"Greenwood, Ed - Elminster 05 - Elminster's Daughter_v1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenwood Ed)

into a silence that was suddenly very deep and yet as singingly tight as
a drawn bowstring.

Nael swallowed, lifted his chin, swallowed again, then said, "I've
brought neither gems nor my deed here with me, but --"

Without waiting for a signal, one of the crossbowmen fired, and Aldurl
Nael's left eye was suddenly a bloody profusion of sprouting wood and
flight-feathers. The brass-merchant reeled in his seat, head flopping
back and mouth gaping, and did not move again. Crimson rivulets of blood
spilled from his mouth, seeking the floor.

"-- but how unfortunate," Caethur said mildly, finishing Nael's sentence
for him. "For Nael, and for all of you. After all, we can't have any
witnesses to such wanton butchery, can we?"

The other guard calmly fired his crossbow, and Hammuras died.

As the three surviving merchants shouted and surged desperately to their
feet, both guards tossed their spent crossbows aside and plucked
cushions off a shelf affixed to the back of Caethur's chair. Four more
hand-crossbows gleamed in the lamplight, loaded and ready. Coolly the
guards snatched them up -- and used them.

Kamburan groaned for a surprising long time, but the rest of the room
was still in but a breath or two.

"The bolts my men use, by the way," the moneylender told the corpses
conversationally, "are tipped with brain-burn, to keep prying Watchful
Order mages from learning anything of our meeting -- and how you
happened to so carelessly end up wearing war-darts in your faces. After
all, we wouldn't want to start one more irresponsible city fashion,
would we?"

Caethur rose from his chair, nodded to his two guards, and waved a hand
at the gem-coffers on the table. "When you're done stripping the bodies
of all deeds and coins and suchlike, bring those."

As he strode to the door and slipped out, he took something from a belt-
pouch. It looked like a beast's claw: a grip-bar studded with a row of
little daggers. When Caethur closed his hand around the bar, the blades
protruded from between his fingers like a row of sheathed talons. With
his other hand, the moneylender drew a belt dagger and used it to
cautiously flick away the sheaths that covered every blade of the claw.
Something dark and wet glistened on each razor-sharp point.

Thrusting the dagger through a belt-loop and putting the ven-omed claw
behind his back, Caethur waited, humming a jaunty tune softly under his
breath.