"Jack Vance - Tschai 4 - The Pnume" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

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Planet of Adventure




TABLE Of CONTENTS

Book One CITY OF THE CHASCH
Book Two SERVANTS OF THE WANKH
Book Three THE DIRDIR
Book Four THE PNUME




THE PHUME




CHAPTER ONE
IN THE WAREHOUSE at the edge of the Sivishe salt flats, Aila Woudiver sat
perched on a stool. A chain connected the iron collar around his neck to a high
cable; he could walk from his table to the closet against the wall where he
slept, the chain sliding behind him.
Aila Woudiver was a prisoner on his own premises, insult added to injury,
which by all accounts should have provoked him to spasms of tooth-chattering
fury. But he sat placidly on the stool, great buttocks sagging to either side
like saddlebags, wearing an absurd smile of saintly forbearance.
Beside the spaceship which occupied the greater part of the warehouse Adam
Reith stood watching. Woudiver's abnegation was more unsettling than rage. Reith
hoped that whatever schemes Woudiver was hatching would not mature too quickly.
The spaceship was nearly operative; in a week, more or less, Reith hoped to
depart old Tschai.
Woudiver occupied himself with tat-work, now and then holding it up to admire
the pattern-the very essence of patient affability. Traz, coming into the
warehouse, scowled toward Woudiver and asserted the philosophy of the Emblem
nomads, his forebears: "Kill him this moment; kill him and have an end!"
Reith gave an equivocal grunt. "He's chained by the neck; he does us no
harm."
"He'll find a means. Have you forgotten his tricks?"
"I can't kill him in cold blood."
Traz gave a croak of disgust and stamped from the warehouse. Anacho the
Dirdirman declared, "For once I agree with the young steppe-runner: kill the
great beast!"
Woudiver, divining the substance of the conversation, displayed his gentle
smile. He had lost weight, so Reith noticed. The once-bloated cheeks hung in
wattles; the great upper lip drooped like a beak over the pointed little chin.