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

She was watching him still. Tod felt himself flush; he had not yet answered. “No,” he gasped. Elzith’s
eyes were green, steady, leveled on him in examination. Then, suddenly, she nodded. “Good,” she said,
only half to him, a motion of dismissal, and then, “Shall I see the flat now?”

The flat was the lower floor of Tod’s cottage, half- buried in a hill. Here outside the city the land was
filled with smooth rolling hills and valleys, blanketed with rich velvety grass. It was beautiful land,
peaceful, and almost empty. The cities of Dabion were scattered, built around the branches of the Great
Halls of Justice that were posted throughout the country: Insigh, Tanasigh, Kerr, Origh two miles away,
and others. Almost all the remaining population had been ousted from the country generations before,
leaving the hills and valleys nearly barren. The few commoners who remained lived in cottages half-buried
in the slopes like the burrows of moles.

Tod stumbled a little as he started down the steps that edged the slope of the hill, rough-hewn shards of
flagstone placed irregularly in the earth. Tod’s cottage was one of a row of three burrowed into this hill.
All three had lower floors with doors that let out at the bottom of the slope. The inner stairwell that
accessed the lower floor in Tod’s cottage had been blocked to form a separate flat. The neighbors did
not use the outside steps; Widow Carther’s lower door, at the far end of the row, was even boarded
over.

“These steps need fixing,” Tod said, his voice tripping, still a little breathless from his frantic rush out of
town. “I’m afraid they were let go for a long time—I just started trying to fix them up a few years ago. I
try to keep them clean, but the rain, you know, and mud, and then in the winter they get icy, then snow
covers them up, and once it melts in the spring…” Tod cut himself short. The riot, the note, they had
made him lose his wits, and he was babbling like a fool. He usually only spoke much in the company of
someone quieter than himself, and his great-aunt had been the last person to fit that description.

No taste for gin except when he remembered the dreams, his great-aunt’s ghost face in them. He almost
lost his footing completely. It was too much to remember in one day. He swallowed hard and looked
around, searching for something else to see. Behind him Elzith was navigating the steps, not stumbling at
all.

“I need to replace the stones, at any rate,” Tod said thickly. “It’s so hard to contact the landlord, though.
He’s a Lesser Justice, of course.”

Tod did not expect his companion to finish his thought. “Of course,” said Elzith dryly, surprising him.
“And what do they care for us?”

Tod’s hand shook and rattled the keys in the lock. Speaking ill of the Justices was enough of a crime. He
had a mad, sick sensation that the woman’s voice was carrying over the fields, where the guards massed
in the streets of Origh would hear it and come for her. For a second he was also sure that she knew
exactly what had happened in the middle of town. He fumbled the door open and rushed Elzith inside.

The basement flat was tiny, cold, low-ceilinged. Morrn, Tod’s former renter of six years, hadn’t cared.

Morrn had been perfectly happy with the flat, until he’d been carried off to the Great Hall for keeping a
distillery there. Three years later, the smell of gin was almost out of the floorboards and plastered walls.
The renter Tod had had during those three years since Morrn left hadn’t seemed to mind, either, but that
man had been a Healer. Healers were a race so strange, so mysterious, that Tod could say little about his
previous flatmate at all.