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

"Particularly not if there's talk in council of dumping those whose stubbornness and gree
started the trouble with the Prince in the first place," put in Teryne.

Starhawk was silent for a time, thinking. Thinking about matters she had read in Sun Wo
books of magic-proper books, Teryne would have called them, that did talk about the why a
wherefore of such matters as wights. Thinking about the political situation in the Gwarl
Peninsula, something she and Sun Wolf had kept up on through tavern gossip and merchants
reports with the professional curiosity of one-time mercenaries whose livelihood had once
depended on knowing who was fighting whom and why. Thinking about the cities she had
helped sack, back in her fighting days, and of why she had quit being a mercenary. Thinking
about the men and women of those cities that she had met: who they were, and what they
wanted out of life.

Thinking about the fact that the wight-stink was growing stronger again, thick and rancid
the night air.

"-book of his said that if the names of his enemies were written on the walls of the tomb
when it was opened, the wight would go after those enemies," Elia was explaining to Butch
"I asked him-and I wasn't the only one-what would happen if the wight started hunting, start
killing, inside the city as well as outside. Brannis said that wouldn't happen."

"Brannis didn't inquire," remarked old Teryne drily, "whether Aganna could read the nam
of Brannis' enemies or her own name, for that matter, which she couldn't."

"The council voted against Brannis' plan," Elia went on. "But two nights later the husban
one of my neighbors disappeared-the shutters of his room broken in, and the smell there…"
stopped and looked around her at the darkness, realizing that while she had been speaking,
smell had returned. Stronger, and growing stronger still.

"Give me that lantern, Butcher," said Starhawk. "And watch my back."

The four women formed up a perimeter around her, a moving circle that followed her ou
into the open patch of ground where the mud glistened with the foulness that had dripped fro
the wight's wounds. Starhawk slipped back the lantern slide and knelt, edging this way and
in the muck, searching.

"There's been three others taken so far, that I know about," Elia said. "That's just from m
neighborhood, which is one of the poorest in the city."

"Your Mayor could have saved himself trouble," remarked Butcher. "I can't see Prince
Chare turning loose one square foot of territory that belongs to him no matter how many
soldiers get killed, his own or somebody else's. He's a stiff-necked bastard."

"Stiff-necked has nothing to do with it." Starhawk pulled off her mail-backed glove to ru
her fingers over the greasy earth. "The council of Horran's got to be negotiating with the La
Prince of Kwest Mralwe. Chare would be a fool to let Horran out of his-Ah!" She found wh
she sought and picked it up, crumbling, brown and slimed from the dirt. Deep in the darkne
beyond the orange-lit shoulders of Butchers scouting-leathers, beyond Battlesow's thick
tattooed neck and shaven head, a noise started, a low throaty growling, like a cat when
cornered by a dog.