The Saga of Larten Crepsley 1-4. Darren Shan

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СКАЧАТЬ the base of the vat, soaking the sleeves of her dress.

      “Sorry, sir,” the girl gasped.

      Traz grabbed her hair – she was new to the team and had made the mistake of not cutting it short – and jerked her face up to his. “If you ever do that again,” he snarled, “I’ll bite off your nose.”

      It would have been funny if anyone else had made such a ludicrous threat. But Traz had bitten off more than one nose in his time – a good number of ears too – and they all knew that he meant it. Nobody snickered.

      Traz released the girl. He wasn’t interested in newcomers. He knew the younger children were terrified of him and probably dreamt about him when they went to bed every night. They were too easy to scare. He wanted to work on some of the more experienced hands, remind a few of the older lot of his power, make sure they didn’t start taking him for granted.

      He cast his gaze around. There was a tall boy in one corner, a lazy piece of work. Traz started to move in on him, but then he caught sight of Vur Horston and changed direction.

      Traz slowly strolled past Vur, giving him the impression that he’d escaped the foreman’s wrath. But when he was about four strides past he stopped, turned and stepped up behind the boy.

      Vur knew he was in trouble, but he worked on, not giving any sign that he was aware of Traz’s presence. Larten could see that his cousin was in for a beating, and although he risked drawing attention to himself, he raised his head slightly to watch. He felt sick and hateful, but there was nothing he could do.

      For a while Traz didn’t say anything, just studied Vur as he dunked cocoons and held them beneath the surface of the water. Then he stuck a thick, dirty finger into the vat and held it there for a couple of seconds.

      “Lukewarm,” he said, withdrawing the finger and sucking it dry.

      Vur gulped, but didn’t move. He wanted to throw more sticks on the fire – even though the heat was fine – but he had to keep the cocoons down. If he released them early, he’d be in an even worse situation than he was now.

      Behind Vur’s back, Traz scowled. He’d hoped the boy would panic, release the cocoons and give the foreman an excuse to batter him.

      “You’re a vile, useless piece of work,” Traz said. He tried to think of something more cutting, then recalled someone telling him that the boy was an orphan. “An insult to the memory of your mother,” Traz added, and was delighted to note the boy’s back stiffen with surprise and anger.

      “You didn’t know that I knew your mother, did you?” Traz said slyly, walking around the vat, cracking his knuckles, warming to the game.

      “No, sir,” Vur croaked.

      “She didn’t work here, did she?”

      “No.”

      “So where do you think I knew her from?”

      Vur shook his head. Across from him, Larten guessed what the foreman was up to, but there was no way he could warn Vur. He just hoped that Vur was reading Traz’s intentions too. Usually Vur was a better judge of people than Larten was, but fear had a way of shaking up a person’s thoughts.

      “Well?” Traz purred.

      “I don’t know, sir.”

      “Inns,” Traz declared grandly. “I knew her from inns.”

      Vur’s head rose and he frowned. Larten groaned — his cousin had swallowed the bait. This was going to be bad.

      “Beg pardon, sir, but you’re mistaken. My mother didn’t work in an inn.”

      “She did,” Traz sniffed.

      “No, sir,” Vur said. “She was a seamstress.”

      “By day,” Traz jeered. “But she earned a bit extra by night.” He gave Vur a few seconds to dwell on that. “Worked in a lot of inns. I met with her many times.”

      Vur was too young to have kissed a girl, but there were few true innocents in the world at that time. He knew what the foreman was implying. His cheeks flushed. The worst thing was, he couldn’t say for sure that it was a lie. He was almost certain that Traz was toying with him, but Vur had few memories of his parents, so he couldn’t dismiss the insult as an outrageous piece of slander.

      “She wasn’t a pretty thing,” Traz continued, relishing the twisted look on Vur’s face. “But she was pretty good at her job. Aye?”

      Vur started to tremble, but not with fear. He had always been able to control his temper – much better than Larten could – but he’d never been subjected to an insult of this nature before.

      Traz whispered something in Vur’s ear. The boy’s face went white and a lone cocoon bobbed up inside the vat.

      “Keep the bloody things down!” Traz roared, punching Vur hard in the left side of his head. Vur was slugged sideways and lost his grip on the cocoons. They all shot to the top. “Idiot!” Traz yelled and followed it up with cruder curses, each accompanied by a blow to Vur’s head.

      Vur tried to push the cocoons down again, but was knocked away from the vat by the bullying foreman, then to the ground. As he hit the floor, Traz kicked the boy in the stomach. Vur cried out with pain, then threw up over Traz’s boot.

      The foreman’s fury doubled. Cursing the boy with his vilest insults, he grabbed cocoons from the vat and lobbed them at Vur’s face. Vur retreated like a crab, trying to avoid the soggy missiles. Larten and the others watched with their jaws open. They had never seen Traz as mad as this. Nobody was bothering with work any longer. All eyes were on the furious bully and his defenceless victim.

      When the vat ran out, Traz plucked cocoons from the vat next to it. He had never before manhandled the valuable balls of silken thread, but something inside him had snapped. It wasn’t anything Vur had said or done. This had been building within the hate-filled foreman for a long time, and Vur was simply in the wrong place at the worst possible moment.

      Traz stamped after the fleeing Vur, pelting him with cocoons, calling the boy and his mother all sorts of disgusting names. Larten saw Vur getting close to the door and prayed his cousin wouldn’t make it. He had a vision of Traz slamming the door shut on Vur, over and over, smashing the bony boy to pieces. It would be better if Vur collapsed in the middle of the floor. All Traz could hit him with then would be his fists, feet and cocoons.

      As if responding to Larten’s silent prayer, Vur stopped crawling and held his ground ahead of the advancing foreman. But Vur hadn’t stopped to take a beating. Something had switched inside him, just as it had inside the vicious Traz. He knew it was lunacy, but he couldn’t stop himself. Maybe it was a reaction to one of the insults aimed at his dead mother. Maybe a bone had shattered in his ribs and the pain drove him momentarily insane. Or maybe life had been leading him to this point since he first stepped into the factory, and it was simply his destiny to one day hit back at a world that treated helpless children so repulsively.

      Vur snatched a cocoon from the floor, hurled it at Traz and screamed, “Leave me alone, you…” He paused as the cocoon struck Traz between his eyes, then smiled and finished with an insult every bit as crude as any the foreman had used.

      Traz came СКАЧАТЬ