"Janet Morris - Thieves World - Beyond Sanctuary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morris Janet E)

Abarsis had brought his men to Tempus before committing suicide in a most honorable fashion,
leaving them as his parting gift—and as his way of ensuring that Tempus could not just walk away
from the god Vashanka's service: Abarsis had been Vashanka's priest.
 Of all the mercenaries Rankan money had enabled Tempus to gather for Prince/Governor
Kadakithis, this young recruit was the most singular. There was something remarkable about the
finely made slate-haired fighter with his quiet hazel eyes and his understated manner, something that
made it seem perfectly reasonable that this self-effacing youngster with his clean long limbs and his
quick canny smile had been the right-side partner of a Syrese legend twice his age for nine years.
Tempus would rather have been doing anything else than trying to give comfort to the bereaved
Stepson Nikodemos. Choosing a language appropriate to philosophy and grief (for Niko was fluent
in six tongues, ancient and modern), he asked the youth what was in his heart.
"Gloom," Niko responded in the mercenary-argot, which admitted many tongues, but only the
bolder emotions: pride, anger, insult, declaratives, imperatives, absolutes.
"Gloom," Tempus agreed in the same linguistic pastiche, yet ventured: "You'll survive it. We all
do."
"Oh, Riddler… I know… You did, Abarsis did—twice," he took a shivering breath; "but it's not
easy. I feel so naked. He was… always on my left, if you understand me—where you are now."
"Consider me here for the duration, then, Niko." Niko raised too-bright eyes, slowly shaking his
head. "In our spirits' place of comfort, where trees and men and life are one, he is still there. How
can I rest, when my rest-place holds his ghost? There is no moat left for me… do you know the
word?"
Tempus did: balance, equilibrium, the tendency of things to make a pattern, and that pattern to
be discernible, and therefore revivifying. He thought for a moment, gravely—not about Niko's
problem, but about a youthful mercenary who spoke offhandedly of adept's refreshments and
archmagical meditations, who routinely transported his spirit into a mystical realm and was
accustomed to meeting another spirit there. He said at last: "I don't read it ill that your friend waits
there. Why is it bad, unless you make it so? Moat, if you have had it, you will find again. With him,
you are bound in spirit, not just in flesh. He would be hurt to hurt you, and to see you afraid of what
once you loved. His spirit will depart your place of relaxation when we put it formally to rest. Yet
you must make a better peace with him and surmount your fear. It's well to have a friendly soul
waiting at the gate when your time comes around. Surely you love him still?"
That broke the young Stepson, and Tempus left him curled up on his bed so that his sobs need
not be silent and he could heal upon his own.
Outside, leaning against the doorjamb, the planked door carefully closed, Tempus put his fingers
to the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyes. He had surprised himself as well as the boy, offering
Niko such far-reaching support. He wasn't sure he dared to mean it, but he had said it. Niko's team
had functioned as the Stepsons' ad hoc liaisons, coordinating (but more usually arbitrating disputes
among) the mercenaries and the Hell Hounds (the Rankan Imperial Elite Guards), the Ilsig regular
army and the militia Tempus was trying to covertly form out of some carefully-chosen street urchins,
slit purses, and sleeves—the real rulers of this overblown slum and the only people who ever knew
what was going on in Sanctuary, a town which just might become a strategic staging area if war did
come down from the north. As liaisons, both teammates had come to him often for advice. Part of
Niko's workload had been the making of an adequate swordsman out of a certain Ilsig thief named
Hanse, to whom Tempus had owed a debt he did not care to discharge personally. But the young
backstreeter, emboldened by his easy early successes, had proved increasingly irascible and
contentious when Niko—aware that Tempus was indebted to Hanse and that Kadakithis
inexplicably favored the thief—endeavored to lead him far beyond slash-and-thrust infantry tactics
into the subtleties of Niko's own expertise: cavalry strategies, guerilla tactics, western fighting forms
that dispensed with weaponry by accenting surprise, precision, and meditation-honed instinct.
Though the thief recognized the value of what the Stepson offered, his pride made him sneer: he