Цитаты из книги Fool`s Gold

— Я — фермер, — продолжил Билл. — Это Летти. Он показал на нее. — А это Балур. Они… Он заколебался. — В общем, они хорошие, но драчливые незнакомцы. Билл нервно пожал плечами, а Летти подумала, что описание вполне ничего. — А это Фиркин. Он, хм… — Я — дыхание лунного света! — провозгласил тот. — Я — тень и клинок. Я — голос прыгающего из ночи, одетого в алое, в пламя, в смерть! Я — глас, который нельзя не услышать. Я… Он прервал свою диатрибу звучной отрыжкой, затем уставился в ночь. — Да, он такой, — подтвердил Билл.

She picked herself up. Her teeth gritted. Her palms hot. Steam rising from between her fingertips. Someone was running around the corner of the cave. A guard, chain mail glinting in reflected moonlight, mouth open in a yell, sword raised. He saw her, let loose a fresh howl, and charged. Quirk did not see the man. Not as he was here and now. She did not see the cave around her. She did not feel the hot breath of Mattrax gusting over her. Instead, she felt the hot breath of the Tamathian scrublans blowing at her back. She saw the shallow sloping hills of her childhood, dotted with scrubby bushes that held more thorns than leaves. She saw a bandit dressed in tatters charging, scimitar raised above his head, the desperation of a starving man glinting in his eyes. No! screamed the voice [in her head]. This is over. This is past. This is not who you are. But the mask of control was slipping, almost gone. And in her rage, her frustration, her fear, Quirk reached up and tore it away. She reached out her hand. Heat rose in her palm. She felt divine power within her. She felt words she had never learned forming on her tongue, words that pushed back at the skin of reality stretched over the world. Felt them punch through. The guard was almost on her. His sword hung above her head. The heat in her palm became a physical pain. A scalding, searing expression of hate and rage. She howled, loud enough to match the guard`s battle cry. And then, there, in the darkness, she gave birth to fire.

They were past the second house of the village before people noticed them. Even then, as heads began to track them, the gazes seemed half turned inward. Balur looked at one woman, middle-aged, wiry arms and paunchy belly, her graying hair scraped back beneath a bonnet that might just once have been white. Her pupils were too large in her gaunt face, not quite focused on him. Her head was cast back slightly, nostrils flared, mouth just open enough for him to make out her tongue flicking back and forth, licking the back of her teeth. A noise somewhere between a growl and a moan drifted up quietly from the back of her throat. They were all like that. Not quite present. The same slightly defeated, underfed look. Beneath the rising flavor of Quirk`s potion, despondency laced the air of the village. These were people who had given up. Quirk`s potion was working in them, brewing and churning in their heads and hearts, but whatever primal rage it was trying to kindle was buried so deep, the fires would not catch.

"You clear this bloody road now," said the second soldier, waving his sword vaguely at them. "This is Mattrax`s business. And it don`t need to be interrupted by... by..." He considered Balur. "Things like you." Lette turned to him. "Can you be quiet, while I talk some sense into my colleague here for a moment?" "It is being best to just go along with her," Balur said. "There is being no reasoning with her when she is beign like this." The soldier shut his mouth again. "I would like," Lette said to Will, "to say that I am very sorry that this cow once belonged to you. But I`m not. I legitimately don`t give a shit. I just need a cow. Because doing so will allow me to get my hands on so much fucking gold, I can actually smelt it down and make myself an entire herd of golden fucking cows, should I so wish. So you are going to get out of my way, stop interfering with my cow thievery, and get back in the gods-hexed bush. Do you understand?" Something in her tone must finally have broken through. Will looked away from his cow, and back to his bush. "Thievery?" said the first soldier. "You think you is—" Without looking, Lette flicked out her arm. A dagger appeared in the guard`s throat, buried to the hilt. He dropped to the ground gurgling. Balur shook his head. "I was warning you. I was being very clear."

Like the pregnant clouds above, Lette`s impatience was growing. "I was telling you to be taking a nap this morning," said Balur, who it seemed had decided to do an impression of her mother. "You are always being cranky after early morning crimes." She looked over at Balur, squatting beside her in the bush. Well, mostly on top of the bush. The bush was not really up to concealing the lizard man. But when he was sitting stil enough, and curled up on himself, Balur could look remarkably like a piece of the landscape. A particularly stupid piece of the landscape. "Did I say anything?" she snapped. "Any complaint?" "You were breathing angrily," Balur deadpanned.

The problem with high-risk adventuring, and other acts of derring-do, Lette thought, was that they mostly involved just sitting around on your ass. No ancient and mysterious cult had ever bothered to build its temple within an easy morning`s ride of a city. No long-dead king ever bothered to be buried anywhere near where he had actually ruled. And considering the frequency with which terrible beasts terrorized villages, they tended to live remarkably far from them. Even the more lowly adventurous acts — mugging two soldiers and a cow, for example — seemed to involve lurking in a yew bush for such an inordinate amount of time that several bards would start composing ballads about the pair of you.

Will stood, momentarily paralyzed by the vision of a cave full of goblins. Run! screamed a small and eminently sensible part of his mind, but for some reason his legs weren`t paying attention. They, it seemed, were more fatalistic. They would only carry him from so many attempts on his life in one day before simply giving up and accepting the fate as inevitable. "Sorry," he heard himself say. "Wrong cave. My one`s few entrances down." He went to take a step away from the goblins by his cowardly legs were still not on the same page as the rest of him. A low growl seemed to rise from every small mouth in the room, a whisper brought to the volume of a roar by the sheer density of the bodies packed into the space before him. "I`ll be off then," he said, more to his own anatomy than to the crowd. His knees shivered in response, but he thought the movement boded collapse more than any sort of horizontal traction.

Adventuring had seemed such a good idea when she`d started out. Punching monsters for a living. Receiving riches and glory in return. And there really was glory. She knew at least three people who had had songs composed about their endeavors. Four if you counted "The Ballad of Fairthroat the Man-Whore" but that one didn`t end with Fairthroat in possession of all his anotomy, so the glory thing was questionable there. And yet, even assuming you got a song, and that then someone managed to reconcile the sweaty, bloodstained social deviant in front of them with the shining idealized figure they`d heard songs about, you were still left with the fact that any riches coming your way would be the result of a significant amount of violence and personal harm. And violence and personal harm had a way of spiraling out of control. Very far out of control.