Читать книгу Kane and the Flame - Ар'лан ис'Дрекхэм - Страница 4

The quarter that remembered the Burned Skies looked the part. The houses here leaned into each other like drunks after a tavern closed, propping up their neighbors with rotten beams. Black mold covered the walls, and in its bizarre patterns you could make out contorted faces if you stared long enough. Kane didn’t stare.

The fog lay thick as old cotton wool. It muffled sounds into indistinct rustling, blurred outlines, turned houses into ghosts, crept into the lungs and settled there as damp cold. The locals called it the “Breath of Gloom” and tried not to stick their noses out of their homes unless necessary. Kane called it “convenient” — the fog hid him just as well as it hid the creatures.

The first witness was found where he belonged — in a pile of rags shifting by the wall of an abandoned bakery. The pile reeked of cheap booze, urine, and long-standing rot.

A beggar. Old, filthy, with the clouded eyes of a man who had long ago traded reality for cheap swill. Kane squatted down. His knee cracked. He shoved a copper coin under the beggar’s nose — a dull disk that glinted faintly in the gray light.

“Hey, old man. Seen a girl around here? Alone, skinny, not from around here.”

The beggar jerked as if electrocuted. He scraped at the cobblestones with his crooked, bird-claw fingers, trying to crawl away. His eyes widened, animal terror flooding them.

“Saw her!” he gasped, blasting Kane with the smell of alcohol. “Saw her, I say… She walked, and the stones melted under her feet! Holy fire, I thought, a she-demon in human skin! So I ran!”

Kane calmly took the copper coin back. It clinked as it fell into his purse.

“You were drunk, old man. Stones melting…” He gestured at the huge puddle under the beggar’s feet, where cigarette butts and a dead rat floated. “The moss doesn’t grow here because of the rats, not because of fire.”

The beggar whimpered and burrowed deeper into his stinking rags. Useless.

Kane straightened up, his knee cracking, and walked on, weaving between puddles and piles of trash that nobody cleaned up here. Why bother? The next rain would wash it all into the gutters anyway.

The market in this part of the city worked while it was light. Now, in the gray twilight, the merchants were hastily closing up shop, shoving goods into sacks and chests, glancing back at the fog every few moments. One of the women — stocky, with red, sleep-deprived eyes and flour-stained hands — was boarding up her stall with such fury it looked like she was taking personal revenge on it.

Kane stopped nearby. A board flew off to the side, the nail scraping unpleasantly and bending.

“Need help?” he asked without much hope.

The woman glared at him like a wolf, but seeing the sword belt and his cold eyes, she cooled down a bit. Hunters weren’t liked around here, but they were feared more than the unclean things.

“Help,” she exhaled, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. “Third day and I still can’t pull myself together. Look, the corner’s scorched.”

Kane looked. The corner of the stall was indeed scorched — but strangely. The edges were even, as if the fire hadn’t spread gradually but had struck from a single point and instantly gone out. Neatly. Sterilely. Not even smoldering embers remained.

“What happened?” he asked, taking the hammer. The metal struck the nail head with a dull thud.

“There was no girl!” The merchant suddenly shrieked. “A flash, I tell you! A flash! I was saving my goods! A lightning bolt, I thought, thrown by the gods to punish sinners. And after that blaze…” She lowered her voice to a whisper and crossed herself fervently. “It smelled sweet, like in church during a service!”

Kane hammered in the last nail — thud, thud, thud — and returned the hammer to the woman.

“How far from here?”

“Well, in that dead end,” she waved her hand somewhere into the fog. “Where the rats die. Just don’t go there, hunter. It’s still… warm.”

He went.

The dead end between two houses looked like a wound. Soot covered the brick walls, but not the kind left by an ordinary fire — old, ingrained. This was fresh, smelling of smoke and something else, unfamiliar, unsettling.

Kane stepped inside and immediately knew something was wrong.

The air was dry. In this damp, perpetually wet city, this little pocket of space breathed heat, like an oven just extinguished. Kane ran his tongue over his parched lips.

On the ground, on the dirty cobblestones, a black circle stood out.

Perfectly even. Burned down to the stone.

Kane knelt. The stone was warm. He ran his finger along the edge of the circle — the soot crumbled into gray dust, but underneath, the stone was clean, even melted at the edges, transformed into something like smooth glass. Inside the circle lay ash. Not ordinary gray ash, but almost white, with a pearlescent sheen, shimmering in the light like fish scales.

He poked at it with his knife and brought it to his face. It smelled of ozone and incense.

Remains of demons. Low-tier. Three, maybe four. Burned so thoroughly that not even bones remained — only this light, almost beautiful ash that the wind had already begun to scatter through the dead end.

“Holy shit…” Kane breathed.

He stood up and touched the wall. The brick was warm. So many hours after the flash — warm, as if the sun were shining directly on it.

She didn’t set the house on fire, he realized. She destroyed them. A weak but pure force.

The client hadn’t lied. This wasn’t a demon. It was something else. Something that knew how to burn creatures so that only a memory remained.

Kane circled the area, peering at the ash, the melted stones, the soot-stained wall. Then he froze.

The soot on the wall… it wasn’t just a random stain. Near the floor, a clear imprint was visible.

Small. Narrow. Five fingers.

He knelt again, tilted his head, squinting from a sharp angle. And then he saw the tracks.

They led from the circle — a trail of small bare feet printed in the soot… The tracks crossed the burned zone and dove under the wide eaves of a crooked house. There, where the rain hadn’t reached, the same trail was clearly visible in the dust, leading deeper into the slums. Kane followed it with his eyes. The fog was thickening, and beyond five steps, nothing was visible.

Kane adjusted his sword belt… And stepped into the fog.