"Shirley Meier & S. M. Stirling - Fifth Millenium 03 - The Cage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Meier Shirley)

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. He owned Lixa and Lixa looked like her тАж
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.

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