"R. A. MacAvoy - L2 - King of the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacAvoy R A)

She looked closely, not at him but at me, and she asked why my face and scalp were bleeding.
“I broke some glass,” I told her and she made the tra-ditional response: “God keep us from bad luck.”
That was ugly writing, old friend, and I had to get up and weed the border for a while before I could go
on. Above my desk is the very window I smashed—a window of four-teen panes—and it shows the
signs of my own carpentry and glazing. (I am a better optician than I am glazier.) Now I must return to
this story and write things much uglier.
Arlin had a red weal on her abdomen in the shape of an ax handle, and at the top was a patch of broken
skin in the oblong of the back of an =head. She sat on our cot, hands Benched, silent as ever and staring
at the rotten old silk win-dow screw. An hour passed and the mark darkened. Though I had explored
medicine with you, Powl, in the last few years, I could do nothing to cure this and she would take nothing
for the pain. I took the elixir of opium I had ready and went down the long hall to the closet where we
had locked the broken assassin, and I forced a good amount down him. In a few minutes he was
oblivious, and I set the arm as well as I could and wrapped it against him again.
The other beggars in the oratory warily watched me emerge with my lantern from the closet, and they
said noth-ing. They were not used to seeing me take prisoners: no more than I was used to it. Nor did
they attempt to enter Arlin’s and my room, for her black silences and bright blades kept people at a
distance. Some of them knew she was a woman and some did not. Some who had known had forgotten
it again, as a thing too inexplicable. No one besides myself knew yet that she was carrying.
When I returned she told me she was beginning to mis-carry. She said it as one would say, “I think I
smell a dead mouse”: with indifferent disgust, and she kept her gaze on the soft, discolored light of the
screen.
We had raspberry leaf infusion, I told her. We had the stinking preparation you brought back from
Felonka and left in the medicine chest, which was supposed to be effective to prevent such things.
Arlin said, “If it is dead, then it had better pass out,” using the same dry tone of voice. I looked at the
spreading weal and I tried to ask her if it was dead; if she had a way of knowing, but I could not speak at
all. Then the blood started, and horrible cramping against the, injury, and I could do nothing, but hold her
hand until from her grip the long bones of my own hand ground against one another.
When the worst of it had passed, I went down the hall to see to the other patient. Cown, the redhead
with one eye, stopped me to ask about Arlin: was he well and would we want any dinner? I gave him a
single “no” and brushed by.
The prisoner had awakened. He had hanged himself by his own belt from a roof beam and there he was,
dangling, hours dead, his right arm still neatly bound to his side.
I cut him down. The next day I ripped out the silk screen (the last one left from when the oratory was rich
and filled with religious). I could not bear to see the light shine through it.
This had been the third assassination attempt that sum-mer, though the other two had been with fewer
assassins, and both had been directed at myself. I had killed three men—four, if you counted the
prisoner—and one had gotten away, first cutting the throat of his injured partner. This day Arlin had
killed three.
And now our five years together, first with her as a student of my own teacher, and then two years
wandering, seemed a paradise of innocence, not to be regained—certainly not by a man who killed as a
matter of convenience.
I had been either arrogant or naive. I had thought I had the skills to control any man and keep him from
injuring either me, my friends, or himself. That attitude was nothing I got from you, Powl. It had been
nurtured by my years in Sordaling, where I was more experienced than any other student, and at the
boundary of Norwess and Ekesh, where the worst enemy I encountered was a single renegade soldier.
Now that I had met professed assassins, I knew I was not even a minor god.
***
The years of our honeymoon—I call it that though we could not be legally married—had been splendidly
quiet. Even when Arlin pursued the blood-drinker (who turned out to be only simple and insane), that
was more a matter of intellectual curiosity than of dread, and as I lay in bed in the late hours of this