"Asprin, Robert - Thieves' World 08 - Soul of the City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asprin Robert)

The Beysib

SHUPANSEA; SHU-SEA, Head of the Beysib exiles in Sanctuary; mortal avatar of the
Beysib mother goddess.



POWER PLAY

Janet Morris

Tempus, a mercenary general in the service of Ranke's new emperor, was knee-deep
in the bloody purges marking the first winter of Theron's accession to the
Rankan throne when the sky above the walled city began to weep black tears.

By the time dawn should have broken, ashen clouds massed to the very vault of
heaven so that not even the Sun God's sharpest rays could pierce the arrayed
armies of the night. The city of Ranke, once the brightest jewel of the Rankan
empire, shuddered in the dark, her ochre walls stained dusky from the storm's
black and ugly might.

Thunder growled; winds yowled. Black hail pelted Theron's palace, shattering
windows and pounding doors. On temple streets and cultured byways it bounced,
sharp as diamonds and large as heads, bringing impious priests to their knees
and cheap nobles to charity in slick streets covered with greasy slush freezing
to ice as black, some said, as their emperor Theron's heart.

For all knew that Theron had come to power in a coup instigated by the armies-he
was a creature of blood, a wild beast of the battlefield. And the proof of this
was in the allies who had brought him to the Imperial palace: Nisibisi witches,
demons of the black beyond, devils of horrid aspect, even the feared near
immortals of the blood cults-Askelon, the lord of dreams, and his brother-in-law
Tempus, demigod and favorite son of Vashanka, the Rankan wargod, to name but
two- had lent their strength to Theron's cause.

Did not Tempus still labor at his gory task of purging the disloyal-all who had
been influential in Abakithis's court? Did not women still wake to empty beds
and find pouches made of human skin and filled with thirty gold soldats (the
Rankan price for one human life) nailed to their boudoir doors?

Did not those few remaining adherents of Abakithis, former emperor of Ranke (now
deceased, unavenged, much cursed in his uneasy grave), still scuttle even
through the deadly, knife-sharp hail with bulging pockets to the mercenaries'
guildhall to leave their fortunes at the desk with scrawled notes saying, "For
Tempus, to distribute as he wills, from the admiring and loyal family of So-and
So," while servants spirited noble wives and children out back ways and slumyard
gates in beggars' guise?

Thus it was whispered, as the storm raged unabated into its second day, that