Читать книгу Kane and the Flame - Ар'лан ис'Дрекхэм - Страница 3

“Hey, Kane. Still alive?”

The beer mug cracked in his hand. Kane forced his fingers to relax — the clay walls spiderwebbed with fine fractures but held together. He looked up.

Lissa stood before him — a scrawny barmaid with perpetually red, chapped hands. She slammed a bowl of murky stew onto the table.

“Not dead yet,” Kane grunted.

Lissa snorted and flitted off, shuffling her worn-out shoes across the sticky clay floor. Kane watched her go, his gaze sliding over the moldy walls, the two oil lamps casting writhing shadows on the ceiling. The “Rotten Tooth” exhaled its usual hopelessness.

He sat motionless, rooted to the bench like part of the rotten interior. A man with ash-gray skin and a scar across his eyebrow. Any regular at the tavern would say the scariest thing about Kane wasn’t the scar or his fists — fists that could crush a clay mug. The scariest thing was his eyes. Tired, cynical, with such coldness at the bottom that even Kane felt uneasy when he caught his reflection in a murky beer glass.

But now he was looking inward. And there he saw a different face.

A child’s face, with curls and a laughing mouth. His little sister. The one whose scream he still heard in his nightmares.

The tavern had its usual evening atmosphere. An old man by the counter sharpened his knife with pleasure, listening to the screech of metal on stone — the only music he acknowledged. In the corner, two drunkards had already forgotten what they were about to fight over and now just stared at each other in silent, drunken hatred.

An ordinary evening. Ordinary melancholy. An ordinary life that stretched on like old chewing gum.

Then the light in the corner went out.

Not everywhere. The lamp on the table kept burning. But its rays seemed to hit an invisible wall, flowing around the figure of a man who had silently lowered himself onto the bench across from him. A hooded cloak covered him from head to toe, and his face remained in shadow, even though the light fell directly on it.

Kane caught a smell: dampness, mold, and something sweetish and cloying. Mastic for bookbinding, rotting folios, book dust. The smell of archives. The smell of people who spend too much time among dead pages.

“I need a man who isn’t afraid of fire,” the stranger’s voice was quiet, flat, and utterly lifeless, like the creak of an old door. “Or of what’s left of it.”

Kane finished his beer and only then looked up. In the shadow of the hood, only the tip of a pale, almost alabaster chin was visible.

“A demon?” he asked, setting the mug back on the table. His voice sounded lazy, but his hand was already on the knife hilt beneath the table. “Price depends on the rank. For a Rattler — a silver piece. For a Bonebreaker — a gold one. If it’s a Prince of the Abyss — I don’t do that kind of auction.”

The stranger didn’t appreciate the joke. He just tilted his head — and the movement was strange, unnaturally smooth, as if his joints worked differently than a human’s.

“Not a demon,” he said. “Worse. A girl who thinks she’s a firework.”

Kane froze.

“A girl? You look like someone who catches rats in a library, not a procurer.”

“I need a hunter,” the stranger interrupted. Steel crept into his voice, though he hadn’t even raised it. “Someone who can find and bring her. Alive.”

“That’ll cost you.”

“I know.”

A purse landed on the table, right in a greasy stain from the stew. Heavy. Kane gauged the weight with practiced ease: silver, and a lot of it. For that kind of money, he could stay in the “Rotten Tooth” for six months without Lissa giving him dirty looks about his tab.

“District,” he said curtly.

“The Old Quarters. By the eastern wall. Where the houses remember the Burned Skies.” The stranger rose, and his cloak didn’t even stir, as if made of lead. “She’s dangerous, hunter. But not to you. You… won’t burn.”

The last words sounded strange. Almost like a blessing. Or a curse.

Kane wanted to ask more, but the stranger was already gone — silent as a shadow, dissolving into the doorway. Only the smell of dampness still hung in the air, mixing with the stench of cheap tobacco and sour beer.

Kane tucked the purse into his shirt. The leather felt its pleasant weight. The stew had cooled, covered in an unappetizing gray film. He stared at it, feeling a dull irritation rising inside him.

