"Alexander Jablokov - The Fury At Colonus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jablokov Alexander)

more-than-man-sized execution device made of two perpendicular wood beams. The drawers of her
desk were still full of teeth and finger bones, and racks of organs in jars filled the shelves. The morgue
kept demanding them back, but she always refused to recognize the validity of their paperwork. She was
too attached to her souvenirs to let them go. Each was the memory of an avenged wound.

The precise arrangement of the office was all of a piece with the new Director's meticulousness, and
indicated that the Fury's effectiveness could, and would, be destroyed without ever violating departmental
regulations.

The Fury sniffed her desk. Clean as a looted tomb. A key flick, and Pending files appeared on the
computer screen. Nothing flagged for her. Departmental statistics showed that a higher percentage of
crimes were being solved. She wasn't interested in solving crimes. That wasn't her territory.

As a final indignity, her In tray held a stack of sheets explaining the Department's new retirement plan.
Glossy color photographs showed the green leaves of a place called Kindly Grove, with the legend
'Gracious and Exclusive!' Using her fingernails, she spread them deliberately out on the ancient surface of
her desk, tearing and shredding the paper. They would try to wall her in down here, she knew, until she
was completely entombed in stone, as she had been before her existence.

As she sat, the trundle of document-laden carts, the flirtatious laughs, the anxious footsteps, the tense
discussions, all the sounds of the office, continued, first abashed by her presence behind the door, then
unrestrained, as her existence was forgotten.

A drop of liquid fell on the piled sheets, its smack loud in the silence of her office. She turned her head in
time to see another blot of crimson appear on the investment options page. Then another, each drop
thick, rounded, and shiny. The metallic scent of fresh blood filled the room. A desperate splatter
obliterated most of the health benefits. The Fury put her fingernail in a drop, touched it to her tongue --
and was out of the office and down the hall.

"Oh, an oversight, of course," Athena said from behind her garishly painted desk. Her hair was swept up
above her head and held in place by rusting metal spikes pulled from some distant battlefield. Her wide
gray eyes regarded the Fury calmly.

"You should have been copied on it. An oversight, as I said." Athena snacked on an ox's thigh bone
wrapped in fat, but didn't offer the Fury any. There had been a time, the Fury remembered, when
sacrifices had been offered her as well. "It's nothing. All taken care of. No need to trouble yourself, its
just a family dispute, a problem stemming from the late war...."

The Fury ran her fingernails across the desk's elaborately painted surface. Ten parallel lines of blood
appeared, and began to soak in, ruining the colorful scenes painted there. With a casual air, as if she'd
just spilled a little tea, Athena shook out the linen napkin in her lap and wiped up the blood.

Athena was an Olympian, a member of the new administration. A lot of irrevocable changes were being
made. But the Fury was a key member of the Old Service. Athena could fiddle with the details of
jurisdiction all she wanted, but she could not stop the Fury from acting.

Athena swiveled her chair and stared out of the window. Her office was high up, and looked out over the
bronze towers of the city. Their edges were rosy now with what was either dawn or sunset. Abruptly
rising mountains held in the sky.