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

Where?
Furious, Qeteb sent firestorms tumbling about Tencendor. They ravaged from the Murkle
Mountains to the Nordra, and from the Minaret Peaks to the cliffs of Widewall Bay. Sheets of ice
fell from the sky, and impaled creatures as they scrambled to avoid the fireballs. Molten earth spurted in
great gouts from the chasms that wound over Tencendor.
And even this did not flush forth StarLaughter, nor reveal her presence.
Qeteb slid down from his beast, strode over to Barzula, and hauled him from his mount to the
ground.
He sent a furious armoured foot booting into the Demon's abdomen. " Where is she?"
"I do not know, Great Father!" Barzula screamed.
"Where is she?" Qeteb roared as he punched Sheol in her throat, sending her to the ground as well.
"I do not know, Great Father!"
" Why did you not kill her?" Qeteb bellowed.
All four Demons now huddled on the ground, their faces pressed into the dirt.
"We thought you might like to play with her," Sheol eventually whispered.
Qeteb fell silent, regarding his Demons.
"Get up," he said, and turned away, staring into the northern distance. Star Laughter had escaped
very far away, and that probably meant north. But not only had she escaped, she had somehow
managed to cloak herself from his power, and that Qeteb did not like at all.
She should not know how to do that ... and if she had found the means to do so, it meant that there
was still some secrets left in this land that Qeteb did not understand.
Secrets probably powered with the knowledge of the Enemy.
"It should not be so," the Midday Demon whispered to himself. "Haven't I ravaged this land
completely?"
But even as he said it, Qeteb knew that his power was not yet absolute. The power of the Enemy
continued to linger within the land — the Sanctuary was the perfect example of such power — and until
the StarSon was dead, Qeteb could not destroy it completely.
He looked skywards, and beckoned. "My lovely," he said. "I would speak with you."
StarGrace spiralled down from the sky.
"I need you to hunt," said Qeteb.

Spiredore deposited StarLaughter and WolfStar in a world that was different to the one
immediately about the Maze and Spiredore, but that was, nevertheless, substantially the same.
StarLaughter stood and stared, smiling and seemingly uncaring for the moment that
WolfStar lay crumpled and semi-conscious at her feet.
The trip through Spiredore (or, rather, the journey up its sharp-edged stairs) had not been kind to
him.
StarLaughter let him be for the moment, allowing her eyes and senses to absorb the scenery. The
Icescarp mountains had always been frigid and barren, picked clean by the icy winds that
whistled over the northern Iskruel Ocean and through every blackened crevice of the ranges.
But before Qeteb had wasted the land, the mountains had always seemed alive ... almost as if
warmth smouldered under their cold, hard skin, and all one had to do was find the way
down through the crevices to reach it.
Then, of course, the Icarii had made their home in the mountains. Talon Spike had been the
greatest mountain of all, and the Icarii had gradually tunnelled and chiselled away its interior to create
living spaces in which to enjoy their exile from the southern lands.
When she and WolfStar had plotted and hungered their way through murder and into
destruction, Talon Spike had been a place of refuge and haunting beauty. Most of it had
been excavated even then ... and StarLaughter had actually grown up inside the mountain rather than in
the southern Minaret Peaks. Her mother, CoalStar, had preferred the views and the scent of the ocean