He hated jobs like this. When they paid you like royalty but didn’t tell you who to look for. That always meant one thing: shit that would surface later. Big, stinking shit.

Kane stood up, threw a worn cloak of thick wool over his shoulders — it smelled of old leather and metal. Checked his sword belt — the blade slid easily in its scabbard, the knives were in place.

Lissa caught his eye.

“Already?” she asked, surprised. “What about staying the night?”

“Business.”

He stepped out into the night.

The rain met him with the kiss of cold drizzle. Not a downpour, but that nasty, persistent dampness that instantly crawled inside his collar and made the cobblestones slick as fish scales.

Kane headed toward the Old City. The sound of his steps drowned in the whisper of water, the squelch of mud, and the occasional sob — dripping from rotten drainpipes.

The streets were empty. At this hour, normal people stayed home, shutters nailed shut and protective charms hung on their doors. Garlic, iron horseshoes, rowan berries — they helped against the lesser creatures like mosquito repellent. Didn’t kill them, but kept them away.

Kane didn’t hang charms. He preferred to kill.

His hand rested on the knife hilt as he turned into an alley between two crooked houses. No lanterns burned here — the glass had long been smashed, the oil drunk by rats. The darkness was thick enough to chew.

He sensed the tail before any sound confirmed it. Just a chill between his shoulder blades. An animal instinct that hunters paid for with sleepless nights.

Kane slowed his step, pretended to adjust a buckle on his belt. He turned slightly sideways, offering his back — bait.

Under the stairs leading to a cellar, there was simply blackness. But not the kind of blackness born from lack of light. That blackness was breathing.

He caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. From the corner where a wall should have been, two coals appeared — dull, reddish. Then a sound tore through the air — a wet, gurgling cough, as if someone was trying to clear lungs full of water.

A Rattler.

The creature jumped before it finished coughing. Kane didn’t see its body — just a clot of darkness flying at him, a gaping maw full of needle-like teeth. The air stirred, reeking of swamp rot and carrion.

Kane took a half-step sideways — dry, calculated, without panic. The attack whizzed past his ear, blasting him with icy draft. And in the same motion, pivoting on his heel, he struck upward.

Cold iron sank into flesh that shouldn’t exist. The demon didn’t even squeal — it just exhaled, collapsing into black ash, and a stinking sludge splashed onto the cobblestones, hissing in the rain.

Kane wiped the blade on his pant leg. He wasn’t even winded. His heart beat steadily.

He walked on, leaving behind the hissing puddle that the rain was quickly washing into the gutter.

By the eastern wall, in the Old Quarters, a firework girl was waiting for him.

The room he rented was no better than the “Rotten Tooth” — the same mold in the corners, the same dank chill that had soaked even into the stones. It smelled of old rags, mice, and Kane himself — the ingrained scent of leather, gun oil, and that particular bitter dryness that seeps into the belongings of a man who has lived alone for a long time.

But it was quiet here. And best of all, he didn’t have to talk to anyone.

Kane lit a candle stub — the flame licked the wick, illuminating the shabby surroundings: a sagging bed, a table, a stool. He tossed the purse onto the table. It clinked heavily, contentedly.

He sat on the bed — the springs groaned pitifully — unbuckled his sword belt, laid the blade within reach. He always slept with a weapon.

His gaze fell on the wall. There, above the headboard, hung an old, faded drawing. A child’s hand had carefully traced clumsy figures: a house with a chimney, a tree, three little people — a big one, a medium one, and a tiny one. The colors were almost gone, the paper yellowed and cracked along the folds.

Kane stared at it for a long time, without blinking. Somewhere beyond the wall, water dripped steadily. Somewhere in the distance, a demon howled — mournfully, drawn out.

Then he blew out the candle. Darkness covered him like an old, familiar friend.

Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow I’ll find that girl. The firework.

And for the first time in a long while, he felt that tomorrow might bring something he couldn’t calculate in advance. Something that would knock him out of his usual rut.

He was wrong. It didn’t just knock him out. It burned his life to the ground.