"Sara Douglass - Redemption 2 - Pilgrim" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglass Sara)

pile of bones with it. She carefully laid it across the top.
Then she stood back, standing very still, her dark blue eyes staring at the bones.
Very slowly she raised her left hand, and the circle of light about its ring finger flared.
"Of what use is bone to me?" she whispered. "I need fleshl"
She dropped her hand, and the light flared from ring to bones.
The pile burst into flame.
Without fear the woman stepped close and reached into the conflagration with both hands. She grabbed
hold of something, grunted with effort, then finally, gradually, hauled it free.
Her own shape changed slightly during her efforts, as if her muscles had to rearrange themselves to manage
to drag the large object free of the fire, and in the flickering light she seemed something far larger and
bulkier than human, and more dangerous. Yet when she finally stood straight again, she had regained her
womanly features.
┬л 14 ┬л
She looked happily at the result of her endeavour. Her magic had not dimmed in these past hours! But she
shook her head slightly. Look what had become of hint!
He stood, limbs akimbo, pot belly drooping, and he returned her scrutiny blankly, no gratitude in his face at
all.
"You are of this land," she said, "and there is still service it demands of you. Go south, and wait."
He stared, unblinking, uncaring, and then he gave a mighty yawn. The languor of death had not yet left
him, and all he wanted to do was to sleep.
"Oh!" she said, irritated. "Go!"
She waved her hand again, the light flared, and when it had died, she stood alone in the stony gully of the
Urqhart Hills.
Grinning again at the pleasantness of solitude, she turned and ran for the north, and as she did so her shape
changed, and her limbs loped, and her tongue hung red from her mouth, and she felt the need to sink her
teeth into the back of prey, very, very soon.
Scrawny limbs trembling, pot belly hanging from gaunt ribs, he stood on the plain just north of the
Rhaetian Hills.
Beside him the Nordra roared.
He was desperate for sleep, and so he hung his head, and he dreamed.
He dreamed. He dreamed of days so far distant he did not know if they were memory or myth. He dreamed
of great battles, defeats and victories both, and he dreamed of the one who had loved him, and who he'd
loved beyond expression. Then he'd been crippled, and the one who loved him had shown him the door, and
so he'd wandered disconsolate тАФ save for the odd loving the boy showed him тАФ until his life had trickled
to a conclusion in blessed, blessed death. Then why was he back?
тАв 15*

3
The Feathered Lizard
Faraday kept her arm tight about the man as they walked towards where she'd left Zenith and the
donkeys. He'd grown tired in the past hour, as if the effort of surviving the Star Gate and then watching the
effects of the Demons flow over the land, had finally exhausted him both physically and mentally.
Faraday did not feel much better. This past day had drained her: fighting to repel the horror of the Demons'
passage through the Star Gate and fighting to save Drago from the collapsing chamber, then emerging from
the tunnel to find Tencendor wrapped in such horrific despair, had left its mark on her soul. For hours she'd
had to fight off the bleak certainty that there was nothing anyone could do against the TimeKeepers.
"Drago," she murmured. "Just a little further. See? There is Zenith!"
Zenith, who had been waiting with growing anxiety, ran forward from where she'd been pacing by the cart.
A corner of her cloak caught in the exposed root of a tree, and she ripped it free in her haste.
"Faraday! Drago! Drago?" Zenith wrapped her arms about her brother, taking the load from Faraday. "Is he