Crusader

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Map

Prologue: An Evil Released

1. The Wasteland

2. The Detritus of an Epic

3. A Son Lost, A Friend Gained

4. WolfStar

5. Of Sundry Enemies

6. The Enchanted Song Book

7. A Wander Through, and Into, Sanctuary

8. The Ploughed Field

9. Of Predestination and Confrontation

10. A Busy Day in Spiredore

11. StarLaughter

12. The Key to Sanctuary

13. Hidden Conversations

14. Envy

15. The Secrets of the Book

16. Fischer

17. Escape from Sanctuary

18. The Joy of the Hunt

19. The Apple

20. Qeteb’s Mansion of Dreams

21. Legal Niceties

22. The Sacred Groves

23. Niah Reborn

24. Zenith

25. Into the Sacred Groves

26. A Gloomy and Pain-Raddled Night

27. Axis Resumes a Purpose

28. Destruction

29. Family Relations

30. The Unexpected Heavens

31. StarLaughter’s Astonishing Turnabout

32. Revival

33. Urbeth’s Plan

34. WolfStar Feels Better

35. Dispersal

36. Pretty Brown Sal

37. Settling In

38. Sanctuary No More

39. Night: I

40. Night: II

41. The Avenue

42. Of Commitment

43. StarLaughter’s Quest

44. The Heart Incarnate

45. Trouble

46. Hidden Conversations

47. The Door

48. Gwendylyr’s Problem

49. The Butler’s Rule

50. The Memories of the Enemy

51. Sliding South

52. A Marital Reunion

53. Sigholt

54. A Troubled Night’s Dreaming

55. A Tastier Revenge Than Ever Imagined

56. StarLaughter’s Awful Mistake

57. South, Ever South

58. Sweetly, Innocently, Happily…

59. Midwiving Deity

60. The General’s Instructions

61. For the Love of a Bear Cub

62. Katie, Katie, Katie…

63. Hunting Through the Landscape

64. The Most Appalling Choice of All

65. Abandoned

66. Choose, DragonStar!

67. Bring Me My Bow of Burning Gold…

68. Twisted City

69. Light and Love

70. The Witness

71. The Waiting

72. The Tree

73. The Garden

Epilogue

Glossary

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Sara Douglass

Copyright

About the Publisher

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.

The ten thousand were those left sane, of course. There were still countless millions left roaming above ground, their minds completely unhinged, utterly demonised, noisily breeding — and entirely successfully — countless millions of genetically insane babies. Those infants that survived their first five years uneaten (or only partially eaten), grew into even worse monsters than their parents.

Fischer shuddered. The insane (and by now there were billions of them) were still out there, haunting the as yet unreclaimed surface of the planet.

He and his companions might have managed to trap and dismember Qeteb, but the other five Demons continued to howl their destructive way about the planet.

They had trapped and dismembered Qeteb, but not destroyed him.

This was the problem Fischer and his companions now faced. What to do? What to do?

“The other Demons will break through the barriers within the month,” said Katrina Fielding, Henry’s wife. She’d been the one to suggest the idea that the Demons could be trapped by reflecting their own malevolence back at them.

Fischer glanced at her. She was young, in her early forties, a mere child when the Demons had first dropped in.

She’d lived virtually her entire life underground, and it showed. Katrina’s shoulders and spine were stunted, her eyes dull, her skin pallid and flaky. She’d never been able to have children. And after the initial years underground only a scattering of babies, mostly physically or mentally disabled, had been born to the few women who came to term.

We’re dying, Fischer thought. Our entire race. The Demons will get us in the end, even if it may take them a generation or two longer than those they cornered above ground. If the Demons don’t leave soon then no-one will be left who can breed!

No-one sane, that is. The insane hordes above ground multiplied themselves with no effort, and certainly no thought, at all.

The idea terrified Fischer. “Whatever we do,” he said, “we’ve got to get rid both of Qeteb’s damned death-defying life parts, and the other five Demons as well.”

“There is only the one solution,” Henry said. “Devereaux’s proposal.”

Devereaux’s proposal frightened Fischer almost as much as the idea that the sane component of the human race would soon die out, leaving earth populated by the maniacal human hybrids (God knows with what they had interbred upstairs!). But a decision had to be made, and soon.

Why, why, why, Fischer thought, is there no government left to make this decision for us? Why couldn’t we leave it to a bunch of anonymously corrupted politicians to foul up so we can be left with the comfort of blaming someone else?

But there were no nations, no governments, no presidents, no prime ministers, no goddamn potentates left to shoulder the responsibility. There was only Fischer and his committee.

