"Larry Niven - Limits UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

*Ot~er tales in the Draco Tavern series may be found in my Convergent Series, published by Del Rey Books in 1979.
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THE
LION
IN HIS
ATIIC



Before the quake it had been called Castle Minter!; but few outside Minterl remembered that. Small events drown in large ones. Atlantis itself, an entire continent, had drowned in the tectonic event that sank this small
peninsula.
For seventy years the seat of govermnent had been at Beesh, and that place was called Castle Minter!. Outsiders called this drowned place Nihilil's Castle, for its last lord, if they remembered at all. Three and a fraction stories of what had been the south tower still stood above the waves. They bore a third name now: Rordray's Attic.
The sea was choppy today. Durily squinted against bright sunlight glinting off waves. Nothing of Nihilil's Castle showed beneath the froth.
The lovely golden-haired woman ceased peering over the side of the boat. She lifted her eyes to watch the south tower come toward them. She murmured into Karskon's ear, "And that's all that's left."
Thone was Out of earshot, busy lowering the sails; but he might glance back. The boy was not likely to have seen a lovelier woman in his life; and as far as Thone was concerned, his passengers were seeing this place for the first time. Karskon turned to look at Durily, and was relieved. She looked interested, eager, even charmed.
But she sounded shaken. "It's all gone! Tapestries and banquet hail and bedrooms and the big ballroom . . . the gardens . . all down there with the fishes, and not even merpeop!e to enjoy them . . . that little knob of rock must have been Crown Hill . . . Oh, Karskon, I wish you could have seen it." She shuddered, though her face still wore the mask of eager interest. "Maybe the riding-birds survived. Nihilil kept them on the roof."
"You couldn't have been more than . . ten? How can you remember so much?"
A shrug. "After the Torovan invasion, after we had to get out
Mother talked incessantly about palace life. I think she got lost in the past.
I don't blame her much, considering what the present was like. What she told me and what I saw myself, it's all a little mixed up after so long. I saw the travelling eye, though."
"How did that happen?"
"Mother was there when a messenger passed it to the king. She snatched it out of his hand, playfully, you know, and admired it and showed it to me. Maybe she thought he'd give it to her. He got very angry, and he was trying not to show it, and that was even more frightening. We left the palace the next day. Twelve days before the quake."
Karskon asked, "What about the other-?" But warning pressure from her hand cut him off.
Thone had finished rolling up the sail. As the boat thumped against the stone wall he sprang upward, onto what had been a balcony, and moored the bow line fast. A girl in her teens came from within the tower to fasten the stern line for him. She was big as Thone was big: not yet fat, but hefty, rounded of feature. Thone's sister, Karskon thought, a year or two older.
Durily, seeing no easier way out of the boat, reached hands up to them. They heaved as she jumped. Karskon passed their luggage up, leaving the cargo for others to move, and joined them.
Thone made introduction. "Sir Karskon, Lady Durily, this is Estrayle, my sister. Estrayle, they'll be our guests for a month. I'll have to tell Father. We bring red meat in trade."
The girl said, "Oh, very good! Father will love that. How was the trip?"
"Well enough. Sometimes the spells for wind just don't do anything. Then there's no telling where you wind up." To Karskon and Durily he said, "We live on this floor. These outside stairs take you right up past us. You'll be staying on the floor above. The top floor is the restaurant."
Durily asked, "And the roof?"
"It's flat. Very convenient. We raise rabbits and poultry there." Thone didn't see the look that passed across Durily's face. "Shall I show you to your rooms? And then I'll have to speak to Father."

Nihilil's Castle dated from the last days of real magic. The South Tower was a wide cylindrical structure twelve stories tall, with several
rooms on each floor. In this age nobody would have tried to build anything so ambitious.
When Rordray petitioned for the right to occupy these ruins, he had
already done so. Perhaps the idea amused Minterl's new rulers. A restaurant in Nihilil's Castle! Reached only by boats! At any rate, nobody else
wanted the probably haunted tower.
The restaurant was the top floor. The floor below would serve as an
inn; but as custom decreed that the main meal was served at noon, it was rare for guests to stay over. Rordray and his wife and eight children lived
on the third floor down.
Though "Rordray's Attic" was gaining some reputation on the mainland, the majority of Rordray's guests were fishermen. They often paid their score in fish or in smuggled wines. So it was that Thone found Rordray and Merle hauling in lines through the big kitchen window.
Even Rordray looked small next to Merle. Merle was two and a half yards tall, and rounded everywhere, with no corners and no indentations:
his chin curved in one graceful sweep down to his wishbone, his torso expanded around him like a tethered balloon. There was just enough solidity, enough muscle in the fat, that none of it sagged at all.
And that was considerable muscle. The flat-topped fish they were
wrestling through the window was as big as a normal man; but Merle and Rordray handled it easily. They settled the corpse on its side on the center table, and Merle asked, "Don't you wish you had an oven that size?"
"I do," said Rordray. "What is it?"
"Dwarf island-fish. See the frilly spines all over the top of the thing?
Meant to be trees. Moor at an island, go ashore. When you're all settled the island dives under you, then snaps the crew up one by one while you're trying to swim. But they're magical, these fish, and with the magic dying away-"
"I'm wondering how to cook the beast."