"Van Lustbader, Eric - Pearl 01 The Ring of Five Dragons(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

"And find him I will, make no mistake," Kinnnus Morcha said. "He is still within the palace walls. I myself saw him enter with the Kundalan skcettta. Trust me, he will not escape us. There is no one to give him aid; by night's end we will have executed them all" The two men laughed like chь-foxes at the rising of the moons.
Annon came in with Ciyan, Kurgan thought, observing them, cloaked by night and shadows. If he escapes, it will be with her connivance. She knows every secret nook and cranny of this accursed place.
He looked over the side of the balcony, grabbed hold of a sturdy vine from one of the oldest of the star-rose plants, shinnied down into the garden. He went swiftly along the loggia to where one of his father's Khagggun was manning the west-ring guard post.
He planted himself in front of the Khagggun, and in his most authoritative voice said: "My father needs a Tracker. Now."
The Khagggun looked at him, nodded distractedly, and handed over a metallic oval. "Mind it's returned to me. Those things are expensive." He raised his voice as Kurgan took off at a trot. "It will be my salary docked if you lose it!"
Kurgan thumbed on the Tracker as he went, dialed up the directory.
This showed him the names of all Kundalan with okuuut registered within the palace's purview. It took him but a moment to scroll through the list. He highlighted Giyan's name, pressed a red button. The Tracker beeped three times as the screen cleared. He saw the word: TRACKING and then: FOUND. He watched, while the letters and symbols scrolled in a spiral over the screen.
They're in the subterranean caverns, he said to himself. Very close to the northern perimeter. What can they be up to? What does the Kundalan female know that I don't? In this case, plenty, he told himself.
Neither his father nor the Line-General would consider that the Kundalan skcettta might harbor maternal instincts toward her charge. An animal feeling protective toward a V'ornn? Unthinkable. Adults, he thought. Slow as a hindemuth and twice as stupid.
He raced through the labyrinthine corridors and chambers. He was almost at the north end of the ring when the signal blipped off. He paused, as much to catch his breath as to see what had happened. The diagnostic tab showed him the Tracker was working perfectly. Something had terminated the signal. That could only happen if Giyan was dead. He could only deduce that Annon was alone and doubtless frightened out of his wits. Kurgan imagined what he would feel like if his father was dead, if he saw his bloody head being held aloft.
He saw the north-ring guard post up ahead and slowed down before he was spotted by the Haaar-kyut manning it. He took deep breaths to get his wind back and passed by the idiot Khagggun in his father's pay. They weren't any brighter than Morcha's unit. He was smarter than all of them put together.
Laughing to himself, he sauntered out of the north gates. He paused to look around. More Khagggun were arrayed around the palace as if awaiting a major revolt—by what, he snickered, a herd of maddened cthauros? He threaded his way through the Khagggun. All of them knew Kurgan Stogggul, the Prime Factor's son. Prime Factor, soon to be regent.
Beyond the military perimeter, Axis Tyr lay in unnatural, enforced darkness. There was an air about the place of a military campaign, the acrid edge of brawny muscle, leveled weapons, and ominous threat. Here and there, tucked into far-distant corners of the city, fusion lamps still burned. But here, shadows bundled in the street, piled themselves in doorways, stretched forth their elastic fingers to embrace walls, windows, shopfronts, cthauros pens, and those few passersby drawn by the Khagggun's inevitable clamor.
Kurgan stopped to visually reconnoiter. This was a trick the Old V'ornn had taught him when he had taken him hunting. Don't look and walk, he had said. Stand still and let your eyes pick out the likely spots for game.
Now Kurgan looked from sector to sector in an arc radiating out from the looming north face of the regent's palace. Where would I put an exit, he asked himself, if I had built that subterranean cavern?
Running from right to left, he saw a row of artisan's ateliers—Bashkir-run businesses where Tuskugggun past childbearing age plied their trades. He took them in quickly and superficially and went on. He recognized one of the city's four cthauros pens, from which V'ornn could ride into the countryside; a marble fountain, one of hundreds throughout Axis Tyr; more shopfronts—the northern edge of the market district, to be exact. Nothing out of the ordinary, little that seemed suitable, unless…
His eyes swung back to the row of ateliers. Many of the Tuskugggun needed kilns, deep pools of running water and the like, so they had appropriated these buildings from displaced Kundalan artisans because in most instances what they needed was already in place Their equipment required basements, foundations, water pipes, filtration systems—in short, extensive subterranean work spaces that might easily have been joined up in the past to secret passageways and hidden doors.
Having made his decision, Kurgan trotted off toward the ateliers. Every so often, he checked the Tracker, but it showed nothing. On Grey Weave Street, he clung to the shadows of the buildings, trying each door in turn. All were locked. Turning the corner onto Blank Lane, he discovered a narrow alleyway the Tuskugggun used to lay in supplies and set out huge barrels of castoffs and remnants. The alley was deserted and ill lighted. Kurgan walked its length, now and again peering in back windows, seeing little but his own ghostly reflection. When he reached the south end of the alley, he chose a spot behind a barrel reeking of dye-lot salts and hunkered down.
