"Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 4 - End of the Matter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

chance the firm kept decent records. I wasn't too concerned with your pedigree. Might be there's
some additional in- formation in their records that wasn't provided with the bill of sale. Not
likely, now. But all I was interested in was whether or not you were diseased. You looked it, but
you weren't." She sipped from a mug. "Sometimes those slavers don't give out all the information
they get. They've got their reasons."
"But how can I trace the firm that sold me?"
"City records," she snuffled, wiping liquid from her chin. "There would have been a tax on the
business, Try the King's tax records for the year I bought you. Waste of time, though."
"I've plenty of time now," he said cryptically. "I'll try it and gladly." He reached out across
the table and patted a cheek with the look and feel of tired suede. "But for the rest of the day,
let's be mother and son."
She slapped the caressing hand away and fussed at him... but softly.

Chapter Two

The following day dawned well. The morning ram was light, and the cloud cover actually snowed some
signs of clearing. Flinx was spared the shocking sight of sunlight in Drallar when the clouds
thickened after he started toward the vast, rambling expanse of official buildings. They clustered
like worker ants around the spines of their queen, whose body was the King's palace.
Damp, cool weather invigorated Flinx. Moist air felt familiar in his lungs; it was the air of the
only home he had ever known. Or could remember, he corrected himself.
He stopped to chat with two side-street vendors, people he had known since childhood. Yet at first
neither of them recognized him. Had he changed so much in one year? Was he so different at
seventeen from what he had been at sixteen? True, he had gone through a great deal in that year.
But when he looked in the mirror it was no stranger he saw. No fresh lines marred his smooth brown
skin, no great tragedy welled out of cocoa eyes. Yet to others he was somehow not the same.
Possibly the crashing kaleidoscope that was Drallar simply made people forget. Resolutely he shut
out the shouts and excitement of the city, strode past intriguing stalls and sights while ignoring
the implorings of hawkers and merchants. No more time to waste on such childish diversions, he
instructed himself. He had responsibilities now. As the leader of an entire race in the Great Game
he must put aside infantile interests.
Ah, but the child in him was still strong, and it was a hard thing to do, this growing up ...

Like a granite ocean the myriad walls of Old Drallar crashed in frozen waves against the sprawling
bastion of bureaucracy which was the administrative center of Drallar and of the entire planet
Moth. Modern structures piled haphazardly into medieval ones. Beyond lowered the King's palace)
spires and minarets and domes forming a complex resembling a gigantic diatom. Like much of the
city, the building looked as if it had been designed by a computer programmed with the Arabian
Nights instead of up-to-date technologies.
Flinx was crossing the outermost ring of stalls when two striking figures passed in front of him-a
man and woman, both slightly taller than Flinx but otherwise physically unimpressive. What was
striking about them was the reaction they provoked in others. People took pains to avoid the
couple, even to avoid looking in their direction. But they did so carefully, to be certain of not
giving offense.
The couple were Qwarm.
Barely tolerated by the Commonwealth government, the Qwarm were a widely dispersed clan of
professional enforcers, whose services ranged from collecting overdue debts to assassination.
Despite being shunned socially, the clan had prospered with the growth of the Commonwealth. Since
the beginning of time, there had always been a market for the services they chose to provide.
Flinx knew that the two walking past him were related in some fashion to every other Qwarm in the