"C. J. Cherryh - Fever SeasonUC - Compilation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cherryh C J)

God knew why. Boregy wanted it that way, that was all. Layers upon layers of duplicity: give out that he was a relative pretending not to be, but showing uptown, which let people think that he was in fact a Boregy with foreign connections. Boregy wanted folk, to perceive his coming and going by the servants* entry as elaborate subterfuge designed to fool the town authorities, and his coming and going in society and in Merovingen-below alike as the actions of a Boregy spy (possibly really a cousin) living frugally in mid-town because that was where the Boregys wanted him, but socializing uptown because he was Boregy and thought no one knew about his other life. All of which mess was his cover: he was a Kalugin spy, which had nothing at all to do with banking, and a great deal to do with Boregys, in a very non-commercial way. Which Boregys of course knew, the Sword presence in Merovingen knew, and he was sure Tatiana
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Kalugin knew, and probably losef the governor as well, which meant that anyone who had a motive to kill him knew.
The only ones in town who did not know what he was and who he worked for were the ordinary folk he met on the walkways, the merchants and tradesmen and canalfolk and craftsmen that were Merovingen. Which was the way it had to beЧbecause Merovingen would never tolerate the things its leaders and would-be leaders were up to. Merovingen was upset enough about the Nev Hettek trade mission. There was muttering in the bars and taverns waterside, that it would be no wonder if some foreigners turned up floating some morning.
There were the beginnings of whisperings about Tatiana Kalugin: he had seen to that. It was too good to let pass, the intimation that the governor's second heir had been sleeping with a Nev Hettek trade minister. Tell old Mintaka a romantic secret and it was end to end of Merovingen by nightfall for sure.
But people gave Tatiana benefit of the doubt: That Nev Hetteker better count his change, was one way they put it. Meaning Tatiana did nothing that did not involve profit to herself, and the very fact she had done something so blatant meant she was after something. It puzzled people. It puzzled them enough they had rather gossip about it for a while. Which was where things stood.
Till the news got down to the canals about the census that old losef had requestedЧstill a rumor, nothing had gotten to the lowest tiers yet. But there was assuredly a point-past-which-not with the rank and file in Merovingen . . . something the Kalugins instinctively knew; and which maybe the Sword, for all its fine calculations, did not entirely figure into its plans.
It was even possible that old losef had thrown out the census for a bait, to get the town stirred up. Which made it a more difficult atmosphere for the Sword, in some senses.
Far belter to be a Falkenaer in public eyes, than Nev Hetteker. Hanging Bridge had seen more than one lynching, so accounts ran.
Better, he thought, as he rounded the corner of Foundry
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onto Grand, and had one of the widest views in Merovingen, the whole Grand Canal spread out in front of him from Veniani to Ventura, all the skips, the barges, the busy main artery of MerovingenЧbetter if he could do what Jones wanted: throw over everything, take to the water, live his whole life on one of those skips. Free.
But that was not a choice he had.
It never would be.
He had no idea what Anastasi wanted of him. But he knew the way things were tending. He knew that there were too many sides to this, and too much danger, and too many enemies.
There were several enemies he would as soon eliminateЧ had offered to; but Anastasi said no. He thought about arranging an accident to Magruder and Chamoun on his own, something Anastasi could not readily trace. But that had hazards as grievous as letting these people go. And if he had a hope in the world it was that Anastasi would live to be governor, and find him for some reason . . . still useful, and not an embarrassment. God knew he had no hope with Tatiana and none at all with her new friends.
He had helped one man into a governorship: Karl Fon, up in Nev Hettek. He had been Karl Fon's close friend and comrade in armsЧuntil Karl Fon found it necessary to bury his affiliations with the Sword of God and become a staunch and conservative Adventist moderate. So Karl used him for a scapegoat; murdered his own father and Mondragon's whole family, and framed his boyhood friend for all of it.
Karl Fon was horrified to learn of his friend's true character. Of course.
Damn him to deepest hell.
Mondragon sneezed, suddenly and violently. Morning chill. He realized an ache in his bones, which he attributed to the cold and to, God help him, falling out of bed like a fool. Prison and old wounds made him hate the winters. He felt a violent chill when the same morning wind that began to blow the mist away got under his coat and up his sleeves. He had half decided to walk over to Boregy, but that turn of the
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corner on Foundry decided him: it would be a hell of a lot more comfortable to get out of the windy upper tiers, go down to canalside and hail a poieboat. No sense courting a cold.
Jones would not thank him for that. Damn, if he had felt his throat this prickly last night he would not have shared a bed with her.
He thought of Jones, barefoot in this weather, like every other skip-freighter down there, and shivered.
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Three months had passed since Mike Chamoun found the dead man, gutted like a fish, aboard his boat, and the worst hadn't happenedЧyet.
