"Fifth Millennium - 03 - The Cage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Meier Shirley)

"Well?"

"There is word from Teik Schotter Valders'sen. Things are going well in Brahvniki, but there was a fight at the counting house. He sent a letter with details. It's on the desk."

"Hmm. Well, I'll read it later. I'm sure they handled it." His eyes focused on her and he smiled, a baring of teeth that had nothing to do with affection. She was one of the reasons he was glad his mother's rooms were far away. Lixa was a tiny woman, just over four feet tall, with clear white skin and ebony black hair, classically Zak. She was staring at her bare feet so that her eyes were hidden but he knew the color matched her hair. "You're a lovely piece, Lixa." He was disappointed that she didn't react. She used to. She stood, silent and tense, until he beckoned with his ringless hand. "Come, come, my dear. We wouldn't want your parents to hear of your dumb-beast insolence, now, would we?"

She stepped into his reach, passive. He ran a proprietary hand down her hip, feeling her quiver, feeling her want to move away. He left his hand on her, waiting to see if she'd fight him.

"No, master," she said, eyes downcast, hiding the hate he knew was there. He smiled silkenly.

"Remember, darling. I own you and all of your kin. Your parents are too old to take your beatings. You want to please me, don't you?"

"Vilist, Teik."

"Well, that's good. I will be dining with my mother. You will come to my room this evening."

"Yes, Teik."

He watched her as she walked to the inlaid wooden door of his sanctum, bare feet soundless on the plush green rug, then scraping faintly on the grey stone, irritated by the subdued tilt of her shoulders under her wool shift. The light oak of the slave-links hanging from neck to one wrist clicked as she moved. It had taken so much to get quiet answers from her. It had been so enjoyable. It was no coincidence that she was small, and dark, and had been wild. Heowned Lixa and Lixa looked likeher Е but Whitlock was gone, dead. Vhsant had killed her. The slave would look better if he had her bleach the color from the lock of hair at the temple.

Life is good, he thought.

а

EARLY EVENING
BALCONY AROUND THE ATRIUM
OF THE SLAF HIKARME

Habiku strolled down the third floor corridor toward his mothers quarters.

Arches to his right opened onto the central courtyard. The milky white glow through the steel-bound alabaster roof was faint and the lanterns hanging from the metal girders were giving off their glow and a feint scent of heated canola oil.

He drew a deep breath of it, along with the eternal F'talezonian scents of wool rugs and slightly damp stone, the wealth-smells of polished wood and wax and incense. Windows to his left were sizable panes of rare imported Arkan plate glass trimmed to fit the pointed arches. Snow tapped faintly against the glass and melted, streaking the view of the narrow strip of brown lawn about the house;that was an arrogant boast of power, within the walls of the City, where space was always precious.

The streaked glass blurred his view west, down to the river, but memory painted the details. F'talezon was a mountain city, built up a sloping, V-shaped valley with its broad end facing the water and a long stream dividing it; there was a lake between the city and the Brezhan, and water tumbled into the greater stream over a natural cliff and moving floodgates of metal that were one of the wonders of the northern world. Down there was the Lake Quarter, where the untouchable corpse-handlers and poor foreigners and vagrants dwelt in hovels built among three thousand years of ruins.

A long climb. He had lived there once, a tall blond half-foreign child in this witch city whose folk were small and dark and despised all outsiders. The more so if their poverty left them nothing but their Zak blood to take pride in.

F'talezon was like that: a grey, aged pile that had seen the days of its glory come, and go, and come again, until the layers and the legends ran together as the crumbling buildings didЕ A long climb up the valley, there were ancient, obscene jokes of how each class drank the piss of the one above. Tumbled, steep-pitched roofs of dark slate over buildings of plain dark stone, the fringing cliffs on either side tunneled like maggot-ridden cheese with old mines and quarries, still worked or abandoned or made over into teeming warrens for the poor, back into darkness where only rumor went.

The Upper City; the town houses of nobles built on the rents of their estates, homes of merchant princes and shipowners wealthy from the river traffic; shrines to the Lady and the Dark Lord, and the DragonLord's palace, the Dragon's-Nest, blocking the narrow way into the crater at the mountain's summit.

A long climb, and he meant to go further yet. He was owner, head of House and household; he let the feeling sweep over him again. This had beenher house, before she ... died.Two years , he thought. The disposal, neat and clean and impossible to trace: but then, Megan Whitlock had been nothing but the child of weavers, self-made, her parents dead and no kin but a few dockside riffraff. It had been profitable to dispose of her; his secret backers had been glad to see the end of the troublesome Whitlock with her habit of carelessly slashing threads of intrigue as she passed.

In the mean streets, on icy decks, when his mother tried to make him take the last bowl of amaranth gruel and pretend she had eaten earlier, the manor of the Sleeping Dragon was what he had dreamed all the long years: safe, secret, enclosed.

The door to her chambers. Inside, he could hear the slave reading to her: it was one of the old Enchian chronicles, the epic of the first Curlion. Absurdly, it made him feel nervous again. As it had when he was a child, summoned to his lessons in the "women's quarters." His mouth quirked. That had been two rooms at the rear of the apartment, his mother's isolation self-imposed. His father had not cared; a Zak ClawPrince might keep a foreign mistress, but the heritage of ancient Enchian nobility and their customs meant little inside the walls of the Zak city.

Mother never forgot what she was, he thought grimly. Pirates, auction block or no, she was Latialia. TheAmam Latialia. Tor Ench counted itself true heir and descendant of Iyesi, the first empire humankind had made after the Earned Fire; across the millennia, they remembered.