"Michelle West - The Confidence Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (West Michelle)

THE CONFIDENCE GAME
MICHELLE M. WELCH

PROLOGUE
Spring, 764 c.c.

I was quitting the game. I would now, finally, after all the years I’d played it for them. I would now, after
losing a year of my life in Siva, a year burned up by that sun like water dried out of your skin. I lost
pieces of my life in Mandera, in Karrim, in cities whose names I cannot speak. I would be done with it.
The game was never mine. I had played it, yes, and played it well, but I tired of it long ago. I grew old
and they were still children.

He was waiting for me in his office. His hair was white; he was still bareheaded. Others in his class had
taken to wearing wigs, and soon he would as well. He would never do anything to make himself
conspicuous. He could walk down any street and no one would know who he was. Some old man, a
clerk perhaps. Never the most powerful man in the Five Countries. He wrote the game, and he played it
best.

I thought I might beat him at it, or I would have, once. I was arrogant as a child. “I’m quitting the game,
Loyd.”

Did he react? Did his eyes betray anything, one flutter, one damned twitch? I called him by name, without
any polite title. It didn’t matter—it wasn’t his name anyway. “Are you?” he replied, mildly.

“I was your best, Loyd.”

These words, simple, foolish-sounding, they were all moves in the game. Questions answered with
questions, remarks that did not follow, words that plumbed for information but gave away nothing. Loyd
turned them back on me with an easy smile. “You still are.”

I had tried quitting once before, last winter. He hadn’t listened to me then. But things were different now.
They had to be. “I can’t play anymore. You know I can’t.”

“My dear.” He sighed, measuring out his breath and his voice carefully. He sounded as I suppose a father
might. “Do you think you can quit?”

I said nothing. He wouldn’t yield to me, and I would say no words that admitted defeat.

He measured his silence as he had measured his words. Then he pulled a drawer in his desk and took an
envelope from it. “Clear your things from the dormitory,” he said, laying the package on the desk, not
near me. “You have two days to find accommodations.” He rose from his desk and left me in his office.

Could I have resisted? Could I have walked out as quickly as he had, with nothing in my hands? The
envelope contained some money, a little, not enough to live on for long. A letter as well, with the usual
details. I crumpled it without reading it and thrust it back into its wrapping. He knew I would take it.

1
Tod was going to be late. The woman’s message said that she would come to see the flat precisely at
noon. Keller didn’t have a clock in his shop, but Tod was sure it was getting close to noon, and he still
had to walk through Origh and two miles out of town to get to his cottage.