"Thieves World - Beyond The Veil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morris Janet E)

"That woman there, the one in silk and leather like a Rankan fighting lordЧyou
do see her, Riddler?Чcame in asking for you."
"How long ago?" He had come up the back stairs, as was his custom; but not gone
down into the drug dens beneath as he usually did. He was avoiding someoneЧa
female someone, a Froth Daughter from the twelfth plane come to earth to spend a
year as a mortal. Six months of that year were up, and the rest of it loomed
unending before him. Jihan, daughter of the nameless Stormbringer who'd spawned
the world's pantheons, was spending her mortal year with him. She was his
companion, perhaps his equal, but not his friend. He peered down through the
smoke and the crowd. The woman who had laid her Machadi helmet on the bar and
wore cavalry boots like a Syrese fighter and a cuirass some smith had had to
mold from a plaster cast made live on her physique was not Jihan. This woman was
not muscular enough, nor tall enough, nor was her hair burnished like copper.
Jihan, though she had many superhuman attributes, could not change the shape she
had chosen, the shape in which she had entered the world of men.
"How long ago?" Madame Bomba repeated, shrugging and holding up one hand to
indicate with thumb and index finger the span between knots on a Tysian rope
which a flame would have burned in that interval. "A Rankan hour, perhaps. She
ate and drank; now she waits."
The woman drank between mercenaries at the bar; more, she drank like one. The
man on her far side had his head bent to hers: a dark head, short-haired.
"That's Crit with her?" Tempus ventured. The angled face was hard to make out
from his vantage point.
Madame Bomba's hearty laugh rang out. "You're ruining my story. Yes, that's
Critias. Thou art: popular with thy band. He's the third to come here asking for
you this evening."
"Would you know why I'm in such demand tonight?"
"No more than I know where the gods hide their treasure. I'd sooner ask your
Stepsons for their favors than their secrets, as you well know. But of course,
one hears of doings on the street."
"One does, of course," he prodded.
"One hears that there was a murder at the Dark Horse tonight, and that the
victim was a man Crit recommended into the innkeeper's care. One hears that both
Crit and Grille were at the scene soon after, and our own Randal summoned from
the mageguild's crypts."
Madame Bomba had appointed herself surrogate mother to the Stepsons; she loved
good fighters, Sacred Banders most of all. They were her "boys," and it was to
the benefit of everyone, even Tempus, that this was so. But she liked to draw
out her tales and had a penchant for innuendo. Tempus didn't try to hurry her or
to interrogate her; he wouldn't spoil her fun; her eyes danced with glee over
something. He had all the time in the world. He leaned his chair back on two
legs and poured some umber krrf carefully into the well of his fist from a
silver box, snorted the powder, offered her the box.
She pinched two piles, lay them on the black marble table at which they sat, and
inhaled them through a golden straw that hung between her satined breasts on a
delicate chain.
She sniffed loudly. "Aah. Good. Very good. When this woman was done eating and
beginning to drinkЧjust after Crit came in and he and I were talking at the
barЧone of my staff came up to us saying the woman wanted to go upstairs."
Madame Bomba kept girls for whoring, but no boys: it was a personal prejudice of