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

That had been four years ago. He had no taste for gin now, almost. Only when he remembered the
dreams. He clamped his eyes shut, hard, as if the face of his nightmare were in the street in front of him,
and stumbled, his hand flung out for balance. Someone met his hand, grasped it, and steadied him. Then
something was pressed into his hand, buried deep in his palm. That someone was gone before Tod
opened his eyes.

Behind him shouts were cut short, dull cracks sounding on bone or flesh. In front of him those people
who had gotten away were hurrying toward the edges of town. For a moment he stopped to look at the
wad of paper in his hand. It was a note, scribbled hastily.

Follow Nanian, not the law.

Tod dropped the paper like it was a hot coal. Being found with it in his hands would be enough of a
crime. Those were the rioters, then. Mystics, Nanianists. Tod had never heard of people like that outside
of Cassile. Dabion wasn’t a country for religion. He kicked the note into the gutter—a strangely dirty
gutter—and started running.

Somehow he got out of Origh, onto the road home. When he was some distance away he finally felt it
was safe to turn and look behind him. No gray uniforms had followed him out of town. He sighed with
relief. Then he started thinking, confused, and looked behind him again. No one else was on the road,
either. Where was his visitor? She must have been coming out of town, too. He started running again,
hoping she hadn’t beaten him home.

The little mechanical clock on the mantel read just a minute before noon when Tod rushed through his
door. With a faint smile he dropped his package on his table, took a breath, and lowered himself into a
chair. He would have time to rest, he thought as the clock’s tinny bell began to ring. Then there was a rap
at the door. Tod jumped wearily to his feet. She must have a watch, he thought. That was foolish, though.
Only clerks had those things, officers in the Halls of Justice. His feet hurt from his long run and this
irritated him so much that he forgot about wondering where his visitor had come from.

Tod opened the door. Elzith Kar stood outside. He regarded her for several moments, thinking she did
not see him. She was looking away, her head dropped casually to the side as if surveying the herbs in his
neighbor’s box, and she said absolutely nothing to him. Any greeting Tod might have given seemed more
and more ridiculous as time went by, and so he only looked at her in the silence. Clothed in the manner of
Dabion’s working class, she wore a loose blouse of a mute gray color, with a bodice laced over it to fit a
slight figure. Wealthier women now wore their bodices inside their dresses—so Tod had heard—and had
servants stitch the gown to the undergarment each morning. Elzith Kar was a washerwoman, perhaps,
but she seemed too thin to haul loads of washing. Was she a lady’s maid, forever stitching her mistress
into her clothing? Then Tod continued his inventory and halted. The woman before him wore breeches.
Stranger still, the breeches ended not at white stockings like his (though his were rather yellow) but at
boots, blackened leather pulled up to her knees. Boots like those worn in Mandera, the seaside country
to the south, or by the guards of the Public Force—

“Your neighbor’s a thief,” Elzith said suddenly.

Tod opened his mouth but not even a ridiculous greeting could come out this time.

The woman was regarding him now. “Has he ever stolen from you?” Her voice was even and clear, her
words sharp at the edges. She spoke in a command, though quietly enough that no one beyond his
doorway would hear her. It was like the voice of a Justice, but no women worked in the Great Halls.