Crusader. Novel by Sara Douglass

her daughters looked at the avenue of trees, looked at Ur, dozing underneath a cart, the pot still wrapped

in her arms, and nodded to themselves.

The three reappeared in their womanly forms, not as icebears. All three had dark circles of

exhaustion under their eyes, and their skin was pallid, not with the reflection of the ice and snow, but with

the strain they’d undergone.

“You need food and rest,” Axis said, sharing a concerned glance with Azhure, and then offering

Urbeth his arm.

For a moment it appeared Urbeth might actually accept his support, then she shook her head tiredly.

“Rest,” she said. “Food can wait.”

“What happened?” Azhure asked, knowing they were probably too tired to tell, but needing

to know anyway.

Urbeth was too exhausted even to snap. “We drew the Demons off,” she said, “and handed

them into the care of the Chitter Chatters.”

Axis smiled. He remembered how the box Ho’Demi had brought out of the Murkle mines had

whispered disconcertingly to itself for months until the Ravensbund Chief had turned the Chitter Chatters

loose in the northern icepack.

“Where are the Demons now?” said Azhure.

“I don’t know,” Urbeth said, and Axis and Azhure realised she was so strained she was close to

tears. “I just don’t know.”

“Rest,” Azhure said, “please.”

Urbeth nodded, then turned slightly to address her two daughters. “Take the rear of the avenue.”

Without a reply the two ice women turned, and melted away into the snow.

“Why send them back there?” Axis said.

“To protect it,” Urbeth said. “The trees will protect the length of the avenue, but for the

moment its two entrances are vulnerable. I will stand here.”

Without further ado Urbeth took several steps back until she was at the border where snow turned

to shaded walk, and began very slowly to turn about.

Within heartbeats she sped up until her form was spinning so fast Axis and Azhure could not discern

her features, and then, in the next breath, Urbeth turned into a pillar of opaque green and grey ice that

stood immobile and solid, guarding the entrance to the avenue.

Qeteb and his companions had escaped the Murkle mines only through the most extreme of efforts. The

dark and damp mines had contained enchantment — did the very cursed soil still reek with enchantment?

— and the Demons had found it very difficult to negate its holding effects.

Eventually, after hours of temper, they had burst through the boarded-up entrances of several of the

ancient shafts, sending showers of sharp-edged rock cascading through the air, and causing a

massive avalanche down three sides of the mountain from which they’d emerged.

Qeteb was furious, but calm. He had finally understood that the forces ranged against him consisted

not only of DragonStar and his five companions, but of the land itself.

The total and catastrophic destruction of Tencendor must wait until every creature, rock

and speck of soil ranged against him and his had been destroyed.

And for this, Qeteb knew he needed a cool and calculating head, not a fount of fury erupting at

every setback.

Thus, he held back his Demons for an hour or two of planning. They crouched on the

desolate side of the mountain they’d escaped from, clinging to rocks like bunch-backed toads, letting

the snow settle about their shoulders and lumpy spines.

They crouched, and they whispered. They let their rage feed their whispers, but not control them. They

spent some time in utter quiet, sending their senses scrying about the land; not only to verify the

whereabouts of DragonStar and his five, but also to truly sense the land itself, feel its purpose, know its

motives.

Qeteb, his senses soaring and penetrating deeper than those of his companions, felt something else.

A thing or a purpose as intimately connected to DragonStar as his five witches. No! Even more

intimately connected! Who or what was this thing? And where? Where?

Qeteb knew where the five witches were — indeed, their positions was as preordained as

their forthcoming battles with the Demons — but where, where the sixth mysterious and powerful

presence?

Ah! A smile crawled through Qeteb’s mind as his senses showed him the icy northern tundra.

And the long, snaking convoy within which was the sixth … and perhaps the most vital.

“There is a heart yet beating within this land,” Qeteb eventually said.

He had thought he’d completely ravaged Tencendor when he’d been resurrected, but now he

understood the untruth of that belief. He’d devastated its skin, but no more. Somewhere lay a great

heart thumping, still pounding power through the land, frustrating the Demons at every turn.

