"David Drake - Belisarius 3 - Destiny's Shield" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

Part of their careful progress, however, was due to the obstacles in their
way. The room was littered with the squalid debris of a poor family's cramped
apartment.
As they came forward, they maneuvered around the bodies of the family who had
once lived there. A man, his wife, her mother, and their four children. After
killing the family, the assassins had piled the corpses in a corner. But the
room was so small that the seven bodies still took up a full quarter of the
floor space. Most of the floor was covered with blood, dried now, but still
sticky. A swarm of flies covered the corpses and the bloodstains.
One of the assassins wrinkled his nose.
"They're already starting to stink," he muttered. "Damn southwest India and
its fucking tropical climate -- and we're in the hot season. We should have
kept them alive until -- "
"Shut up," hissed the leader. "What were we going to do? Guard them for almost
a full day? The baby would have begun squawling, anyway."
His subordinate lapsed into sullen silence. A few seconds later, he and his
companion levered the bombard onto the hastily-improvised firing platform
which the assassination squad had erected that morning. It was a rickety
contraption -- simply a mounded up pile of the pallets and two wicker chairs
which had been the murdered family's only furniture. But it would suffice. The
bombard was not a full-size cannon. It would fire only one round, a sack full
of drop shot. The recoil would send the bombard hurtling into the far wall,
out of action.
That would be good enough. When she passed through the street below the window
of the apartment, the Empress-in-exile of Andhra would be not more than twenty
yards distant. There was nowhere for her to escape, either, even if the alarm
was given at the last moment. The narrow street was hemmed in, on both sides,
by mud-brick tenement buildings identical to the one in which the assassins
lay waiting. At that point blank range, the cannister would sweep a large
swath of the street clean of life.
"Here she comes," whispered the lookout. He was peering through a second
window, now. Like his leader, he had drawn the curtain aside no more than an
inch or two.
"Are you certain it is she?" demanded the leader. The lookout had been
assigned to the squad because he was one of the few Malwa assassins who had
personally seen the rebel Empress after her capture at the siege of Amaravati.
The girl had aged, of course, since then. But not so much that the lookout
wouldn't recognize her.
"It must be Shakuntala," he replied. "I can't see her face, because she's
wearing a veil. But she's small -- dark-skinned -- wearing imperial regalia.
Who else would it be?"
The leader scowled. He would have preferred a more positive identification,
but --
He hissed an unspoken command to the other two assassins in the room. The
command was unnecessary. They were already loading the gunpowder and the
cannister round into the bombard. The leader scampered back and sighted along
its length. He could only estimate the angle, since the curtain hanging in the
window obscured his view of the street below. But the estimate would be good
enough. It was not a weapon of finesse and pinpoint accuracy.
The leader made a last inspection of the cannon. He could not restrain a