"Miller,.Steve.And.Lee,.Sharon.-.Liaden.Universe.07.-.I.Dare.v1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Miller Steve)

well, for a year or six, here on backworld Neglit.

And they promised him three cantra more, when they came to
collect the ring.

The ring. Now, there was a beautiful piece of work. In his young
days, he would have snatched the job up for the challenge of it, no
thought of payment in his head.

He'd aged out of that nonsenseЧpaid he would be. Well-paid. And
still he had the delicate, brutal trial of the work, the result of which,
polished and re-polished until the intarsia-work gleamed like water
in the beam of his work-light, proved he was yet a master of his
craft.

They'd sought him out, the canny Liadens. Him, Jen of Neglit
Center, though they surely had all the fabled master jewelers of
Solcintra to choose from. Yet they traveled to an outworld, sought
out an old and fading Terran master, commissioned him to makeЧ
to remakeЧtheir ring. And why was that?

The tale they'd spun for Terran wits was simple enough. The
original ring, a family heirloom, had gone missing, and must be
replaced before certain elders of the house noticed its lack.

Such things happened, drain pipes and gambling games being
universally hazardous to jewelry. And mayhap the jewel-masters of
Solcintra gossiped 'mong themselves, and a whispered word
might waft to the ear of the stern elder, to the dismay of his pretty
patrons.

Mayhap.

He was canny enough not to question them too nearly. He had no
ambition to risk his six cantra, though he might have balked, if they
had wanted paste or light-gold or glass.

But they were keen in their instructions: he was to use only pure-
gem, true-gold and emerald. A replacement, that's what they
insisted on: full duplication of the ring that was lost.

A replacement, exact in every detail, is what he had made for them.

He picked the ring up, turning it this way and that, admiring the
simple power of the design. Caught in fluid perfection, a bronze
dragon hovered, wide-winged, above a tree in full green leaf.
Smiling, he set it against the holopic they had given him of the
original.

"I witness ye'd deceive the master who made yon," he told the