“We must find that heart,” said Qeteb, “and destroy it.”

“Do you mean the four hearts of the four lakes?” said Mot.

“No.”

“Then the heart of the Maze —” Barzula began.

“No! Another heart. An unknown heart. A powerful heart. A despicable heart!”

“Where?” asked Sheol.

Qeteb sat silent a moment, his black armoured form hunched against the weight of snow on his

wings and back. The metal of his visor rippled, as if the thoughts contained within were too virulent to be

contained much longer.

“The long line of hopelessness,” Qeteb finally said, “that escaped from Sanctuary and currently

wallows in icy misery to the north.

“In there lies the heart incarnate.”

Sometime after StarLaughter had resumed her trek east, six loathsome shadows swept over the

landscape.

StarLaughter reflexively crouched close to some rocks, but the Demons, flying high overhead, did

not notice her — or perhaps were too preoccupied to notice her.

“There’s trouble ahead,” StarLaughter said, and then silently mouthed a prayer for WolfStar’s

safe-keeping.

DragonStar also saw the Demons soar overhead, so single-minded in their quest for destruction they did

not even heed him.

He, too, crouched, then stared, and then leaped lightly down from his rocks atop the rubble of Star

Finger to where his Star Stallion waited in a ravine below.

The Alaunt milled about the stallion’s legs, whining with their eagerness for the hunt.

As DragonStar walked up to the horse and hounds, his garb slipped away, and he strode once more

in the linen loincloth with the lily sword swinging from the jewelled belt.

“There’s trouble ahead,” he said, and vaulted on the Star Stallion’s back.

Within the instant both horse and Alaunt were running north-east.

Chapter 45

Trouble

Beyond the trees and the still ice forms of Urbeth and her daughters in their respective positions at either

end of the avenue, the northern tundra was wrapped in an ice-gale so vicious that even the odd

Skraeling, escaped from Ur’s trap preferred to huddle in their burrows than drift out to search for prey.

Axis spent most of the morning making sure that people and animals were settled comfortably —

perhaps on the morrow they might begin their move south — and trying to avoid StarDrifter, who sat like

a brooding storm on one of the carts near the head of the convoy.

Neither StarDrifter, nor Axis or Azhure, could quite come to terms with, let alone believe, the

choice Zenith had made.

Axis blamed Fate, Azhure blamed herself and StarDrifter blamed WolfStar.

Axis had sent word to WingRidge to move WolfStar to the very rear of the convoy, far enough that

he and StarDrifter might not meet accidentally.

Axis was also truthful enough with himself to understand that he did not want to see WolfStar either,

nor Zenith with WolfStar.

Perhaps he could speak to her later … but for the meantime there was far too much to do.

Urbeth’s twin daughters dreamed the morning away in their pillars of ice, recovering strength after their

efforts at leading the Demons into the souls of the Chitter Chatters. As had Urbeth at the front of the

convoy, they’d placed themselves at its very rear, standing in the open space between the last trees on

either side of the avenue, at the border between the rage of the snowstorm and the peaceful warmth of

the avenue.

They seemed completely inviolate, twin pillars of unapproachable ice, but they were not

quite alone.

Protected by the warmth of the trees, SpikeFeather TrueSong sat some paces away from them,

cross-legged and winged, his head resting in one hand, red hair and feathers flaming

incongruously before the ice, his eyes resting curiously on Urbeth’s daughters.

Truth to tell, SpikeFeather had been feeling more than slightly obsolete in the past few weeks. He’d

been the one to correctly guess the location of Sanctuary, but it had been others who’d opened it, and

then led Tencendor’s populations through its doors. DragonStar and his five witches had garnered

all the attention and glory in their quest to destroy the Demons. SpikeFeather was not feeling

jealous, merely horribly useless. He’d always hovered about the edges of the action, through the wars

with Gorgrael, and now with these Demons, bursting with potential but never quite achieving it. Why had

Orr taken charge of his life and why spend so many years talking to him and showing him the