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

"Y'all c'n have audience with my arse, Mr. Radmer."

"E'en if your arse were a magistrate, m'boy, I would have to decline. I will see no guard, no City Mother,
not even a senator. I'm here to speak with the Furies."

Bruno finds it difficult to follow this exchange, for accent and inflection so clot the guard's voice that his
might almost be another language entirely. This "Radmer" has spoken Queendom-standard,
Tongan-inflected English up to this point, but with the city guard he speaks in the city dialect. Flawlessly,
as near as Bruno can detect.

"He doesn't know you," Lyman says to Radmer, in Queendom-standard tones of quiet indignation. Then,
to the man on the wall, "Groveling in the dust is where you should be, maggot. This is General Emeritus
Radmer, who turned back the armies of Red Antonio and saved this pathetic city of yours, when your
grandparents' grandparents could not. More than that, you glob of phlegm, he carved the very world
upon which you now stand, whose air you now stink up with your putrid excuses."

The man is not impressed. "Y'all Olders 're all Gross High Mucky-Muck of someorother, close as I can
figure. And 'f this man built the world, then he be a god, and should need no 'sistance o' mine."

"Good point," Lyman says, sounding approving for the first time this day. "You have wit enough to call us
Olders. Have wit enough, then, to realize we request your help for the sake of decorum. And we'll open
the gate, if you will not."

Radmer holds up a hand at waist level--a gesture which commands silence. And
Lyman--reluctantly--obeys.

"We dare not tarry out here," Radmer says to the guards. "I bring with me an item of great strategic
value, and the Glimmer King's scouts have found us once already. You do know they're here, yes? Soon
the hills will be lousy with them. If you turn us away, O morbid child, I daresay you won't last the week."

Glimmer King. Is that what they're calling Bruno's son these days? His only child, his greatest error? If
indeed Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui is (a) alive, and (b) responsible for all this mad suffering--Bruno
has heard only Radmer's suspicions on the subject. But those were enough to draw him here, to this
unreal place. A father's disappointment--and atonement--run as deep as his love.

"If he turns us away he won't last the minute," Lyman says, drawing his sword. And a sense washes over
Bruno yet again, that he is living in some hell of his own creation, for the sword in Lyman's hand could
well be a figment of fevered dreams. Ancient, yes. Sharpened and sealed with a film of epitaxial diamond.
The weapon has a wicked point, and a basket hilt to protect the wielder's hand, and in between there is .
. . nothing at all. Nothing to parry, to grasp, to see flashing in a deadly arc. In showing it off to him,
Lyman had called it an "air foil," and had declined to estimate the number of deaths it had inflicted at his
hand, and the hands of other soldiers before him.

Ploughshares into swords, alas. That wasn't what mass-stabilized wormholes were for.

But Bruno's musings are cut short when someone up on the wall cries "Bandits!" and hurls down a
wooden spear tipped with barbs of iron. Of course it bounces harmlessly off the marble-gray cloak of
one of the Olders--Brian, his name is--who picks it up quietly, examines it for a moment, and then breaks
it calmly over his knee.