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

and the legends ran together as the crumbling buildings didтАж 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 been her 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. The Amam
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.

His father had had little time for him; a foreign bastard, with
naZak looks and no hint of inner power. Habiku's eyes narrowed.