As it happened, he did not have long to wait. He heard a noise first, and peered around the side of the barrel. He saw Annon emerging from an underground cistern. Kurgan was about to call out to him when he saw him turn, bend, and extend his arm. He hauled upward, and out of the cistern popped a Tuskugggun. Kurgan held his breath. What was this? He wondered. Then the Tuskugggun turned so that her face was briefly toward him. He sucked in his breath. The Kundalan skcettta! Kurgan was stunned. With her okuuut inoperative, she should have been dead. Then he saw why Annon had been helping her: a bandage was wound tightly around her left palm. She had surgically removed the okuuut! Kurgan had never heard of such a thing happening; up until that moment he had not known it was possible. But he was someone who rejoiced in the new and unexpected, and now he held his position; stilled his voice. He watched and waited.
When Giyan pointed north, he followed them to the cthauros pens. He watched, wide-eyed, as the Kundalan skcettta went over the fence and walked into a knot of the animals. He himself put no faith in the consistency of behavior of any Kindalini animal and now he was astonished to see how these sestapeds stamped the ground, bent their long necks so that she could scratch their heads. She beckoned to Annon, who nimbly vaulted over the fence. When she had put him on a cthauros she had chosen, she grabbed another by its thick neck hair and swung herself astride its broad back. It lifted its head and rose on its four hind legs. Then she slapped Annon's mount, dug her heels into her own, and the two cthauros charged the north fence of the pen, soared over the highest rail, landed on the street, and, with sparks flying, took off in the direction of the North Gate.
When Kurgan returned to the regent's suite in the palace he found his father sitting in a chair with his booted feet propped up on _. desk. Eleusis Ashera's personal silicon wafers were strewn across the floor, caught in the edges of carpets, flapping like the wings of wounded birds from the louvers in the fusion lamps. Wennn Stogggul held an empty bottle of fire-grade numaaadis in one hand and Annon's birth-caul in the other. They swung in time to his singing, and what he was singing was something about starlight. He was singing this idiotic little ditty to a ragged line of disembodied heads which sat atop the desk, while periodically flinging wet kisses at them. Kurgan recognized them all: the heads of the former regent, his three daughters, their two small sons and one daughter.
"Ah, there you are," Wennn Stogggul said, barely missing a refrain. "Hiding in the shadows, eh?"
"No, I—"
"Well, who can blame you?" Wennn Stogggul's face grew violet with the gathering of blood. "I should murder you along with all your friends in the Ashera Dynasty."
"That is an unfair accusat—"
"Who said life is fair? Has it been fair to me? The difference is, I don't whine about it." Stogggul's eyes were half-glazed, and there was a nasty expression on his face. "I don't suck up to the Ashera the way you have with Annon just to be in his reflected glory. Disgusting be- havior. Now see where it has gotten you." He laughed drunkenly. "Fool that you are, you chose the wrong side!" His laughter rose to an ear-splitting level. "Perhaps I should punish you! Yes, that is what I shall do!"
"You are always punishing me."
"And why should I not? My father did the same to me. Punishment is the quickest way to learn."
Kurgan bit his lip until he tasted a fine thread of blood.
Wennn Stogggul rubbed his nose. "Speaking of your grandfather, do you know what Kinnnus Morcha told me? Eleusis claimed the Ashera did not sabotage his spacecraft. Outlandish, what?" He threw Annon's birth-caul at the regent's head, toppling it off its perch. "And to compound his calumny he said that your grandfather was on a fool's errand! Can you imagine? Your grandfather a fool?"
Rage welled up in Kurgan, and he could no longer keep silent. "Eleusis was right. Grandfather was a fool to think he could directly challenge the Ashera claim on salamuuun."
Wennn Stogggul's face turned purple. "Don't say a word!" he shouted. "Not one more word against your grandfather! He was a great V'ornn! A successful V'ornn, which is more than I can say for you! You aren't worth a grain-weight against him."
Something shut down inside Kurgan. He felt like an island in the middle of a raging sea. He knew he must do whatever it took to keep himself from being inundated by the rising water. "You are drunk on your victory, father. But it will be short-lived unless—"
"There you go whining again." Wennn Stogggul spat at his son's feet. "Unless what?" he roared. "Will you look into your magic crystal ball and show me the future?" He laughed harshly, contemptuously. "On to something of real importance! I am in need of more of this fine numaaadis."
"I think you have had enough."
"Who asked you to think? Fetch me another bottle, you little swine!" the Prime Factor shrieked, hurling the bottle at the boy.
Easily ducking the makeshift ordnance, Kurgan retreated to the hallway, where he ran into Line-General Kinnnus Morcha.
The huge Khagggun's booming laugh echoed down the otherwise eerily quiet halls. "Running your father's errands again?"
"I guess we have that in common," Kurgan said.
Kinnnus Morcha frowned. Unlike Wennn Stogggul, he was not too drunk to know what was being said. "You have an uncommonly acid tongue for one so young."
"I am not as young as all that. How about a drink?"
"A drink?" The Line-General's laughter boomed out again. "I warrant you are one of a kind. Why, the fire-grade numaaadis your father and
I have been drinking would shrivel the markings on your tender parts.
That is, if your tender parts had any markingsV He roared again as his jest.
"One drink," Kurgan pressed. "That is all I ask. It is a special night, after all."
Kinnnus Morcha regarded him with a remarkably sober expression.
"Aye, there is no disputing that."
"Well, then. Where is the harm?" He grinned. "I won't tell my father if you won't."
The Line-General nodded. "All right. As you say, where is the harm?"
He led Kurgan into a midsize chamber that had been converted from a sanctuary into a library. Where images of the Goddess Mьna had hung, now stood cases filled with silicon wafers and data-gems that held the entire cultural libraries of the races the V'ornn had conquered. Of their own past, however, there was precious little.