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

Zopyrion's eyes followed the tapping finger. As his head bent slightly, Perennius hit him behind the ear
with the base of the ink pot. It was an awkward, left-handed blow, but there was enough muscle behind
it to spill the clerk flaccidly onto the floor. The table went over on top of him with a crash.

Perennius set the stone pot down on its side carefully, so that there would be no additional noise. There
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was a neat circle of ink on the palm of his left hand. He did not wipe it off, because the smear might be
harder to hide than the ink where it now was. Working fast, the agent unhooked a skin of powerful wine
from the inner hem of his cloak where it had been hidden. He tilted up Zopyrion's face and squirted a jet
of wine into the corner of the unconscious man's mouth. The liquid drooled back down his chin. The air
of the office filled with the wine's thick, sweet odor. Perennius laid the skin, still uncorked, beside the
eunuch's outflung hand. Its contents leaked and pooled across the terrazzo, drawing whorls of ink into
them.

The agent straightened. In a voice that even he could barely hear, he said to the fallen man, "Next time
you leave somebody hanging in hostile territory, make damn sure that he doesn't make it back."

He threw open the office door. "Sir! Sir!" he cried as he ran toward the double office at the head of the
row. "Sir, you've got to come here!"

Calgurrio's sharp-eyed aide was on his feet before Perennius completed the two strides to his door. The
department head himself was far slower to react, though he did swing his heavy thighs over the edge of
his couch. Startled clerks leaped from stools in the aisle to crowd around the door of Zopyrion's office.
"Get back!" snapped the aide. The group dissolved in a flurry fearfully righting the stools they had
knocked over in their haste.

Speaking rapidly, Perennius followed the aide back to the unconscious eunuch. "A banker in Antioch
wouldn't fund my mission like he was supposed to," the agent said, "but he gave me a letter for this
Claudius Zopyrion when I got to Rome. The guy was drinking when I got here - "

The aide knelt down by Zopyrion, keeping the hem of his tunic clear of the pooled ink and wine. He
picked up the open tablet and skimmed it, keeping the wax side turned away from Perennius at his
elbow, "Ah, I looked at it after he fainted," the agent said softly. "I was horrified. What sort of
punishment could be sufficient for an embezzler like that?"

"What happened, Anguilus?" demanded Calgurrio as he waddled into the room. The department head
stared at Zopyrion in amazement. The eunuch was beginning to moan. "Isis and the Child, what is this?"

Anguilus swung the door closed and handed the tablet to his superior. "I think we have a problem with
Zopyrion, sir," the aide said. Calgurrio began to read the document to himself with increasing
astonishment. To Perennius, Anguilus whispered, "And just who are you, good sir?" The words were
polite, but there was no deference in the aide's tone. His face was as blank as a sheet of marble and as
hard.

The agent handed over the diploma with his orders. The clerks had returned to noisy confusion as soon