"Paul Kearney - Monarchies of God 2 - The Heretic Kings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kearney Paul)

Also by Paul Kearney

HAWKWOOD’S VOYAGE
Book One of The Monarchies of God

For my brothers,
Sean and James Kearney

Acknowledgments to:

John McLaughlin, Richard Evans and Jo Fletcher, for their patience and hard work on my behalf

WHAT WENT BEFORE . . .
I T is over half a millennium since the birth of the Blessed Saint Ramusio, the man who brought the light of
true belief into the western world. The empire of the Fimbrians, which once spanned the wide continent
of Normannia, is only a dim memory. Their empire has been transformed into a series of powerful
kingdoms, and the Fimbrian Electorates have remained isolated within their borders for over four
centuries, indifferent to events beyond them.

But now things are taking place which cannot be ignored. Aekir, the Holy City on the eastern frontier and
seat of the High Pontiff Macrobius, head of the Church, has fallen to the teeming armies of the heathen
Merduks, who have been pressing on the eastern frontier of the Ramusian kingdoms for decades.

Caught up in the fury of its fall, Corfe Cear-Inaf flees westwards, one of the few of its defenders who has
survived. On the refugee-choked road he befriends an old man the Merduks have blinded, and finds out
that he is none other than Macrobius himself, who escaped unrecognized by the troops of Shahr Baraz,
the Merduk general. Corfe is nursing his own private grief: he left his wife in Aekir, and believes her
dead. Unknown to him, however, she survived the assault and was captured and sent to the court of the
Sultan as spoils of war to join his harem. Corfe and Macrobius trek westwards along with thousands of
others, seeking sanctuary in the impregnable fortress of Ormann Dyke, the west’s last line of defence
after Aekir.

In the meantime, across the continent, the mariner Richard Hawkwood returns from a voyage to find that
in this time of fear and uncertainty the militant Churchmen of the Inceptine Order are cracking down on
anyone in the great port-capital of Abrusio, first city of the kingdom of Hebrion, who is either a user of
magic, or a foreigner. Since half of Hawkwood’s crew are not native to Hebrion, they are hauled off to
await the pyre. Hebrion’s king, Abeleyn, tries to do what he can to limit the scale of the purge in the
raucous old port, and at the same time is involved in a battle of wills with his senior Churchman,
Himerius, who has instigated it, and who has also asked the Church to send him aid in the form of two
thousand Knights Militant, the fanatical military arm of the Church.

The wizard Bardolin is also affected by this purge. He befriends a young female shape-shifter, rescuing
her from one of the city patrols, but it seems likely to be only a temporary reprieve. Then his old teacher,
the King’s wizardly (and proscribed) advisor, the mage Golophin, tells him of a possible way out. The
Hebrian King is sponsoring a westward voyage of exploration and colonization, and its ships will have
room for a sizable contingent of the Dweomer-folk who at this moment are being hunted down across the
kingdom.

The captain of the expedition is none other than Richard Hawkwood, who has been blackmailed into
taking on the mission by an ambitious minor noble, Murad of Galiapeno. Murad is after a kingdom of his