"Joel Rosenberg - The Warrior Lives" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenberg Joel C)

surrounded a lawn that was always ankle-height, the garden guarded by cornered hedges, the precision
of it all maintained each night by scissor-wielding slaves working under smoky torchlight.

Except for the flowers. A gardener, fealty-bound to the guild, had the responsibility for their care.
Flowers were different, Laheran thought, as he bent to sniff the rich fragrance of a blood-red rose. They
required loving attention, not just fearful care.

Laheran liked the garden. It was the one quiet place in the city, the only place he could get completely
away from the noise and the bustle and the smells of Pandathaway.

"You have to stop Karl Cullinane," the guildmaster said, as though Laheran hadn't heard him.

"You said that." Laheran held up an admonishing finger, hoping that Yryn would slap him down for his
insolence, silently begging the guildmaster to assert his authority.

But the older man just nodded.

Laheran could have cried. The guildmaster was losing his grip on himself. Could his grip on the guild be
far behind?

It was a bad time to be leaving Pandathaway. Perhaps Laheran oughtn't have any delusions about having
a chance at the guildmastership—there had never been a guildmaster in his twenties, and damned few in
their thirties—but as the youngest full master in the guild, it wasn't at all impossible that he could have
some impact on the outcome of the contention.

If there was to be a contention. Perhaps what the guild needed now was stability, even if that meant that
somebody would have to be the power behind the throne.

Laheran held out his hand to accept the piece of leather. It was about two handbreadths across, not of
terribly high quality, probably cut from a leather food sack of some sort.

There was writing on the rough surface; Laheran recognized it as dried blood. He couldn't make out
most of the writing, although he suspected it was in that Englits that Karl Cullinane and his friends were
turning into a common trade language throughout the Eren regions and beyond.

But below the scratchings that he couldn't decipher, there were the words he could:

The warrior lives, they said. Beneath were three crude drawings: a sword, an ax, and a knife—a threat
that Cullinane would kill them with whatever was handy.

It was the third such piece of leather Laheran had seen. The first he himself had brought back from
Melawei; it had been pinned to the corpse of a brother slaver, a man who had been split with an ax from

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his brow almost to his waist.

The second had been discovered in Ehvenor, tied to the hilt of a sword that had been struck through
three bodies; the killers had either discovered the slavers in a dark alley or drawn them into it, leaving