"Michael Swanwick - Cold Iron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

Thistle snickered.
"I mean it! And not only is it wrong, but it's a stupid idea as well." Thistle was a shifter, as was Stilt
himself, and like all shifters she was something of a lack-wit. Jane had learned long ago that the only way
to silence Thistle was to challenge her directly. "What good would it do? Even if it worked—which I
doubt—there'd be an investigation afterwards. And if by some miracle we weren't discovered, they'd still
only replace Blugg with somebody every bit as bad. So what's the point of killing him?"

That should have silenced them. But to Jane's surprise, a chorus of angry whispers rose up like cricket
song.

"He works us too hard!"

"He beats me!"

"I hate that rotten Old Stinky!"

"Kill him," the shadow-boy said in a trembling voice from directly behind her left shoulder. "Kill the big
dumb fuck!" She whirled about and he wasn't there.

"Be still!" Casting a scornful look at Jane, Rooster said, "We have to kill Blugg. There is no alternative.
Come forward, Stilt."

Stilt scootched a little closer. His legs were so long that when he sat down his knees were higher than his
head. He slipped a foot out of his buskin and unself-consciously scratched himself behind an ear.

"Bend your neck."

The scrawny young shifter obeyed. Rooster shoved the head further down with one hand, and with the
other pushed aside the lank, ditchwater hair. "Look—pinfeathers!" He yanked up Stilt's head again, and
waggled the sharp, foot-long nose to show how it had calcified. "And his toes are turning to talons—see
for yourselves."

The children pushed and shoved at one another in their anxiety to see. Stilt blinked, but suffered their
pokes and prods with dim stoicism. Finally, Dimity sniffed and said, "So what?"

"He's coming of age, that's so what. Look at his nose! His eyes! Before the next Maiden's Moon, the
change will be upon him. And then, and then. . ." Rooster paused dramatically.

"Then?" the shadow-boy prompted in a papery, night-breeze of a voice. He was somewhere behind
Thistle now.

"Then he'll be able to fly!" Rooster said triumphantly. "He'll be able to fly over the walls to freedom, and
never come back."

Freedom! Jane thought. She rocked back on her heels, and imagined Stilt flapping off clumsily into a
bronze-green autumn sky. Her thoughts soared with him, over the walls and razor-wire and into the air,
the factory buildings and marshalling yards dwindling below, as he flew higher than the billowing exhaust
from the smokestacks, into the deepening sky, higher than Dame Moon herself. And never, oh never, to
return!