"Joel Rosenberg - Guardians Of The Flame 08 - Not Exactly the Three Musketiers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenberg Joel C)

28 - Uneasy Lies the Head, Part III.543



1 - Their Attention is Arrested

T

here will be payment for your crimes, foul deceiver. Justice demands an accounting!''Enh.

Beneath the flickering of the uncaring stars, the smoking torches, and the slow,
crimson-to-orange-to-blue pulse of the distant faerie lights, the handsome young warrior lev-eled the
point of his absurdly too-short spear at where the obese form of the wicked prince cringed in a bed that
was too small, although understandably so: a full-sized bed would have taken up too much room.

"Aye," the young warrior said, his voice a stage whisper that could carry as far as need be, his accent
foreign al-though impossible to place, "you may count on it, traitor Prince. You sold out Barony Furnael,
and today there'll surely be an accounting."

That had already been said, and not particularly well, either.

"By my fathers and theirs, I swear there'll be an account-ing," the ramrod-straight nobleman echoed,
clapping his hand to the young warrior's shoulder. "I swear that to you, Pirondael, and to you, Walter
Slovotsky."

Again, he repeated himself. Redundantly.

Argh.

Neither the warrior nor the nobleman at his side seemed to notice how the prince's hand fumbled with a
blade under his pillow. It wasn't as though it was hidden from them, but their gaze never left the prince's
face.

"An accounting," the evil prince said with a snicker, "you'd have an accounting, would you? Of course I
sold off your barony, Furnael. It was dead, gone, lost, a rotting corpse, stinking in the sun. Are those
words you do not understand, dear Baron? If the corpse could serve Bieme, then how could I not let the
Holts consume the body bite by bite? Why should I not have allowed them to feast on the carrion?" He
leaned forward, as though about to impart a secret, and the baron leaned forward as though to receive it,
pausing dramatically, as no word would have been able to be heard through the gasps.

Pirojil leaned back in his seat as the scene played itself predictably, inexorably, repetitively toward the
moment that Pirondael would stab Furnael, and then Walter Slovotsky would kill the prince with the
single throw of a knife.

He had seen much better, but what had he expected?Birth of an Empire was hardly a classic in the
spirit ofIranys orTea for the Tendentious. The stage was too small, and the actors were by no means
the best in the empire.

It did have some virtues, though: for one thing, of the three playhouses open in Biemestren, the House of