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

black heart. They climbed and capered and whispered through every corridor and conundrum of
the Maze, a writhing army of maddened animals and peoples, waiting only for Qeteb, waiting for the
word for them to act.
Out there waited a hunting, for the hunt in the Maze had proven disappointing in the extreme. The
man, the false StarSon, had offered his breast to the point of the sword without a whimper
(indeed, with a smile and with words of love), and now the hopes and dreams of the maddened horde
lay in drifts and shards along the hardened corridors of the Maze.
There was a hunt, somewhere. There was a victim, somewhere. There was a sacrifice, waiting,
somewhere, and the whispering, maniacal horde knew it.
They lived for the Hunt, and for the Hunt alone.

There was one creature crawling through the Maze who was not at all insane, although some may have
doubted the lucidness of the twisting formulations of his mind.
WolfStar, still covered in Caelum's blood, still with the horror of that plunging sword imprinted on
his mind, crawling towards what he hoped might be a salvation, but which he thought would probably be
a death.
Creatures swarmed around and over him, and although a few gave him a cursory glance, or a peck,
or a grinding with dulled teeth, none paid him any sustained attention.
After all, he looked like just one more of their company.

Chapter 2
The Detritus of an Epic


A rather tumbledown, grey-walled hovel sat in the centre of the clearing. Flowerbeds surrounded the hut,
but they were overgrown with mouldy-stemmed weeds and thistles. A picket fence surrounded the hovel
and its gardens; most of the pickets were snapped off. The once-white paint had faded and peeled from
the pickets that remained whole, so that the fence resembled nothing so much as the sad mouth of a
senile gape-brained man.
Ur's enchanted nursery had fallen into unhappy days.
Two women sat on a garden seat set in a small paved area.
Several of the paving stones had crumbled, and dust crept across the uneven court.
The Mother wrapped Her fingers around a cup of tea and tried not to sigh again. She was tired —
the effort of closing off the trails to the Sacred Groves against any incursions by the Demons had been
exhausting — but more worrying was Her overwhelming feeling of malaise. The Mother did not feel well.
In truth, She felt profoundly ill.
Tencendor had been wasted by Qeteb, the Earth Tree was gone (surviving only in embryonic form
in the seedling She had given Faraday), and the Mother could feel the life force ebbing from Her.
But not before — oh gods, not before! — that life could be restored elsewhere!
"Is it gone?" a cracked voice beside Her asked, and the Mother jumped.
"What? Oh, no, thank you, I still have a half cup left." And yet almost everything else had gone,
hadn't it? Everything ...
Ur grumbled incoherently into her cup, and the Mother looked at her. The hood of Ur's red
cloak was lying over her angular shoulders, revealing the woman's bald skull. The skin over Ur's face
was deeply wrinkled, but it stretched tight and angry over the bones of her skull.
Ur had lost her forest. For over fifteen thousand years Ur had tended her nursery hidden deep within
the trees of the Sacred Groves. As each female Avar Bane had died, so her soul had come here to be
transplanted out as a seedling in a tiny terracotta pot. Forty-two thousand Banes had transformed in this
manner, and Ur had known them all — their names, their histories, their likes and loves and
disappointments. And, having cradled them, Ur had then handed them over to Faraday to be replanted