"C. L. Moore - The Black Gods Kiss" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

Jirel choked something that was mercifully muffled as she darted her head sidewise, like a serpent
striking, and sank her teeth into his neck. She missed the jugular by a fraction of an inch.
Guillaume said nothing, then. He sought her head with a steady hand, found it despite her wild writhing,
sank iron fingers deep into the hinges of her jaw, forcing her teeth relentlessly apart. When he had her
free he glared down into the yellow hell of her eyes for an instant. The blaze of them was hot enough to
scorch his scarred face. He grinned and lifted his ungauntleted hand, and with one heavy blow in the face
he knocked her halfway across the room. She lay still upon the flags.

Jirel opened her yellow eyes upon darkness. She lay quiet for a while, collecting her scattered
thoughts. By degrees it came back to her, and she muffled upon her arm a sound that was half curse and
half sob. Joiry had fallen. For a time she lay rigid in the dark, forcing herself to the realization.
The sound of feet shifting on stone near by brought her out of that particular misery. She sat up
cautiously, feeling about her to determine in what part of Joiry its liege lady was imprisoned. She knew
that the sound she had heard must be a sentry, and by the dank smell of the darkness that she was
underground. In one of the little dungeon cells, of course. With careful quietness she got to her feet,
muttering a curse as her head reeled for an instant and then began to throb. In the utter dark she felt
around the cell. Presently she came to a little wooden stool in a corner, and was satisfied. She gripped
one leg of it with firm fingers and made her soundless way around the wall until she had located the door.
The sentry remembered, afterward, that he had heard the wildest shriek for help which had ever rung in
his ears, and he remembered unbolting the door. Afterward, until they found him lying inside the locked
cell with a cracked skull, he remembered nothing.
 Jirel crept up the dark stairs of the north turret, murder in her heart. Many little hatreds she had known
in her life, but no such blaze as this. Before her eyes in the night she could see Guillaume's scornful,
scarred face laughing, the little jutting beard split with the whiteness of his mirth. Upon her mouth she felt
the remembered weight of his, about her the strength of his arms. And such a blast of hot fury came over
her that she reeled a little and clutched at the wall for support. She went on in a haze of red anger, and
something like madness burning in her brain as a resolve slowly took shape out of the chaos of her hate.
When that thought came to her she paused again, mid-step upon the stairs, and was conscious of a little
coldness blowing over her. Then it was gone, and she shivered a little, shook her shoulders and grinned
wolfishly, and went on.
By the stars she could see through the arrow-slits in the wall it must be near to midnight. She went
softly on the stairs, and she encountered no one. Her little tower room at the top was empty. Even the
straw pallet where the serving-wench slept had not been used that night. Jirel got herself out of her armor
alone, somehow, after much striving and twisting. Her doeskin shirt was stiff with sweat and stained with
blood. She tossed it disdainfully into a corner. The fury in her eyes had cooled now to a contained and
secret flame. She smiled to herself as she slipped a fresh shirt of doeskin over her tousled red head and
donned a brief tunic of link-mail. On her legs she buckled the greaves of some forgotten legionary, relic
of the not long past days when Rome still ruled the world. She thrust a dagger through her belt and took
her own long two-handed sword bare-bladed in her grip. Then she went down the stairs again.
She knew there must have been revelry and feasting in the great hall that night, and by the silence
hanging so heavily now she was sure that most of her enemies lay still in drunken slumber, and she
experienced a swift regret for the gallons of her good French wine so wasted. And the thought flashed
through her head that a determined woman with a sharp sword might work some little damage among the
drunken sleepers before she was overpowered. But she put that idea by, for Guillaume would have
posted sentries to spare, and she must not give up her secret freedom so fruitlessly.

Down the dark stairs she went, and crossed one corner of the vast central hall whose darkness she
was sure hid wine-deadened sleepers, and so into the lesser dimness of the rough little chapel that Joiry
boasted. She had been sure she would find Father Gervase there, and she was not mistaken. He rose
from his knees before the altar, dark in his robe, the starlight through the narrow window shining upon his