And Devereaux. Polite, charming, helpful Devereaux, who had advised that they just load Qeteb’s life parts on separate spaceships (how convenient that the people inhabiting the bunkers when the Demons had initially arrived tended to be the military and space types) and flee into space.

“Drop them off somewhere else,” Devereaux had said only the day before yesterday. “Or at the least, just keep going. The other Demons are bound to follow.”

“What if Devereaux finds a place to leave them?” said Jane Havers, the only other woman present. “Or just crashes into some distant planet or moon. What then?”

“We pray that whoever inhabits that moon or planet can deal with the Demons better than we have,” Katrina said. “At least it won’t be in our solar system, or galaxy.”

Fischer dropped his face in a hand and rubbed his forehead. Cancer was eating away in his belly, and he knew he would be dead within weeks. Best to take the decision now, before he was dead, and while there were still women within their community with viable wombs.

Somehow the human race had to continue.

“Send for Devereaux,” he said.

Eight days later the spaceships blasted out of the earth’s atmosphere, their crews hopeful that at least they were giving their fellows back home a chance.

What they didn’t realise was that when they’d blasted out of their underground bunkers, they’d left a corridor of dust and rock down which the maniacally hungry were already swarming.

Fischer didn’t have time to die of cancer, after all.

Chapter 1 The Wasteland

No longer did the ancient speckled blue eagle soar through the bright skies of Tencendor. Now Hawkchilds had inhabited the seething, scalding thermals that rose above a devastated wasteland. They rode high into the broiling, sterile skies seeking that which would help their master.

The Enemy Reborn has hidden himself. Find his hiding place, find his bolthole. Find him for me!

Qeteb had been tricked. The StarSon had not died in the Maze at all. The Hunt had been a farce. Somewhere the true StarSon was hiding, laughing at him.

Find him! Find him!

And when the Hawkchilds found him, Qeteb did not want to go through the bother of another hunt through the Maze. All he wanted to do was to reach out with his mailed fists and choke the living breath out of the damned, damned Enemy Reborn’s body!

The fact that he had been tricked was almost as bad as the realisation that Qeteb’s plans for total domination of this world could not be realised until the Enemy had been defeated once and for all.

All Qeteb wanted to do was ravage, but what he had to do was stamp the Enemy into oblivion, obliteration and whatever other non-existent future Qeteb could think of as fast and as completely as he possibly could.

Find him! Find him!

And so the Hawkchilds soared, and while they did not find the Enemy Reborn’s bolthole on their first pass over the wasteland, they did find many interesting things.

It helped immeasurably that all external inessentials, like forests and foliage and homes and lives, had been blasted from the surface of the wasteland, for that meant secret things lay open to curious eyes.

Secret things that had been forgotten for many years, things that should have been remembered and seen to before the Enemy Reborn had hidden himself in his bolthole.

“Silly boy. Silly boy,” whispered the Hawkchilds as they soared and drifted. “We remember you wandering listless and hopeless in the worlds before the final leap into Tencendor. Now your forgetfulness will crucify you …”

And so they whispered and giggled and drifted and made good note of all they saw.

Far to the south a lone Hawkchild spied something sitting in the dust that had once been a rippling ocean of forest.

It was but a speck that the circling Hawkchild spotted from the corner of his eye, but the speck was somehow … interesting.

The hands at the tips of his leathery wings flexed, then grasped into tight claws, and the Hawkchild slid through the air towards the ash-covered ground.

He stood there a long while, his head cocked curiously to one side, his bright eyes slowly blinking and regarding the object.

It was plain, and obviously completely useless, but there was something of power about it and the Hawkchild knew it should be further investigated.

The bird-like creature stalked the few paces between himself and the object, paused, then carefully turned it over with one of his taloned feet.

The object flipped over and hit the ground with a dull thud, sending a fine cloud of wood ash drifting away in the bitter, northerly breeze.

The Hawkchild jumped back, hissing. For an instant, just for an instant, he thought he’d heard the whispering of a many-branched forest.

A whispering? No, an angry crackling, more like.

The Hawkchild backed away two more paces, spreading his wings for flight.

But he stopped in that heartbeat before he should have lifted into the air. The whispering had gone now — had it ever existed save in the dark spaces of his mind? — and the object looked innocuous, safe … save … save for that irritating sense of power emanating from it.

This object was a thing of magic. A fairly sorry object, granted, but mayhap his master might find it amusing.

The Hawkchild hopped forward, flapped his wings so he rose in the air a short distance, and grasped the object between his talons.

