（外文电子版资料）Greg Keyes - The Python Kings Treasure.pdf

J Gregory Keyes - The Python Kings Treasure Fool Wolf only had a few days left to live when he saw the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes upon. Her hair was spun black glass, spilling down the sides of a face incised from amber, flowing over shoulders and down breasts of the same red-gold hue. He was too far away to see what color her eyes were, but he could feel her gaze on him. She stood on the edge of a cliff, half a bow-shot above him, looking down at the jade sea and the cinnamon sun it was swallowing in the west. And at him, on the desolate strand, fifteen days along the way to starvation. He stood rooted, stunned, watching her naked lithe half-shadow in the melting sunlight. She is pretty, the goddess imprisoned in him sighed, wistfully. She looks good enough to eat. Fool Wolfs stomach growled in agreement. A month earlier, in the Land of Nine Princes, in the many-tiered city of Fanva, Fool Wolf had been considerably better fed. He had arrived in Fanva with a single carnelian and two copper coins, fleeing from the blood-guttered city of Rumq Qaj. In the incense-choked gambling temples of Fanva, he had increased that jewel and those two coins into what was for him a small fortune. He took a room in a good inn, draped himself in silk, and feasted on roast pork, pheasant, peacock, and eel. He ate sweet fruits from the islands-Lorn, whitemelon, fernpears, bananas. He drank wines he could not name but which pleased him a great deal, and he bedded a series of women of the same sort. His fortunes changed, of course. He was caught cheating by one of the gambling-house priests. As gambling was a religious matter in Fanva, and cheating sacrilege, he was sentenced to death. While bets were being placed on which form of death would be chosen and how long he would survive, Fool Wolf escaped his would-be-executioners and fled into the Gibbering Quarter, where foreign diplomats and madmen lived. He eluded his pursuit