"Lynn Flewelling - Raven's Cut" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flewelling Lynn)

of killing anyone until one foggy spring night when a drunken noble dragged me into an alley for a quick
bit of in and out. I struggled and he started slapping me around, hard enough to make my ears ring. If the
bugger had punched me properly, I might have answered in kind, but something about being slapped as if
I was some cheap whore to have against the nearest wallтАФI don't know. Something in me just let go. I
got my belt knife free and did a little in and out of my own on him with it. Afterward I jumped off a wharf
to wash off the blood, but I felt all clean and free before I ever hit the water.
Two nights later an older boy tried to bully me out of a fat purse I'd cut, and without even thinking about
it, I drew steel again. He was too quick and smart to get killed, but I opened his arm up in good shape
before he got free of me. I laughed like a loon when it was all over. It wasn't much of a victory, but it
made me feel strong.
That same night a stranger with gentleman's clothes and a hangman's smile invited me to "join the choir,"
as he put it. I accepted on the spot.
The assassins of Rhiminee have a fine house hidden away in a poor section of the city. From the outside
you'd take it for a tenement, ripe for burning, but inside there are clean little rooms for everyone to kennel
in, and bigger ones with proper furniture and wax candles.
It was all run by a blond rail of a man we called Master, and he ran it well. He kept the guild small, no
more than fifteen people or so, and made sure we all knew our businessтАФwork quiet, no fuss, never be
seen. We were the best, and in great demand. Our members got called out for jobs in all the great cities
of
Skala and Mycena, Plenimar even, when there wasn't a war on. There was plenty of work that way, and
it kept folks on the move, not too visible around town.
Those first couple of years I was with them were the best of my life. For the first time I had enough to eat
every day, a safe billet every night, and companions who kept their hands to themselves. Even small jobs
paid in gold, and most of what they used me for didn't even call for any killing. I got to be a lookout, a
pickpocket, a jilt. Tym's lessons served me well.
I was the youngest in the house, and they made a pet of me, especially Master. He took me along to
plays and gambling houses with my pockets well-filled, all dressed up like a gentleman's son.
Mijar paused, looking around at his audience through the wavering blue cloud of kif smoke. "If I ever
loved any soul in this life, it was Master. He taught me my lessons himself: how to kill quick and quiet
with knife or neck wire, poisons, hand fightingтАФ just like a real father would. Bilairy's balls, I'd have
walked over fire for him if he'd asked me to! But he never would, not him. I never once saw him angry,
even.
"Things went on like that for better than a year. It wasn't like it is here, with all your chieftains and
courtesans and sneaky lordlings having each other killed just for fun and spite. No, Skala's a civilized
land, and Rhiminee the most civilized city I've seen. That meant less work, of course, but when we killed
someone, it meant something! It made you proud, even if it wasn't you done the job."
We lost people from time to time, as you'd expect in our line of work. One night in early summer Master
told us to be on the lookout for new recruits. I made up my mind to find him the best new man who could
be had. Sort of my way of thanking him for all his good treatment.
It was a hot summer that year, deadly hot. Tempers run high in that sort of weather, and there were more
killings than usual. It wasn't too difficult to observe a few, if you knew where to look as we did.
Right off, I ruled out brawlers and jilted lovers. Anyone can kill if you get him mad enough. No, I wanted
someone with a cool head and a taste for killing. Maybe because I was paying such close attention, I
soon picked up a rumor of just such a killer. No one had seen this fellow, but it was said that he left his
victims with a special mark of some sort, one after the other. In fact, there seemed to be a new one every
couple of days, regular as the butcher's cart.
So I took my search to the dead houses and sure enough, I soon learned that the Scavenger Guild had
been finding bodies of men with their chests slit a certain way, just below the breastbone, though they'd
been killed by strangling. Not robbed, by all accounts, just killed, cut, and left. These particular corpses
turned up in the worst neighborhoods down by the harbor, so maybe they had nothing worth the .taking