"Tanya Huff - Kigh 2 - Fifth Quarter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huff Tanya)

Except he'd always be her little brother.

And that's the problem, isn't it? she asked herself as he disappeared into the
night. Spitting the taste of self-pity out of her mouth, Vree started back to camp.
Mooning about it wouldn't change anything. There wasn't anything she could
change___

The baths, the brothels, all the extras, were officially outside the patrolled

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perimeter—although the marshal had been heard to remark on more than one
occasion that she knew what the Sixth Army would rush to defend if it came to
an attack. Vree slipped unseen past a sentry grown bored near the end of an
uneventful watch and picked her way carefully around snoring bodies until she
came to the place where the Fourth Squad, Second Unit, First Company, First
Division, Sixth Army had been ordered to sleep. The weather had been hot and
dry, so hardly anyone had bothered unfolding the tiny, oiled-canvas tents the
army issued as shelter to the common soldiers, and she found her gear right
where she'd left it, piled next to Bannon's. Others might lose possessions to petty
pilfering, but no one messed with an assassin's kit.

She nodded to Corporal Emo hunched over his wineskin, then glanced up at the
sky. The Road to Glory arced overhead and The Archer continued to aim away
from the heart of the Empire. A priest of Assot, God of Music and Prophecy, had
long ago declared that the Empire would endure until The Archer turned his
bow. Vree, inclined to believe that the priest had been sucking back too much
sacramental wine, checked anyway—just to be certain.

Head pillowed on her arms, she closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the
army. It was like being in the belly of a great benevolent beast, wrapped in
protection, secure in the knowledge that if death came in the night, it would have
to come a long way and through many lives to get to her.

Tensions the bath had been unable to touch leached out of her muscles. Slowly,
her breathing slid into the cadence of those breathing all around her, and it was
as a part of the greater whole that she finally slept.


One moment she was asleep, the next she knelt on the shoulders of a young

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recruit, her dagger point hovering over the wildly rolling surface of his left eye.
As her brain caught up with the responses trained into her body, Vree could hear