"Coldheart Canyon (preview edition)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive - Coldheart Canyon)

"Sin?"
"Lying is a sin, Mister Zeffer. Perhaps it's just a little one, but it's a
sin nevertheless."
Oh Lord, Zeffer thought; how far I've slipped from the simple proprieties!
Back in Los Angeles he sinned as a matter of course; every day, every hour. The life
he and Katya lived was built on a thousand stupid little lies.
But he wasn't in Hollywood now. So why lie? "You're right. I don't like this
country very much at all. I'm here because Katya wanted to come. Her mother and
fatherєI'm sorry, her stepfatherєlive in the village."
"Yes. This I know. The mother is not a good woman."
"You're her priest?"
"No. We brothers do not minister to the people. The Order of St. Teodor
exists only to keep its eyes on the Fortress." He pushed the door open. A dank smell
exuded from the darkness ahead of them.
"Excuse me for asking," Zeffer said. "But it was my understanding from
yesterday that apart from you and your brothers, there's nobody here."
"Yes, this is true. Nobody here, except the brothers."
"So what are you keeping your eyes on?"
Sandru smiled thinly. "I will show you," he said. "As much as you wish to
see."
He switched on a light, which illuminated ten yards of corridor. A large
tapestry hung along the wall, the image upon it so grey with age and dust as to be
virtually beyond interpretation.
The Father proceeded down the corridor, turning on another light as he did
so. "I was hoping I might be able to persuade you to make a purchase," he said.
"Of what?" Zeffer said.
Zeffer wasn't encouraged by what he'd seen so far. A few of the pieces of
furniture he'd spotted yesterday had a measure of rustic charm, but nothing he could
imagine buying.
"I didn't realize you were selling the contents of the Fortress." Sandru
made a little groan. ьAh...I'm afraid to say we must sell in order to eat. And that
being the case, I would prefer that the finer things went to someone who will take
care of them, such as yourself."
Sandru walked on ahead a little way, turning on a third light and then a
fourth. This level of the Fortress, Zeffer was beginning to think, was bigger than
the floor above. Corridors ran of in all directions.
"But before I begin to show you," Sandru said, "you must tell meєare you in
a buying mood?"
Zeffer smiled. "Father, I'm an American. I'm always in a buying mood."
Sandru had given Katya and Zeffer a history of the Fortress the previous
day; though as Zeffer remembered it there was much in the account that had sounded
bogus. The Order of St. Teodor, Zeffer had decided, had something to hide. Sandru
had talked about the Fortress as a place steeped in secrets; but nothing
particularly bloody. There had been no battles fought there, he claimed, nor had its
keep ever held prisoners, nor its courtyard witnessed atrocity or execution. Katya,
in her usual forthright manner, had said that she didn't believe this to be true.
"When I was a little girl there were all kinds of stories about this place,"
she said. "I heard horrible things were done here. That it was human blood in the
mortar between the stones. The blood of children."
"I'm sure you must have been mistaken," the Father had said.