"Brooks, Terry - Landover 04 - The Tangle Box" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brooks Terry)

Brooks, Terry - MKL#4 - The Tangle Box
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5kat M.andu
Horris Kew might have been a Disney artist's rendering of Ichabod
Crane. He was tall and gawky and had the look of a badly assembled
puppet. His head was too small, his arms and legs too long, and his
ears, nose, Adam's apple, and hair stuck out all over the place. He
looked harmless and silly, but he wasn't. He was one of those men
who possess a Hide bit of power and'handle it badly. He believed
himself clever and wise and was neither. He was the proverbial
snowball who always managed to turn himself into an avalanche. As a
result, he was a danger to everyone, himself included, and most of
the time he wasn't even aware of it.
This morning was no exception.
He came up the garden walk to the swinging gate without slowing,
closing the distance in huge, loping strides, slammed the gate back
as if annoyed that it had not opened of its own accord, and
continued on toward the manor house. He looked neither left nor
right at the profusion of summertime flowers that were blooming in
their meticu-
2 THE TANGLE BOX
lously raked beds, on the carefully pruned bushes, and along the
newly painted trellises. He did not bother to breathe in the
fragrant smells that filled the warm upstate New York morning air.
He failed to give a moment's notice to the pair of robins singing
on the low branches of the old shagbark hickory centered on the
sweeping lawn leading up to the manor house. Ignoring all, he
galloped along with the single-mindedness of a charging rhino.
From the Assembly Hall at the base of the slope below the manor
house came the sound of voices rising up like an angry swarm of
bees. Horris's thick eyebrows furrowed darkly over his narrow,
hooked nose, a pair of fuzzy caterpillars laboriously working their
way toward a meeting. Biggar was still trying to reason with the
faithful, he supposed. Trying to reason with the once-faithful, he
amended. It wouldn't work, of course. Nothing would now. That was
the trouble with confessions. Once given, you couldn't take them
back. Simple logic, the lesson a thousand charlatans had been
taught at the cost of their lives, and Biggar had somehow missed
it.
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Brooks, Terry - MKL#4 - The Tangle Box
Horris gritted his teeth. What had that idiot been thinking?
He closed on the manor house with furious determination, the shouts
from the Assembly Hall chasing after him, elevated suddenly to a
frightening new pitch. They would be coming soon. The whole bunch
of them, the faithful of so many months become a horde of
unreasoning ingrates who would rip him limb from limb if they got
their hands on him.
Horris stopped abruptly at the foot of the steps leading up to the
veranda that ran the entire length of the gleaming home and thought