"Confluence - 02 - Ancients Of Days" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

THE WHISPERERS
PANDARAS (NT[R[D TP[ shadowy arena of the Basilica just as
one half of the defense force charged at the other. Tamora
led the point of the attacking wedge, screaming fearsomely
Yama ran up and down behind the double rank of
the defending line and shouted at his thralls to stand firm.
The two sides met with a rattle of padded staves against
round arm shields. Shadows shifted wildly as fireflies
swooped overhead like a storm of sparks. For a moment
it seemed that the attack must fail, but then one of the
thralls in the defending line gave ground to Tamora's remorseless
blows. Instead of closing the gap as the man
went down in the press, the first rank wavered and broke,
stumbling backward into the second. Yama shouted the
order to regroup, but his thralls fell over each other or
simply dropped their shields and staves and ran, and the
wedge formation of the attacking force dissolved as thralls
began to chase each other around the Basilica.
In the middle of the confusion, Tamora threw down her
stave in disgust, and Yama blew and blew on his whistle
until everyone stopped running. Pandaras came toward
them, trotting over the pattern of chalked lines Tamora
had carefully drawn on the marble floor that morning. His
two fireflies spun above his small sleek head. He said
cheerfully, "Did they do something wrong? I thought it
was very energetic."
"You should be in the kitchen with the rest of the pan
scourers," Tamora said, and went off to round up the
thralls so that she could tell them exactly what they had
done wrong. Her
own fireflies seemed to have caught some
of her anger; they flared with bright white light and
whirled around her head like hornets sprung in defense of
their nest. Her long queue of red hair gleamed like a rope
of fresh blood. She wore a plastic corselet, much scratched
and scored, and a short skirt of overlapping strips of
scuffed leather that left her powerfully muscled legs
mostly bare.
Pandaras said, "They are armed with sticks, master. Is
that part of your plan?"
"We do not dare give them proper weapons yet," Yama
told the boy. Like the thralls, he wore only a breechclout.
The floor was cold and gritty under his bare feet, but he
was sweating in the chill air, and his blood sang. He could
feel it thrilling under his skin. His vigorous black hair was
bushed up by the bandage around his forehead. A ceramic
disc, of the kind believed to have been used as coins in
the Age of Enlightenment, hung from his neck on a leather
thong. At his
back, his knife hung in its goatskin sheath