Читать «Rulers of the Darkness (хвв-4)» онлайн - страница 38

"It's war," Oraste said. "You do what you have to do. If we need Forthwegians, we'll take 'em. We can sell it to the ones we don't take: if the Kaunians weren't wolves in sheep's clothing, we can say, we wouldn't have to do this. The Forthwegians'll buy it, or enough of 'em will. They hate the blonds as much as we do."

"I suppose so." Bembo didn't particularly hate anybody- save, perhaps, people who made him work more than he cared to. Those people included Sergeant Pesaro, his boss, as well as the miscreants he all too often failed to run to earth.

"Look at 'em!" Oraste waved again, this time with a sort of animal frustration. "Any one of them could be a Kaunian. Any one, I tell you. You think I like the notion of those lousy blonds laughing at me? Not on your life, pal." He folded his beefy hands into fists. When he didn't like something, his notion of what to do next was pound it to pieces.

And, whenever he got into that kind of mood, he'd sometimes lash out at his partner, too; he wasn't always fussy about whom or what he hurt, so long as he was hurting someone or something. To try to placate him, Bembo pointed to a man whose beard was going gray. "There. That fellow's a genuine Forthwegian, no doubt about it."

"How d'you know?" Brooding suspicion filled Oraste's voice.

"Don't you remember? He's the one who had a son disappear off to powers above know where, and his nephew murdered his other son. He couldn't get anybody to do anything about it, because the nephew was in Plegmund's Brigade."

"Oh. Him. Aye." The fire in Oraste's hazel eyes faded a little. "Well, I can't say you're wrong- this time."

Bembo swept off his plumed hat and bowed as deeply as his belly would permit. "Your servant," he said.

"My arse," Oraste said. He pointed to the man with whom the assuredly genuine Forthwegian was speaking. "How about him? You going to tell me you know for sure he's no Kaunian, too?"

"How can I do that?" Bembo asked reasonably as he and Oraste came up to the two men. The other fellow certainly looked like a Forthwegian: a white-haired, white-bearded, rather dissolute-seeming old Forthwegian. "But what else is he likely to be? He's a blowhard, I'll tell you that."

Sure enough, the old man was doing most of the talking, his companion mostly listening and then trying to get a word or two in edgewise. As Bembo and Oraste came up to them, the geezer waved his forefinger in the other man's face and spoke in impassioned Forthwegian. Bembo couldn't understand more than one word in four, but he knew an irate, hectoring tone when he heard one. The fellow the old man was talking to looked as if he wished he were elsewhere.

Oraste rolled his eyes. "Blowhard, nothing. He's a stinking windbag, is what he is."

"Aye, that's the truth." Instead of walking past the windbag, Bembo slowed and cocked his head to one side, frowning and listening hard.

"Are you daft?" Oraste said. "Come on."

"Shut up." Bembo was usually a little afraid of his partner, and wouldn't have dared speak to him like that most of the time. But a moment later he gave a decisive nod. "It is. By the powers above, it is!"