Too Many Magicians

Начало книги

Commander Lord Ashley, Special Agent for His Majesty’s Imperial Naval Intelligence Corps, stood in the doorway of a cheap, rented room in a lower middle-class section of town near the Imperial Naval Docks in Cherbourg. The door was open, and a man lay on the floor with a large, heavy-handled knife in his chest.

His lordship lifted his eyes from the corpse and looked around the room. It was small; not more than eight by ten feet, he thought, and the low ceiling was only a bare six inches above his head. Along the right-hand wall was a low bed. It was made up, but the wrinkles in the cheap blue bedspread indicated that someone had been sitting on it — most likely, the dead man. A cheap, wooden table stood in the far left corner with a matching chair next to it. An ancient, lumpy-looking easy chair — probably bought secondhand — stood against the left wall, nearer the door. Another wooden chair, the twin of the one at the table, stood at the foot of the bed, completing the furniture. There were no pictures hung on the green-painted walls; there were no extraneous decorations of any kind. The personality of the man who lived here had not been implanted forcibly upon the room itself, certainly.

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