"Stephen Palmer - The Green Realm Below" - читать интересную книгу автора (Palmer Stephen)

Tales from the Spired Inn:
The Green Realm Below
a short story by Stephen Palmer

Through the rain, Kytanquil could see the aquamarine lamps of the Spired
Inn, like corpse lights floating around a mausoleum. She hurried on down
Morte Street. The inn was a tall, domed structure with a single door, to
which she ran as the wind blew drizzle into her face. It was the last
centre of culture in this northerly district of the dying city of Kray.
And it was her home; for Kytanquil was the daughter of Oq-Ziq, notorious
thief and local ambassador for the jannitta culture, and Balgydyal,
notorious lecher and ambassador for nothing.
Inside the hall, she stuffed her boots into an antiseptic bin, pulled off
her film protectives, and dressed in a white shift and slippers that she
withdrew from her kit, belting the shift with string, inflating the
slippers with a minipump. She opened the door into the common room and
strolled in. Dark alcoves of oak surrounded her, their carven sides
flickering as a multitude of giant candles sputtered and hissed. A few
locals drank dooch from tankards. At the bar she saw the innkeeper,
Dhow-lin, a crusty old woman dressed in the traditional smock of her
aamlon culture.
This was through force of circumstance a cosmopolitan inn, where
melancholy Krayans mingled with exotic jannitta, who were in turn mellowed
by the intense, almost elegiac musicality of the aamlon. Kytanquil, never
quite at home with any of these cultures, nevertheless found the mixture a
comfort, for her personality was not sober, not passionate, nor yet
profound. She was a drifter. Not a loner, but a misfit.
As usual, her appearance caused a trio of priestesses from the Temple of
Youth to stare at her. She was unusually tall, her short, bleached hair
slicked back with antiseptic gel, her sad, dark eyes - identical to her
mother's - like anti-lamps in a bright face. She ignored the priestesses,
and they returned to their whispered conversation.
Dhow-lin greeted her. "Come along. Drink?"
Kytanquil approached the bar, and replied, "Is she in?"
"No. Out raiding some unsafe homes wired off by defenders this morning.
Four or five families forced south to the refugee streets."
"Hmmm." Kytanquil nodded to the bottles of mootsflosser. She enjoyed a
special relationship with Dhow-lin on account of her mother, allowing her
such luxuries as credit and free board. "Make it a big glass."
Swilling the creamy liqueur around her goblet, she surveyed the clientele.
Apart from the priestesses, all were locals. She turned back to the bar,
only to see Dhow-lin's hand waving a slip of plastic at her. "I forgot,
this message came for you."
Only one symbol had been printed on the fragment, a red splotch looking
like a leaf. She did not recognise it. But her bracelet did.
It had been a present from a mysterious relative, an object she had owned
since her rite of puberty, a wide bracelet of gold, copper and silicon
with an object embedded in it like a soft emerald. Now that dark jewel
glowed, and as she waved the slip at it bright green beams burst out. One
of the decorative frills beside the jewel moved to become a slit, and