"Greg Keyes - The Python King's Treasure" - читать интересную книгу автора (Keyes J Gregory)

J Gregory Keyes - The Python King's Treasure

Fool Wolf only had a few days left to live when he saw the most beautiful
woman he had ever laid eyes upon.
Her hair was spun black glass, spilling down the sides of a face incised
from amber, flowing over shoulders and down breasts of the same red-gold hue.
He was too far away to see what color her eyes were, but he could feel her
gaze on him. She stood on the edge of a cliff, half a bow-shot above him,
looking down at the jade sea and the cinnamon sun it was swallowing in the
west.
And at him, on the desolate strand, fifteen days along the way to
starvation.
He stood rooted, stunned, watching her naked lithe half-shadow in the
melting sunlight.
<> the goddess imprisoned in him sighed, wistfully. <looks good enough to eat.>>
Fool Wolf's stomach growled in agreement.

A month earlier, in the Land of Nine Princes, in the many-tiered city of
Fanva, Fool Wolf had been considerably better fed. He had arrived in Fanva
with a single carnelian and two copper coins, fleeing from the blood-guttered
city of Rumq Qaj. In the incense-choked gambling temples of Fanva, he had
increased that jewel and those two coins into what was for him a small
fortune. He took a room in a good inn, draped himself in silk, and feasted on
roast pork, pheasant, peacock, and eel. He ate sweet fruits from the

islands-Lorn, whitemelon, fernpears, bananas. He drank wines he could not name
but which pleased him a great deal, and he bedded a series of women of the
same sort.
His fortunes changed, of course. He was caught cheating by one of the
gambling-house priests. As gambling was a religious matter in Fanva, and
cheating sacrilege, he was sentenced to death.
While bets were being placed on which form of death would be chosen and how
long he would survive, Fool Wolf escaped his would-be-executioners and fled
into the Gibbering Quarter, where foreign diplomats and madmen lived. He
eluded his pursuit through the open window of a third-story apartment, waiting
breathlessly for distance to hush their cries and footsteps, alert for any
movement by the occupants of his refuge.
None came, and after five hundred heartbeats, he began to explore. It was a
large place, well furnished with exotic rugs, censers of gold and
cream-colored ivory, screens of lacquered wood and stippled velum. It smelled
strange, like burnt sugar candy and wet dog.
And books, everywhere. Crammed into shelves, littered on the rugs and
polished wooden floors, piled on low sitting-desks.
Behind one of those desks sat a dead man. He hadn't been dead long-drool was
still leaking from his mouth. His flesh was still warm.
Fool Wolf could see no obvious reason why the man died, unless it was the
small, empty cordial glass on the table before him. Suicide by poison, or just
a last drink before dying from some natural cause? Probably the first-aside
from being dead, the corpse did not look unhealthy. In fact, he looked
something like an older Fool Wolf-tall and lean, narrow of face with sharp,

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