"Barbara Hambly - Sun-Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

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The Rainbow Abyss


the question in his capacity as wizard was an improvement upon doing so in the
capacity of bar-boy, a position he’d occasionally filled at the Black Pig when things got
bad. If my father could see me now…
She leaned forward, her little purple-gloved hands clenched upon the scrubbed oak
tabletop. “There is… a man.”
Rhion sat down on the opposite side of the table, folded his hands, and nodded
encouragingly. Above the edge of the veil, her eyes were dark, enormous, and painted
with green kohl and powdered gold; her cloak was lined with marten fur. From his days
of loitering in the most fashionable scent shops in the City of Circles, he could price her
perfume to within a few royals, and it wasn’t cheap.
She went on, softly and simply as a child, “He must love me or I shall die.”
“And he doesn’t.”
The delicate brows above those immense eyes puckered tragically. “He doesn’t know I’m
alive. He is fickle, frivolous… his affections turn on a whim. Give me something that will
draw him to me, something that will make him love me…”
Rhion had never, personally, been able to fathom why human beings persisted in
craving the love of people who didn’t know they were alive, but this was far from the
first time he’d encountered the phenomenon, or used the proceeds to put food on the
table.
“Look,” he said gently. “Are you sure he’s the kind of man you want? If he’s that fickle,
that frivolous… A love-potion won’t change what a person is. Only—and only temporarily
—whom they want.”
“That is enough,” she breathed, and clasped her hands at her breast as if to contain the
throbbing of her heart. Her cloak, falling back a little, showed strand upon strand of
filigreed silver beads at her throat, gleaming against a ground of ribbon and featherwork
like a field of summer flowers. “If only I can have the chance to win his regard, I know I
can make him love me. If once I hold him in my arms, I know he will come back.” She
swayed forward and clutched his hand, as if fearing he would rise to his towering five-
feet-five and denounce her as a strumpet. “Oh, name your price!”
They always said, Name your price, but Rhion had learned over the years what the

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The Rainbow Abyss


going rate on love-philters was and had also learned that the rich especially would be
screaming for the magistrates if the sum quoted were so much as a dequin above it.
He fetched candles from the mantelpiece, noting automatically as he passed the door of
the common room the two chair bearers and the linkboy, drinking wine from boiled-
leather cups beside that room’s enormous hearth. Unlike the attics, the commons and
the private parlors downstairs were pleasantly warm, redolent of beer and woodsmoke,
sweat, onion stew, and the sawdust that strewed the floor. Judging by their clothes, the
chair bearers were hired men, probably ex-slaves who’d bought themselves free and
gone into business, for of course his client, no matter how rich she was, would have used
hired bearers to bring her here, rather than her own household slaves.
No lady of respectable family would let her own servants know about coming to a place