No one had come to Boregy House, where Chamoun was living with Cassie Boregy, his new bride, to accuse him of murdering Dimitri Romanov, who had been the. most feared and influential agent that Nev Hettek's Sword of God had in place here in the stronghold of its enemy, Merovingen. Second most feared and influential man in Merovingen, Chamoun amended on his way to the Revenantist College for his catechism lessons: Dimitri Romanov, the Sword's tactical agent in place, was a) dead and b) no match for Chance Magruder, or else Romanov wouldn't be dead.
It was probably MagruderЧHis Excellency, Nev Hettek's Ambassador and Minister of Trade and Tariffs in MerovingenЧ who'd arranged Romanov's death. Then arranged to keep Michael Chamoun's name out of it, the young man told himself for the hundredth time as he slipped unremarkably through the sparse traffic across the high water bridge that led, if you didn't mind cutting across the Signeury, straight from Boregy House to the College, where Chamoun's uncle-in-law, the cardinal, waited to make a good Revenantist out
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of a heretical Adventist from Nev Hettek who'd married his niece, Cassie, for mercantile reasons.
Married to Cassie Boregy, even on a five-year contract, Michael Chamoun had a certain degree of immunity from the laws all lesser folk of Merovingen-above and -below obeyed. The Boregys were inextricably linked to their patron, Anastasi Kalugin, son of losef who ruled Merovingen with a rusty iron hand. Aging, Poppa Kalugin was preparing for the future of his dynasty: watching and waiting while his three childrenЧ Mikhail the Craftsman, Anaslasi the Advocate Militiar, and Tatiana the Terrible and only daughterЧvied for position.
Soon the old man would die, and even if he designated a successor, the war for power here would break into the open. If the war between Nev Hettek and Merovingen didn't break out first, helped along by Nev Hettek's agents provocateur in Merovingen, a "terrorist" group called the Sword of God, of which Dimitri Romanov, dead on Chamoun's boat, had been a member.
Of which Chance Magruder was another. Of which Michael Chamoun was a third, brought in here at great expense and under painstaking cover for the express purpose of marrying into the Boregy family, as close to Anastasi Kalugin as the Sword could get.
Or as close as it had thought it could get, until Chance Magruder found a way into Tatiana Kalugin's bed. Certainly it was Chance who was protecting Chamoun from involvement in the investigation of Romanov's death. Probably it had been Magruder who'd ordered the hitЧa disagreement between rival Sword factions. Magruder wouldn't sayЧ wouldn't admit it to Chamoun.
And that worried Michael. It worried him every day. It worried him at night in bed with sweet Cassie Boregy, the girl he'd married for the Cause, who loved him with an innocent love he didn't deserve. It worried him especially when he was out of Boregy House, abroad in Merovingen as he was now, crossing the treacherous heights of the Signeury where the Kalugins had total and autocratic control. There
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were fates worse than pretending to convert to Revenantism to legitimize his marriage.
There were dungeons in the Justiciary; interrogation cells, it was whispered, in the Signeury itself. To land in one of them, you only needed to make a Kalugin nervous. And Mike Chamoun had already done that, in spades.
His booted feet slapped hollowly on the cold stone of the Signeury's outer walk. The Grand Canal was on his left, the rock of the Kalugin's administrative fortress on his right. He was taking the long way around because his skin crawled every time he crossed the private bridge to the Justiciary. He didn't want to end up there. He prayed he wouldn't.
So he went the long way, and he went his circuitous way among the Boregys who'd taken him as a son-in-law, and he went his own way less and less frequently these days.
It had been a good plan, the plan of Karl Fon, Nev Hettek's governor, and Chance Magruder and others of the veteran revolutionaries who'd come to power in Nev Hettek. It had been a plan to open diplomatic and trading relations with Merovingen, to infiltrate and conquer, to start a war on Nev Hettek's terms.
The plan might have worked, even with young Mike Chamoun as its fulcrumЧworked although so much depended on a poor boy from Nev Hettek. A boy who knew little of society matters and less of destabilization strategies mounted by governments but knew very clearly when he and his Nev Hettek family were caught in a trap lethal to ail if complete obedience was not given. ... It might have worked, bui for a traitor named Mondragon, an ex-Sword agent under the protection and in the employ of Anastasi Kalugin and Vega Boregy.
Vega Boregy, the father of the girl named Cassie whom Chamoun had married, had called Chamoun into his marble study, the very night of the 24th Eve BallЧmere hours after the wedding and the merger had been announced, and the Sword disrupted the proceedings. There, in that room, Mike Chamoun had met the fabled traitor, Mondragon, for the first time. And Mondragon had fingered Chamoun as Sword of
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HURTS AND MINDS