about being wakened in the smallest hours of the morning t
Brannis Cornmonger had been. "Sign the Articles of Compromise?" he blustered. "Nonsens
The city is mine, to do with as I please. Who let you in here? Guards!"

"Your guards are taking a little nap right now." Battlesow touched a taper to the single
candle Starhawk had lit at the Prince's bedside and went about the tent lighting lamps. Give
the cost of oil and candles-beeswax, not tallow-the Prince was as extravagant about lights
he was about everything else. Gorgeous hangings of the bright-colored silks for which the
Middle Kingdoms were famous covered the canvas walls; chairs of expensive inlay and
enamel punctuated tufted rugs. Starhawk saw Battlesow pause by the dressing-table and po
the Prince's emerald neck-chain and several of his rings.

"The city is not yours," said Councillor Toth indignantly. "You can't tax us as if we were
trading municipality and govern us as if we were a village of serfs. That recognition is all w
ask."

"That's not all we ask!" retorted Cornmonger. "We demand-"

"I demand," said Starhawk, raising her usually soft voice to a cutting battle edge, "that y
sign the Articles of Compromise-both of you-now. You, Cornmonger, summoned a wight, a
you, Prince, knew of its existence. According to Butcher you've been covering up the
disappearances of outpost guards for days. You don't care whether the people in the city or
soldiers who're fighting for your lands are being slaughtered by this thing, as long as you th
you'll each get your way. Now sign the Articles and end the siege, or you will both
pay-personally-for the situation you're letting continue."

She fished in the pouch at her belt and held up one of the broken brown fragments she'd d
from the mud: visibly a tooth. In the halo of candleflame her scarred, narrow face was stern
and cold, anger and disgust at the waste and violence of war repeated a hundredfold, like th
tongues of the wavering fires, in her gray eyes.

"By this I have summoned her," she said, in her best imitation of the Mother at the conve
where she'd been raised when she told the girls why they had to be good. In fact it was only
native greediness of wights that would draw the creature, but these men didn't have to know