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

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eyes follow him past the ranks of clerks.

The first office was double the width of the others in the row. As Perennius stepped past, he caught a
glimpse through the doorway of a plump, balding man reclining on a brocaded couch. Seated upright
between the couch and the door was a younger man with hard eyes and a face as ruthless in repose as
Perennius' own. Perfect, the agent thought. He had no immediate need for the department head and his
aide, however. Not until he had prepared things in the second office over.

Perennius slipped in the door and closed it before the cubicle's inhabitant could more than glance up
from the scroll in his hand. "Zopyrion?" the agent asked in a husky whisper.

"Herakles! Who are you?" the other demanded. Zopyrion was a short man with the cylindrical softness
that marked him as a eunuch more clearly than his smooth chin. Like his department head, Zopyrion had
a couch and window; but only one window and a couch with a frame of turned wood instead of the
filigree of his superior's.

The section head spoke Latin with a pronounced Carian accent. Perennius answered in that dialect,
though he was not fully fluent in it. The partitions separating the offices were thin, and the agent wanted
only Zopyrion to understand him at the moment. "I've got a letter from Simonides," the agent said,
preferring the sealed tablet in his hand. "He said for me to take back an answer."

There was a one-legged tablet near the head of the couch. It held writing instruments. "Simonides?" the
bureaucrat repeated as he took the document. He picked up a stylus with which to break the thread
which held the tablet closed. Concern had replaced the initial anger in his voice.

"Simonides of Antioch, the banker," Perennius said as he stepped closer. "You know, the one you used
to wash the - "

"Silence, by Herakles!" Zopyrion gasped. He too had slipped into his native Carian. That was a result of
confusion rather than a conscious desire for secrecy, however. He looked down at the document in his
hand.

It was a tablet of three waxed wooden leaves, hollowed to keep the writing from being flattened to
illegibility when they were closed. Zopyrion began to read the first page in a low sing-song, holding the
page by habit at a flat angle to the light so that shadows brought the wax impressions into relief. "
'Simonides, son of Eustachios, greets Sextus Claudius Zopyrion. I return herewith the draft by which you
ordered me to transfer two hundred gold solidi from Imperial accounts to your brother-in-law, Nelius
Juturnus. .. .' " The clerk looked up again in utter, abject terror at Perennius, who now stood beside him.
The agent's left hand rested on the table, covering the alabaster ink pot there. "Why in the name of
Fortune did he write this?" Zopyrion demanded.

The agent laughed. "Oh," he said, "maybe it was when I asked him which orifice he wanted to swallow
my sword through, hey? But take a look at the draft - " he tapped with his right forefinger the pair of
pages which were still closed. "You know, it seems to me your department head's seal is a bit fuzzy, like
somebody used a plaster copy instead of the original."