A heartbeat later he was gone, rising into a thermal that would carry him south-west into the throbbing, blackened heart of the wasteland.

Qeteb laughed, and the wasteland cringed.

“He thinks himself safe in whatever hideaway he has built for himself,” he whispered (and yet that whisper sounded as a roar in the mind of all who could hear him). “And when I find it… when I find its secret…”

The Midday Demon strode stiff-legged about the interior of the Dark Tower, his arms flung back, his metalled wings rasping across the flagged flooring of the mausoleum.

He screamed, then bellowed, then roared with laughter again.

It felt so good to be whole once more! Nevermore would he allow himself to be trapped.

Qeteb jerked to a halt, and his eyes, hidden beneath his black-visored helmet, fell on the woman standing in the gloom under one of the columned arches.

She was rather more beautiful than not, with luminous dark hair, a sinuous body beneath her stained and rust-splotched robe, and wings that had been combed into a feathered neatness trailing invitingly from her back.

Qeteb wondered how loudly she would scream if he steadied her with one fist on her shoulder, and tore a wing out with the other fist.

She said she was his mother, but Qeteb found he did not like to hear what she said. He was complete within himself, a oneness that needed no other, and he had certainly never been entrapped in her vile womb. She had never provided him with life!

But she had provided him his flesh, and for that Qeteb spared her the agony of sudden de-wingment. For the moment.

There was a movement from another side and Qeteb almost smiled. There, the soulless body of a woman, waiting for him. He lusted, for he found her very soullessness inviting and reached for her, but was distracted by the voice of Sheol from beyond the doorway.

“Great Father. One of the Hawkchilds has returned with —” “With the gateway to the StarSon’s den?” Qeteb demanded.

“No,” Sheol said, and stepped inside. Behind her walked a Hawkchild, carrying something in its hands.

“Great Father!” the Hawkchild said, and dropped to one knee before Qeteb. “See what I have discovered for you!”

He placed the object on the ground before Qeteb, and the Midday Demon looked down.

It was a wooden bowl, carved from a single block of warm, red wood.

Qeteb instinctively loathed it, and just as instinctively knew that it would bring him great fortune.

Beyond the mausoleum the Maze swarmed with creatures dark of visage and of mind; the vast majority of demented creatures within the wasteland had found their way to the land’s 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 as the great Minstrelsea Forest.

Which, after only forty-two years of life, Qeteb had then turned to matchsticks.

Matchsticks! Ur rolled the word over and over in her mind, using it as both curse and promise of revenge.

Matchsticks.

Ur’s beloved had been reviled, murdered, and utterly destroyed by the excrement of the universe.

Her lips tightened away from her teeth — incongruously white and square — and Ur silently snarled at her ravaged garden. Revenge …

“It is not good to think such thoughts,” the Mother said, and laid Her hand on Ur’s gaunt thigh.

Ur closed her lips into a thin hard line, and she did not speak.

The Mother fought again to repress a sigh and looked instead out to the forest beyond Ur’s decaying garden.

Everything was fading. The forests of the Sacred Groves, even the Horned Ones themselves. The Mother had not realised how closely tied to Tencendor the Groves were — as was the health of all who resided in them. Tencendor had been wasted, and if DragonStar could not right the wrong of Qeteb and his companion Demons, and finish what the Enemy had begun so many aeons before, then eventually the Groves would die.

As would Herself, and all the Horned Ones, and even perhaps Ur.

The Mother shot another glance at the ancient nursery-keeper. And perhaps not. Ur appeared to be keeping lively enough on her diet of unremitting need for revenge.

“But We are safe enough for the while,” the Mother whispered. “Safe enough for the while.”

Chapter 3 A Son Lost, A Friend Gained

Sanctuary should have been crowded. Over the past weeks hundreds of thousands of people, as well millions of sundry insects, animals and birds, had swarmed across the silver tracery bridge, along the roadway meandering through the fields of wildflowers and grasses and into the valley mouth. Yet despite the influx of such numbers, Sanctuary continued to remain a place of delightful spaces and untrodden paths, of thermals that seemingly rose into infinite heights, and Mazes of corridors in its palaces that appeared perpetually unexplored.

Sanctuary had absorbed the populations of Tencendor without a murmur, and without a single bulge. It had absorbed and embraced them, offering them peace and comfort and endless pleasantness.

And yet for many, Sanctuary felt more like a prison. The endless peace and comfort and pleasantness had begun to slide into endless irritation and odious boredom which found temporary release in occasional physical conflict (an ill-tempered slap to a face, a harder than needed smack to a child’s legs) and more frequent spiteful words.