The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
But people made way for Richard St. Vier as he headed in the direction of a stall selling drinks. The parrot lady collared one of the street kids, saying, “See that? You can tell your grandchildren you saw St. Vier fight right here.” Oh, honestly, Richard thought, it hadn’t been much of a fight; more like bumping into someone on the street.
He leaned on the wooden counter, trying to decide what he wanted.
“Hey,” said a young voice at his elbow. “I’ll buy you a drink.”
He thought it was a woman, from the voice. Women sometimes tried to pick him up after fights. But he glanced down and saw a pug-faced boy looking at him through slitted eyes, the way kids do when they’re trying to look older than they are. This one wasn’t very old. “That was real good, the way you did that,” the boy said. “I mean the quick double feint and all.”
“Thank you,” the swordsman answered courteously. His mother had raised him with good manners, and some old habits cling, even in the big city. Sometimes he could almost hear her say, Just because you can kill people whenever you want to doesn’t mean you have a license to be rude to anyone. He let the boy buy them both some fancy drink made with raspberries. They drank silently, the boy peering over the rim of his cup. It was good; Richard ordered them both another. “Yeah,” the kid said. “I think you’re the best there is, you know?”
“Thanks,” said the swordsman. He put some coins on the counter.
“Yeah.” The kid self-consciously fingered the sword at his own side. “I fight too. I had this idea, see—if you needed a servant or something.”
“I don’t,” the swordsman said.
“Well, you know,” the boy went on anyway. “I could, like, make up the fire in the morning. Carry water. Cook you stuff. Maybe when you practice, I could be—if you need somebody to help you out a little—”
“No,” said St. Vier. “Thank you. There are plenty of schools for you to learn in.”
“Yeah, but they’re not ...”
“I know. But that’s the way it is.”
He walked away from the bar, not wanting to hear any more argument. Behind him the kid started to follow, then fell back.
Across the square he met his friend Alec. “You’ve been in a fight,” Alec said. “I missed it,” he added, faintly accusing.
“Someone slammed into me by the parrot cages. It was funny.” Richard smiled now at the memory. “I didn’t see him coming, and for a moment I thought it was an earthquake! Swords were out before he could apologize—if he meant to apologize. He was drunk.”
“You didn’t kill him,” Alec said, as if he’d heard the story already.
“Not in this part of town. That doesn’t go down too well with the Watch here.”
“I hope you weren’t thinking of getting a parrot again.”
Richard grinned, falling into step beside his tall friend. It was a familiar argument. “They’re so decorative, Alec. And you could teach it to talk.”
“Let some bird steal all my best lines? Anyhow, they eat worms. I’m not getting up to catch worms.”
“They eat bread and fruit. I asked this time.”
“Too expensive.”
They were passing through the nice section of the city, headed down to the wharves. On the other side of the river was the district called Riverside, where the swordsman lived with sharpsters and criminals, beyond reach of the law. It would not have been a safe place for a man like Alec, who barely knew one end of a knife from another; but the swordsman St. Vier had made it clear what would happen to anyone who touched his friend. Riverside tolerated eccentrics. The tall scholar, with his student slouch and aristocratic accent, was becoming a known quantity along with the master swordsman.
“If you’re feeling like throwing your money around,” Alec persisted, “why don’t you get us a servant? You need someone to polish your boots.”
“I take good care of my boots,” Richard said, stung in an area of competence. “You’re the one who needs it.”
“Yes,” Alec happily agreed. “I do. Someone to go to the market for us, and keep visitors away, and start the fire in winter, and bring us breakfast in bed ...”
“Decadent,” St. Vier said. “You Gan go to the market yourself. And I keep Visitors’ away just fine. I don’t understand why you think it would be fun to have some stranger living with us. If you wanted that sort of life, you should have—” He stopped before he could say the unforgivable. But Alec, in one of his sudden shifts of attitude, which veered like the wind over a small pond, finished cheerfully for him, “I should have stayed on the Hill with my rich relatives. But they never kill people—not out in the open where we can all enjoy it, anyway. You’re so much more entertaining. ...”
Richard's lips quirked downward, unsuccessfully hiding a smile. “Loved only for my sword,” he said.
Alec said carefully, “If I were the sort of person who makes crude jokes, you would be very embarrassed now.”
Richard, who was never embarrassed, said, “What a good thing you’re not. What do you want for dinner?”
They went to Rosalie’s, where they ate stew in the cool underground tavern and talked business with their friends. It was the usual hodgepodge of fact and rumor: A new swordsman had appeared across town claiming to be a foreign champion, but someone’s cousin in service had recognized him as Lord Averil’s old valet, with fencing lessons and a dyed mustache. . . . Hugo Seville had finally gotten so low as to take a job offing some noble’s wife ... or maybe he’d only been offered it, or someone wished he had.
Nobles with jobs for St. Vier sent their messages to Rosalie’s. But today there was nothing. “Just some nervous jerk looking for an heiress.”
“Aren’t we all!”
“Sorry, Reg, this one’s taken; run off with some swordsman.”
“Anyone we know?”
“Naw . . . fairy-tale swordsman—they say all girls have run off with one, when it’s really their father’s clerk. ”
Big Missy, who worked the mattress trade at Glinley’s, put her arm around Richard. “I could run off with a swordsman.” Seated, he came up only to her bosom, which he leaned back into, smiling across to Alec, eyebrows raised a little provocatively.
Alec took the bait: “Careful,” the tall scholar told her; “he bites.”
“Oh?” Missy leered becomingly at him. “Don’t you, pretty baby?”
Alec tried to hide a flush of pure delight. No one had ever called him “pretty baby” before, especially not women other people paid to get into.
“Of course I do,” he said with all the brittle superciliousness he was master of. “Hard.”
Missy released St. Vier, advancing on his tall young friend. “Oh good . . . ,” she breathed huskily. “I like ’em rough.” Her huge arms pointed like weather vanes into the rising wind. “Come to me lover.”
The old-time crowd at Rosalie's was ecstatic. “Missy, don’t leave me for that bag of bones!” “So long, then, Alec; let us know how it comes out!” “Try it, boy; you just might like it!”
Alec looked like he wanted to sink into the floor. He held his ground, but his hauteur, already badly applied, was slipping treacherously.
At the last minute, Richard took pity on him. “I saw a wedding today,” he said to the room at large.
“Oh yeah,” said Lucie; “we heard you killed one of the guards. Finally made them earn their pay, huh?”
“Thought you didn’t do weddings, Master St. Vier.” Sam Bonner looked around for approval of his wit. Everyone knew that St. Vier disdained guard work.