"Norton, Andre - Flight in Yiktor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

from behind the butcher's and, measuring the distance care-
fully, while Russtif was watching the woman, his small eyes
leering. Dung threw the bit of food into the cage. Toggor was
on it in an instant, grasping the unwholesome-looking piece
and bringing it to his mandibles.

Russtif roared and swung one of those hammer fists at
Dung, but it did not crash against the side of the hunchback's
head as he expected. It was the woman who swung her
lightly held captive out of the way, and it was the man whose
hand came down in a sharp chop across the beast seller's
wrist, bringing an angry cry out of him.




Andre Norton

"What you do?" Russtif seemed to swell as if his bulk had
suddenly increased.

"Nothing."

"Nothing? You let this trash throw poison to my smux and
it is nothing? Ho, let the wardens decide whether this is

nothing."
That Dung had not expected. That Russtif would allow the

law such interference was unheard of. Yet the beastmerchant
was slipping farther along the edge of the table, his eyes
turning from the spaceman standing at quiet ease, to Toggor,
to the woman, almost as if he expected they were about to
unite against him. Dung made a second attempt to wring free
of the grasp which had brought his misshapen body into the
tent, fruitlessly. Though that hand twisted in the rags across
the hump did not tighten, yet moving away was impossible.

"The smux--quote a price on it." That was not the man
but the woman who said that quietly. Russtif grinned a little,
showing broken, black, rotted teeth.

"There is no price for good fortune. Gentle Fern." He had
stopped his crabwise retreat from the two, standing now at
the end of the table with Toggor's cage between them. The
smux had finished the bit of near-carrion Dung had scraped
out of a discarded E tube and had closed himself once more
into ball form which was his only protection, since Russtif
had soaked the poison from his claws only an hour ago.