"Fancher, Jane - Rings 1 - Ring Of Lightning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fancher Jane S)

even breaths, and his legs were as sound as they'd been
that morning.
"I'm not impressed, you know."
The large head raised to rest its chin heavily . . . pitifully
. . . on his shoulder.
Laughter escaped despite tight-clamped lips, and Ringer,
with a smug toss of his head, shoved Deymorin's chest with
his nose, demanding his reward, which Deymorin willingly
provided.
Handing the intrepid gelding over at last to the team of
chuckling grooms, he freed his silver-handled cane and pis-
tol from the saddle and headed through the stable toward
the market and the inner wall, pausing only to check the
pistol at the armory.
A man never forgot that twice. If he somehow got past
the guard with it, chances were it would shoot off some-
thing important, without warning and before nightfall.
Ley and gunpowder, like ley and lightning, did not mix.
The Oreno market closed around him, banners and
booths combining to obscure the stable. Once one of sev-
eral private facilities situated well outside the city wall
among productive farmlands, where there had been space
in plenty for paddocks and arenas, the Rhomandi stable
was the final vestige of that original agrarian use of this
land.
Nearly ten years ago, his own dear aunt Anheliaa had
realized her greatest ambition and capped Khoratum
Node, making her the first Rhomatumin ringmaster ever to
have the full power of the Rhomatum Web available to
her. The most immediate and inescapable effect of control-
ling that last of Rhomatum's satellite nodes was the exten-
sion of the Rhomatum City power umbrellaby as much
as five miles in some directions.
The City had immediately constructed a new perimeter
wall, a physical demarcation of that new municipal bound-
ary, and the property valuesthanks to overzealous specu-
latorsbetween the old wall and the new had flared out of
control, taking property taxes with them. Ten years after
the fact, prices had settled, the taxes had, but much of the
land between the old wall and the new still lay fallow, no
longer fit to grow anything but roses, the previous owners,
mostly farmers and horse breeders, driven out, those over-
zealous speculators considering themselves fortunate when
they managed to break even.
Deymorm himself had eventually given in to Mikhyel's
pressure and sold his own training facilities (twenty pad-
docks, two outdoor arenas, and one mirrored, indoor arena,
as well as two of his three barns) to some faceless Oreno
Syndic, whose favor Mikhyel had been courting for some
internode economic alliance. His only consolation when he