Читать онлайн «At the Sign of Triumph»
Автор Дэвид Вебер
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For Father George Anson Clarke.
I really did listen that half-century ago, and you were right.
OCTOBER
YEAR OF GOD 897
. I.
The Earl of Thirsk’s Townhouse,
City of Gorath,
Kingdom of Dohlar.
“Forgive me for intruding, My Lord, but you and I need to talk.
”The Earl of Thirsk stared at the black-haired, blue-eyed guardsman in his townhouse study. Sheer, disbelieving shock froze him in his chair—a shock deep enough to reach even through the agony of his dead family—because he knew that sapphire-eyed man, and that man couldn’t possibly be here. Not in the middle of the city of Gorath. That man was with his emperor in Siddar City, thirty-four hundred miles from this spot. Everyone knew that. And even if he hadn’t been, there was no conceivable way a man in the livery of the House of Ahrmahk could have traveled into the very heart of the Kingdom of Dohlar’s capital city without being spotted and accosted.
Yet there he stood, and Thirsk felt his good hand fumble at his belt, seeking the dagger that wasn’t there.
“I assure you I intend no harm to anyone under this roof,” Merlin Athrawes continued. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t raise a hue and cry, though. ” He stroked one fierce mustachio with a quick smile. “That would get messy, and I’m afraid quite a lot of people would be harmed under those circumstances. ”
Rain pelted against the study windows, gurgled in waterfalls from eaves and gutters, swirled down paved streets or cascaded into storm drains, and distant thunder rumbled somewhere beyond the thick clouds of midnight. Streetlights in Gorath were both dim and few and far between, even on nights when pounding rain didn’t reduce visibility still further. Perhaps that might explain how he could have passed through those same streets unnoted. Yet even as the earl thought that, it only created its own preposterous questions, for Athrawes’ blackened chain mail and the black tunic beneath it were dry, and so was his raven-dark hair.
