"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Dus 1 - Lure Of The Basilisk" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

be out of sight and sound of the door. Unless the wizard were lying in wait
for him, the odds were he could simply walk in the front door unnoticed-unless
there were some sort of alarm. If there were, he would hear it, and could
simply turn around and walk out again.
Although the boldest course, this was also the simplest, and therefore
most likely the best; he had no way of knowing where in the palace he might
encounter the wizard, so one point of entry was as good as another, making it
foolish to risk climbing in windows where he could easily slip and break his
neck.
His course of action decided, Garth strode across the square, dodging
the collapsed tents. The sun, setting somewhere over his right shoulder,
glittered redly on the gems that studded the palace door. Marching up the
three steps, he grasped the handle and pushed; nothing happened. He pushed
harder; the door still refused to yield. He could see no sign of lock or bar,
yet it gave no more than would a mountainside; either the palace had been
designed to withstand a siege or there was sorcery at work here. In either
case, Garth did not care to press the issue. He considered trying to cut
through the door with his axe as he had the city gate, but he rejected the
idea. If anything would annoy Shang, the ruination of his front door would.
Furthermore, the noise attendant upon such a proceeding would be vastly
greater than that of his intended surreptitious entry, so that even if the
wizard were in the far corner of the palace he might hear it.
Therefore another entrance must be found. Garth descended the red stone
steps and turned right, to make a circuit of the building. This led him
through a rather malodorous alleyway perhaps six feet in width, where he found
the south face of the palace to be as totally blank and featureless on all
three floors as the front was on the first. Then, some forty yards along, he
found himself in a broader, more wholesome street at right angles to the
alleyway. The back of the palace, he saw, had the same casements and gargoyles
at top, the same slits on the second floor, the same smooth façade at ground
level, save that where the golden door was in the front, the back had a large
arch, perhaps fifteen feet wide and a dozen high, filled with an oaken gate.
A brief attempt showed that this barrier was as solidly closed as was
the golden portal, if not more so, and the arguments against hacking it down
still held; so Garth continued to the northern face, into an alleyway of
perhaps eight-foot width, which was almost black in the gathering twilight.
Here the palace was again utterly blank and featureless.
Emerging once more into the market-square, Garth realized that daylight
was fading rapidly and that he could not afford to waste much more time if he
wanted to be able to see what he was doing; therefore he discarded his
consideration of such possibilities as concealed doorways, lock-picking,
tunnels from adjacent buildings, and other unlikely means of ingress, and set
his mind to reaching the third-floor windows...One, he could see, was not
closed completely; perhaps an inch separated the metal casement from its
frame.
A single attempt convinced him that the palace walls were not readily
scalable; the smooth marble provided no hand or toe-holds, nor did he care to
waste time and energy noisily making such holds with his axe. He did not care
to attempt lassoing or grappling a gargoyle and clambering up the rope,
because he doubted either the gargoyles or the rope were strong enough to hold