"Raymond E. Feist - Riftwar Legends - Murder In LaMut" - читать интересную книгу автора (Feist Raymond E)

It was a dark and stormy night, but that was, thankfully, outside.

Here, inside, it was warm and smoky beneath the overhead lanterns, so that
it was both too hot and too cold at the same time.

A mercenary soldier's life, Kethol often thought, was always either too
lively or too dull. Either he was bored out of his skin, trying to stay awake
while waiting on watch for something to happen, or he was wading through
rivers of Tsurani troops, hoping that he was cutting down the bastards quickly
enough that none of them would get past him to Pirojil or Durine. Either he
was parched with thirst, or he was drowning in a driving rain. He was either
crowded too close to other unbathed men, smelling their stink, or he was all
by himself, holding down some watch-post in the middle of the night, hoping
that the quiet rustle he heard out in the forest was just another deer, and
not some Tsurani sneaking up on him, and wishing for a dozen friendly swords
clustered around him.

Even here, in the relative comfort of the Broken Tooth Tavern, it was all or
nothing.

In any tavern, on any cold night, there was no such thing as just right - he
was always either too close to the main fireplace, or too far away. Given the
choice, Kethol preferred too close, his back to the hearth, for it was hard to
think of himself as being too warm in winter, even though he would regret it
later, when he went out into the cold night to make his way back to the
barracks at the south end of the city, with the wind cutting through his
sweat-dampened clothes like a knife. And there were better ways to work up a
sweat.

Some of the other mercenaries were doing that at the moment - spending their
hard-earned blood money in the sleeping rooms above, and the incessant
creaking of the floorboards gave witness as to how they were spending their
hard-earned money, but while Kethol didn't mind dropping the odd copper or two
on a quick roll with one of the local whores, the cold shrivelled his passions
as much as it did the relevant portions of his anatomy, and he couldn't see
the point of spending good money on a soft itchy bed when there was an
equally-itchy rope bedframe waiting at the barracks, for free.

Kethol watched closely as the placards fell. This game of pa-kir, or
whatever they called it, wasn't something that he was familiar with, but a
game was a game, and gambling was gambling, and all it would take would be
enough familiarity with it to avoid the traps that drunken men would fall
into, and then he could play.

Men took up the sword for any number of stupid reasons. Honour, family,
country, hearth and home. Kethol did it for the money, but he didn't insist on
earning all of his money with the edge of his sword, or even the point.

In the meantime, a few coppers spent on the particularly thin, sour beer of
LaMut were coppers well spent. With an abundant supply of good dwarven ale