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

"DareWing," he said, and put a hand on the other's shoulder, "let me tell you what I have learned this
day ..."

DareWing wheeled the Strike Force over the Alps. DragonStar had returned to Sanctuary with his
assorted animals. Having heard what the StarSon had theorised, DareWing almost wished he did
meet up with one of the Demons. Either DragonStar's theory was correct, in which case DareWing could
deliver to the Demons an almighty shock, or he was incorrect, in which case it was better for DareWing
to fail than DragonStar. DareWing could feel the probing of Sheol in his mind — it was mid-afternoon
now, and Despair reigned over the wasteland — and he smiled ...
He understood very well that although Sheol could not touch him, she could nevertheless feel him, as
she could feel every one of the almost two thousand members of the Strike Force.
DareWing's smile widened, and he soared in the air, and he spoke to his command.

She hissed and crouched down on all fours about the fire she shared with the other Demons.
Qeteb stared curiously at her, one hand paused in the act of raising a half-burned, half-raw joint of
flesh and bone (it was possibly cow, but it had transformed so much during its demented
life that it was now impossible to determine its original species). "What is it?"
"They are back!"
"Who?" Qeteb threw away the half-eaten joint and stood up.
Sheol's form flowed into that of a misshapen cat, then a pig, then finally back into a vaguely
humanoid form again. She got to her feet, brushing down her gown with something resembling disdain.
"Those who can resist us."
Qeteb grunted. "How many?"
"Many."
"Where?"
 "To the north."
Qeteb thought, and then smiled behind his iron mask. "Go," he said to her, and Sheol gurgled with
happiness, and her form shifted yet again into that of a winged serpent, and she lifted (wriggled) into
the air and disappeared into the raging winds of dust.

DareWing soared his command into the sky above the eastern Icescarp Alps. His sharp eyes scoured
the landscape below him, but there was nothing but the plunge of icy black cliff and the drift of frost.
Nothing lived here, apparently.
South? No, best to check the eastern regions before he sallied south, thus DareWing led his
command — deadly jewel-bright silence — over the flat plains between the Icescarp Alps and the coast
of the Widowmaker Sea, an area that had once been, before the wasteland encroached, the
approaches to the unmapped northern tundra of the Avarinheim.
"The Demonic hordes have not travelled this far north," DareWing eventually said to the Icarii-wraith
flying beside him. "We may have to —"
And he stopped, stunned. Behind him a low buzz of unworded comment rose from the
Strike Force. There was a pack of something moving south towards the wasteland, but it was not what
DareWing and his Strike Force had thought to encounter.
"Stars in heaven," DareWing whispered. "Skraelings!"

"Skraelings!" DareWing said again, hardly able to believe what his eyes told him were there.
Skraelings?
Hadn't Azhure destroyed all Skraelings?
But no, she hadn't. Only the ones in Tencendor itself. The unmapped tundras in the extreme
north had always had a breeding population of the creatures, and DareWing supposed that now the
forests had gone, they would almost naturally drift south.