"Sara Douglass - Redemption 3 - Crusader" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglass Sara)

BOOK THREE OF THE WAYFARER REDEMPTION




SARADOUGLASS




Books by Sara Douglass
The Axis Trilogy
Book One: BATTLEAXE
Book Two: ENCHANTER
Book Three: STARMAN
threshold
The Wayfarer Redemption Trilogy
Book One: SINNER
BookTwo:PILGRIM
BookThree:CRUSADER
Prologue
An Evil Released


"What can we do?" Fischer said uselessly, but needing the comfort of an endlessly repeated
question. "What can we do? Bloody what, you ask?"
"Easy, mate." Henry Fielding laid a hand on Fischer's tense forearm.
Fischer shifted his arm away then turned his head towards the far, windowless wall. He was in his
seventies, a white-haired, emaciated old man, his face deeply lined with the forty-year struggle against the
evil that had savaged — pervaded, consumed, destroyed — his world.
When it had begun he'd been a man in his prime: copper-haired, bright-eyed, lithe and energetic,
determined to fight and destroy the invading beings.
"Demons" was a strange, horrid word that Fischer had only now learned to use, but which he still
found completely distasteful.
"Demons" did not fit a world that was based almost entirely on scientific theory. On logical
explanation. On provable fact. On the complete belief in technology that was far more acceptable and
comfortable than religious beliefs. "Evil" did not exist. Only scientific fact existed. Only the vagaries of
nature and as-yet-to-be-controlled-and-predicted geographical events existed. Only the selfish and
arrogant nature of human society existed. Only petty crime by social misfits and corporate crime by the
socially successful existed.
Evil had no place in this most rational and explainable of worlds.
Until it dropped out of the sky over New York one blithe and fair Sunday morning.
That was what took us three decades to come to terms with, Fischer thought. The idea that we'd
been invaded, not by pastel-coloured and elegantly-elongated extraterrestrials with great dark eyes in
shiny Spielberg-like metal-pocked spaceships, but by pure, and utterly hungrily angry, Evil.
And thus for three decades pure Evil in the shape of the TimeKeeper Demons ran amok. Countries
were laid waste, save for the moaning, shuffling crazed populations that roamed their dusty surfaces.
Cities were abandoned, jungles stripped of foliage, oceans dried and ravaged. Within a year the human
population of earth had gone from billions to a few pitiful ten thousand huddled in bunkers, waiting out the
demonic hours, and wondering how they could strike back.