"Clayton Emery - Lost Empires 03 - Star of Cursrah" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emery Clayton)

crunched on something soft. Star felt the garrote loosen, and she yanked it free of her throat. Hard
hands clutched her against a man's sweaty, bloody chest. She smelled wine and onions and knew
Rosey had rescued herтАФa good thing, for her legs went weak as jelly, her feet too numb to stand.
Five stumbling steps brought light piercing the gloom. More hands caught and lifted her from the
smoke that coiled like death's touch. Star's legs gave out, and her knees banged stone as she collapsed
in the street, rubbing her throat and retching. Rosey hadn't followed, and Star wondered why.
Shadows flickered as someone hurtled over her head. Like sheep over a fald, five more bodies
vaulted down the stairs. Star's spinning vision couldn't identify them.
Noise exploded from below: shouts, screams, a rampaging trumpet like an elephant's call. Forcing
her eyes open, Star saw a woman in a blue tunic and kilt smash a spear haft against someone's head.
On her breast was painted an eight-pointed starтАФAmenstar's own emblem. Her royal bodyguard had
arrived.
The trumpet blared again, and Star cried for joy. As the smoke dimmed, she beheld a ten-foot
monster looming over cowering humans.
The creature's upper half was a black woman with a fist-sized bump on her broad nose and breasts
like watermelons encased in a harness of blue leather. From the waist down, extending more than
twelve feet, was the street-filling bulk of a rhinoceros draped with a star-painted mantle like a tent.
M'saba, formerly of the bakkal's heavy cavalry, was the biggest of Amenstar's thirty bodyguards.
Seeing the rhinaur's savage fury directed at the assassins gave the samira a twinge of shame. She
shouldn't have ditched her faithful guards just to lark with her common friends.
 The smoke was exhausted. Amenstar's bodyguards searched the thieves' den while M'saba blocked
the street in one direction and more guards blocked the other end. Captain Anhur, chief of Star's
bodyguards, snarled, "Everyone lie down immediately or I'll personally ram a spear through your
guts!"
Citizens and soldiers dropped flat. Some people were already down, streaked with blood, dead or
dying or wounded. Some thieves looked like bundles of rags soaked in blood, so viciously had they
been pounded and stabbed.
Yuzas Anhur crouched beside her mistress and gently offered a calloused hand. Still weak, Star
rose meekly to distinguish friend from foe. Friends were hustled at spear point past the huge rhinaur to
where the local populace goggled. Gheqet and Tafir went quietly. One by one Star tolled off the
soldiers from the tavern, and they were also released. She felt a pang when her guards exited the
thieves' den dragging two of the bakkal's soldiers by the heels. One was Rosey, slashed across the
throat by a long curved knife, his blood redder than his birthmark. The man had given his life for hers.
Star's eyes stung, and fat tears washed runnels through the dust and smoke that darkened her cheeks.
Star pointed out the assassins who'd initiated the attack, and Captain Anhur had them bound hand
and foot and gagged. The captain said, "The bakkal's chancellor will wish to know your motives, and
our dark vizars will be glad to torture out your truths."
The captain summoned neighbors to identify the other suspects and so dismissed a few terrified
civilians caught in the sweep. Left cowering on their knees were four men and a mere girl in dark rags
who couldn't account for themselves. Three were tattooed with the crocodile teeth bracelets of hatori.
"Condemned, all," the captain pronounced. "Roll up that wine barrel. Ges, Rhu, bring up a prisoner.
M'saba, do the honors."
Pinned by the arms, the first hatori was draped across a wine barrel. M'saba's four feet, each as big
as the barrel, drummed forward. The rhinaur hefted a halberd long as a flagpole with a steel axe head
big as a tabletop, raised it toward the sky, and swept it earthward.
The massive axe lopped off the thief's head like a chicken's, shattered the oak barrel into splinters,
and buried itself in the street three feet deep. M'saba loved her mistress Amenstar and hated her
attackers. Her frustration showed.
Captain Anhur snickered. "Roll out another barrel. Not so hard this time, 'Saba."
In a trice, the thieves' bloody carcasses were stacked in the street with the heads plunked atop as a