"Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarty Sarah)

the channels of fear. Don't underestimate them."

"I hadn't," Bruno says, meaning it. He has no idea what any of these terms mean, or what anyone here
might be capable of. Blindsight? Channels of fear? The name "Dolceti" itself is suggestive; it's about as
unTongan a word as human mouths can utter, and assuming it descends from some species of Latin or
Greek, it might mean "sweet" or "pleasing." It might also mean "pain" or "chop" or "deceit," or even
"whale."

"You lot are under arrest," says one of the Dolceti--not obviously marked as a leader but certainly
carrying himself that way. His dialect is not quite as impenetrable as the wall guards' had been, though it
does sound forced, as though he's dredging up some ancient tongue he'd learned and half forgotten.

"Y'all near c'rect," Conrad Mursk says back to him, in what sounds to Bruno, again, like flawless Lunish.
"We're t'be escorted to the Furies."

"On whose authority?" the Dolceti wants to know.

"Mine," Radmer answers calmly. "As Third Protector of Imbria."

That sends a ripple of surprise through the guards. "You're Radmer?"

"I am. Are you the captain here? Is Petro dead already?"

"Petro retired twenty years ago, when the haunted towers came down. I'm the captain, yes."
"Well, Captain," says Radmer, "I'm afraid we don't have much time, for the enemy's scouts are in yonder
hills already, and will soon pin you against the sea. Come now: close the gate and do as I ask."

At that, the Dolceti captain moves with amazing swiftness, drawing a short sword--an ordinary one,
though an air foil hangs at his side as well. In an eyeblink, he leaps forward to lay the iron blade across
Radmer's neck. "I take no orders from--"

But Radmer has stepped aside, not quickly but at just the right moment, with the ease of long practice.
Centuries of practice--millennia. He's out of reach, untouchable. Then, with no greater urgency, he tosses
a nearly full canteen at another Dolceti, whose rifle is aimed exactly between Radmer's eyes. The guard
doesn't flinch, but he does swat the projectile aside with a viper-quick motion, letting his rifle waver for a
second. Which gives Radmer enough time to draw his blitterstick without seeming to hurry.

Intended mainly for use against robots, a blitterstick--or blitterstaff, or blitter-anything--is an ungainly and
rather cruel weapon to turn against human flesh. Rarely lethal, its shifting wellstone patterns--caustic and
thermally abusive, alive with pseudoatom disassembly brigades--leave puckers and burns and worse
disfigurements which, in a medically impoverished environment like this one, must surely be permanent.
But Radmer's only other weapon is a pistol, far more lethal.

What happens next strikes Bruno as something like a chess opening: no one attacks, but everyone glares
and sidesteps, aims and tenses, lining up for a kill. The drop of a feather will set them off, but neither side
is crass or undisciplined enough to engage. Not first, not in cold blood. The Dolceti outnumber the
Olders ten to one, though, and from the looks on their faces they seem to think it will be enough. To
penetrate the diamond weave beneath a soft Queendom skin? To shatter the brickmail and impervium of
faxborn Queendom-era bones? Probably not, but they can still drag a man down and pinch his nose shut
until he smothers. And they seemed prepared to.