"David Drake - Birds Of Prey" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

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CHAPTER ONE

The leader of the mob carried the head of a lion with six-inch fangs. It was on a stake just long enough
for him to wave it as a standard while he bawled a slogan back to his followers.

Aulus Perennius, a block and a half down the street, could not make out the words. It was only reflex,
anyway, that made him want to jot down the slogan in his mind, to freeze the faces of the mob's first rank
for a later report. Beside Perennius, Gaius reached under his cloak. "Romeisn't our assignment,"
Perennius said to the younger man. "What we do now is get out of the way. It'd peeve Navigatus no end
if I got trampled to death a couple blocks from Headquarters after he went to all this effort to call me
back toRome."

Perennius had spoken lightly, but he was muttering a curse that was more general than the immediate
situation as he stepped into an alcove. A barred door there served one of the larger units of the
apartment block. The common stairways to the third through sixth floors were open, but they were
already disgorging a rabble which would join the mob for entertainment. Gaius, Perennius' protege from
his homevillageofDoklea, slid into the doorway beside him.

Aulus Perennius was five feet nine inches tall, a touch above the median. He was a blocky, powerful man
with hands hard enough to be a stone mason's and a face as weathered as a field slave's. His tunic and
dark blue cloak were both of better quality than a laborer could have afforded, however. It did not
require the angular shape of a short sword beneath his cloak to give him a military appearance. Perennius
looked to be a forty-year-old soldier of Illyrian descent. That was what he would in fact have been, had
he not become an agent of the Bureau of Imperial Affairs ten years before.

Gaius was half the agent's age; taller, slimmer - a cheerful-looking youth, and that not only by contrast to
his dour companion. He too wore a sword, a cavalry spatha long enough to project beneath the hem of
his cloak.

Perennius stared at the mob. He knew that it was not the cause of the collapse of everything he had
spent his life trying to preserve. It was no more than a symptom of that collapse. The agent's expression
was nonetheless that of a man who had lived so closely with anger and death that they might now be his
only friends.

The bow shock of the mob was clearing the street ahead of it. Rain earlier that afternoon had left a slick
shimmer of mud and filth on the paving stones, since the sewer beneath was blocked. A sedan chair
came to grief as it tried to turn around. One of the bearers lost his footing and the whole rig came down
on him with a crash and a scream. The woman inside tumbled through the curtains and fouled her silk
tunics in the muck. "Dressed like a whore!" Perennius whispered savagely, but she was too old to owe
her success to that. No doubt she was an official's wife, tarted up just as his mistresses were.

Gaius started to go to her aid. The agent's hand stopped him. The woman stood on her own hefty legs
and screamed at her chairmen. An onlooker scooped up a handful of mud from the gutter and flung it at
her with a taunt in Aramaic. The woman cursed back in the same language, but there were more hands
dipping toward the gutter and the mob itself was closing fast. The woman gathered her skirts and darted