"Thieves World v2 7 - 1988 - Dagger - D Drake" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

if they did, he and Star were in trouble much deeper than the general miasma of
danger permeating this place.

There were people in Sanctuary who actively wished Samlor dead. That was
unusual; not because he'd lived a life free from deadly enemies, but because
fate or the Cirdonian caravan master himself had carried off most of those
direct threats already.

When he bedded his camels at night on the trail, Samlor walked the circuit of
the laager prodding crevices and holes with a cornel-wood staff flexible enough
to reach an arm's length down a circuitous burrow.

If there were a hiss or an angry jarring of fangs on the staff, he either
blocked the hole or, as the mood struck him, teased the snake into the open to
be finished with a whip-swift flick of the staff. That was the only way to
prevent beasts and men from being bitten when they rolled in their sleep onto
vipers sheltering against mammalian warmth.

The caravan routes were a hard school, but applying the lessons he learned to
human enemies had kept Samlor alive longer than would otherwise have been the
case.

Sanctuary, though, was a problem better avoided than solvedЧand insoluble
besides. Samlor had no intention of seeing and smelling the foulness of this
place ever again, until the messenger arrived with the letter from Samlane.

It could have been a forgery, though the Cirdonian script on the strip of
bark-pulp paper was illegible until it had been wound onto a message staff of
the precise length and diameter of the ones Samlor's family had adopted when
they were ennobled seventeen generations before. But the hand was right; the
message had the right aurai of terse presumption that Samlor would do his
sister's will in this matterЧ

And the paper was browned enough with age, despite having been locked in a
banker's strong room. The document might well have been written before Samlane

DAGGER 3

died with her brother's knife through her belly and through the thing she
carried in her womb.

Samlor couldn't imagine what inheritance could be worth the risk of bringing
Star back to Sanctuary, but his sister had been foolishly destructive only of
herself. If the legacy which would come to Star at age seven were that
important, then it was Samlor's duty as the child's uncle to see that she
received it.

It was his duty as the father as well, but that was something he thought about
only when he awakened in the bleak darkness.