"Fritz Leiber - FGM 6 - Swords and Ice Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

little on the king. For some time in one of the deepest and darkest corners of
his mind he had been fashioning the doom of the current overlord of Lankhmar,
chiefest city and land in the World of Nehwon. This overlord was a gentle and
tenderhearted scholar, who truly loved only his seventeen cats, yet wished no
other being in Nehwon ill, and who was forever making things difficult for
Death by pardoning felons, reconciling battling brothers and feuding families,
hurrying barges or wains of grain to regions of starvation, rescuing
distressed small animals, feeding pigeons, fostering the study of medicine and
kindred arts, and most simply of all by always having about him, like finest
fountain spray on hottest day, an atmosphere of sweet and wise calm which kept
swords in scabbards, brows unknotted, and teeth unclenched. But now, at this
very instant, by Death's crooked, dark-alleyed plotting hidden almost but not
quite from himself, the thin wrists of the benign monarch of Lankhmar were
being pricked in innocent play by his favoritest cat's needle-sharp claws,
which had by a jealous, thin-nosed nephew of the royal ailurophile been late
last night envenomed with the wind-swift poison of the rare emperor snake of
tropical Klesh.

Yet on the remaining four and especially the two heroes -- Death
assured himself a shade guiltily -- he would work solely by improvisation. In
no time at all he had a vision of Lithquil, the Mad Duke of Ool Hrusp,
watching from high balcony by torchlight three northern berserks wielding saw-
edged scimitars joined in mortal combat with four transparent-fleshed, pink-
skeletoned ghouls armed with poniards and battle-axes. It was the sort of
heavy experiment Lithquil never tired of setting up and witnessing to the
slaughterhouse end, and incidentally it was getting rid of the majority of the
ten warriors Death had ticketed for destruction.

Death felt a less than momentary qualm recalling how well Lithquil had
served him for many years. Even the best of servants must some day be
pensioned off and put to grass, and in none of the worlds Death had heard of,
certainly not Nehwon, was there a dearth of willing executioners, including
passionately devoted, incredibly untiring, and exquisitely fantastic-minded
ones. So even as the vision came to Death, he sent his thought at it and the
rearmost ghoul looked up with his invisible eyes, so that his pink-broidered
black skull-sockets rested upon Lithquil, and before the two guards flanking
the Mad Duke could quite swing in their ponderous shields to protect their
master, the ghoul's short-handled ax, already poised overshoulder, had flown
through the narrowing gap and buried itself in Lithquil's nose and forehead.

Before Lithquil could gin crumple, before any of the watchers around
him could nock an arrow to dispatch or menace the assassin, before the naked
slavegirl who was the promised but seldom-delivered prize for the surviving
gladiator could start to draw breath for a squealing scream, Death's magic
gaze was fixed on Horborixen, citadel-city of the King of Kings. But not on
the interior of the Great Golden Palace, though Death got a fleeting glimpse
of that, but on the inwardness of a dingy workshop where a very old man looked
straight up from his rude pallet and truly wished that the cool dawn light,
which was glimmering through window- and lower-crack, would never more trouble
the cobwebs that made ghostly arches and buttresses overhead.