"Cross CHILDREN Walk" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friesner Esther M)

"And how is the truth supposed to kill a dragon?" the mayor wanted to know.

"Yes, do tell," said the dragon. (Such patience and courtesyЧthat is, the beast's neglecting to devour anyone during the extended parleyЧwere downright odd. However, most of those present were too thoroughly distracted by other matters to remark on it.)

Zoli ignored both the mayor and the dragon. Without another word, she leaped lightly down from the pillar and sprinted the length of the bridge railing to the far bank, where the father-and-son wizards stood captive. Standing before them, she unstoppered the vial with her teeth and poured the contents over Master Thrumble's head before he could react in any way save incoherent spluttering.

"Phew! What's in that stuff?" his father asked.

"The doom of liars!" boomed a new voice. There was a second puff of purple smoke and Master Porfirio appeared upon the same pillar Zoli had just vacated. "A brew of my own devising, compounded of the dead dragon's liquefied vitals."

"But the dragon's not dead!" the dean and the mayor objected as one.

"I was," the beast in question said, "but I got better. It's a fascinating story, good Overforders, most of which has to do with what's been mucking up your river, but I'm not the one who can tell it. Am I, Mayor Eyebright?" it ended on a note of dreadful significance.

The onlookers began to mutter amongst themselves. The mayor, trapped in the midst of a disgruntled constituency, felt fear beyond any that the revenant water-dragon could evoke. Nervously he exclaimed, "Alarmist nonsense! Nothing's wrong with the river."

"No, dragons always come back from the dead," someone said snidely.

"We'll see," said Master Porfirio with unnerving calm. He waved his hands and materialized in quick succession a vial identical to Zoli's, a chicken carcass, and a length of thin rope. Anointing the dead bird with the gloop from the vial, he tied it by the feet, held it up before his face, and in a loud voice quizzed it thus: "Are you now or have you ever been a marmoset?"

"Here! How can a dead chicken lie?" the mayor demanded.

"Or tell the truth, for that matter?" someone else asked.

"What's a marmoset?" a third party wanted to know.

"Shush," the fat merchant directed them. "It is likely a wizardly matter. They're always communing with the strangest things. Don't let him hear you questioning his ways or the next dead chicken may be you."

Master Porfirio laid an ear to the fowl's side, then announced, "She says yes! And now . . ." He swung the body overhead at the rope's end and let it drop into the river. When he reeled it out again and the mob saw the horrific changes that had overtaken the small corpse many turned pale, some gasped, a few screamed, and one unsteady soul vomited over the railing.

"Behold the power of the elixir and the fate of liars!" Master Porfirio proclaimed, flourishing the blackened, boil-encrusted remains of the experimental poultry.

Zoli turned to Master Thrumble. "I'm only going to ask you one question before I shove you in the drink and we see what the elixir thinks of you: What have you been doing to this river and who's been making it easy for you to go on doing it?"

For only one question, it was a doozy, and young Thrumble's reply was worthy of it. By the time he finished rattling through his deposition, most of the Market Day crush had come up out of Overford Town just to listen. Apparently he had never quite mastered the art of summoning demons to transport his alchemical errors to the safety of the Netherworld, as was standard safety practice among wizards. The one time he tried, the fiend broke free of a defective pentagram and only his father's intervention saved him from annihilation. He never found the nerve to try again. Dumping his "leftovers" into the river seemed like the perfect solution: cheap, simple, and didn't everybody do it? There were some complaints from local anglers over the mounting number of fish kills, but a word with Mayor Eyebright and the complaints vanished. By a strange coincidence, so did the anglers. Master Thrumble admitted to feeling a smidgen of concern when the water-dragon was reported missing-presumed-dead, but soothed his conscience with the thought that it wasn't a bad thing if the stuff he'd dumped in the river had killed a monster.

"Didn't kill it any too permanent, though, ha?" someone on the bridge yelled.

"My son crossed that river twice a day!" someone on the townside bank added. "If he'd fallen in, your sludge might've killed him!"

"It did kill him!" someone else cried. "And permanent! Did that when it brought the water-dragon back to life and it et him!"

Other parents amid the press now added their voices to the rising clamor. The swordswomen instinctively moved into protective formation around their captives at the sound of a mob baying for revenge, its mildest demand being that Master Thrumble be tossed into the river without delay.

Master Porfirio gazed down upon the rabble and innocently asked, "Why would we want to do that?"

"Because of what you did with the chicken," someone hollered up at him. "To the chicken. Using the chicken."

"Yeah!" someone else added. "With the magic elixir-thingie."