Crusader. Novel by Sara Douglass

BOOK THREE OF THE WAYFARER REDEMPTION

SARA DOUGLASS

Books by Sara Douglass

The Axis Trilogy

Book One: BATTLEAXE

Book Two: ENCHANTER

Book Three: STARMAN

threshold

The Wayfarer Redemption Trilogy

Book One: SINNER

Book Two: PILGRIM

Book Three: CRUSADER

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

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