"Karl Edward Wagner - Kane 01 - Darkness Weaves" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wagner Karl Edward)

be a danger tonight.

"Sit down and have some wine, Imel. It's excellent for cleansing the damp from your insides. These
Lartroxians keep surprisingly good vineyards, I'll always grant them that." Pouring a third cup, he moved
to where Arbas worked with the fire.

Gratefully Imel slumped into the chair and, seeing no other cup, gingerly drank the heavy wine from its
bottle. He had been unnerved by the past hour's events, and the liquor warmed and steadied him
Missions of this sort ran against his nature, and he wished again, as he so often had before, that he could
have talked her into sending someone else. That despicable Oxfors Alremas, perhaps. Not that he cared
to rate Alremas superior in his missions of intrigue and cunning diplomacy. Still the Pellin lord's
self-esteem at times grew insufferable, and Imel wondered how Alremas's aristocratic sensibilities would
fare under the abuse he had himself thus far sustained.

Arbas soon had the fire ablaze with the dry wood from the caskets. Most of the smoke was sucked
without by the storm winds, and it was not too uncomfortable. The flames lit the crypt as it had not been
before, and Imel was able now to get his first good look at Kane.

He was a large man, a little over six feet in height, although he seemed shorter because of the extreme
massiveness of his body. Thick neck, a barrel chest, strong, heavily muscled arms and legs--everything
created in him an aura of great power. Even his hands were overlarge and the fingers long and powerful.
Less brutal, they might have been called an artist's hands. Imel had once seen such hands before--on a
notorious strangler, whose execution he had attended. As an embellishment on the Imperial law, the
severed hands had been displayed alongside the impaled head in Thovnosten's Justice Square. Kane's
age was hard to guess; he looked perhaps like a man of thirty in body, but he seemed to be older
somehow. Imel had expected to find an older man, so he estimated Kane to be in his fifties and well
preserved. Kane's complexion was fair and his hair light red, cut evenly to moderate length. His beard
was short, and the features of his face were rugged and heavy--too primitively coarse to be considered
handsome.

Kane sensed Imel's inspection and suddenly locked eyes with him. Abruptly there returned the chilling
sensation that had earlier pulsed through Imel during the lightning burst. The eyes of Kane were like two
blue-burning crystals of ice. Within them stirred a frozen fire of madness, death, torment, hellish hatred.
They looked straight through Imel, searching out his innermost thoughts, searing his very soul. They were
the eyes of a maddened killer.

With a cruel laugh, Kane turned away, releasing Imel from the spell of his eyes. His mind staggered
back, and it was with effort that he suppressed blind panic. In a daze, his hand groped for the wine
bottle. Gladly he made use of the wine's restorative virtue.

She who sent him on this mission to Kane had always instilled in Imel a feeling of revulsion. She was but
a twisted, broken vessel of hatred, kept living by her depraved lust for vengeance. To be sure, no man
could approach her without feeling the dark fire of her insane hatred. But this revulsion was nothing
compared to the terror that had blasted Imel when he looked into the eyes of Kane. Insanity gleamed
there, but in complement with a cold murder-lust. Insensate craving to kill and destroy--consuming hatred
of life. With such eyes would Death receive the newly dead, or Lord Tloluvin welcome some hideously
damned soul to his realm of eternal darkness.

"Now then, Imel, what business do you have that concerns me?"