"Julian May - The Golden Torc" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

path. The time-travelers had been warned of the terrible Fir-vulag
who inhabited the Vosges forest. Now it seemed that
Richard, Felice, and Amerie must have been abducted by the.shape-shifting little exoticsтАФor else
recaptured by minions of
the Tanu. Hearing voices, then compelled against his will to
reveal himself, Claude came upon the very desperados who
had seized his friends. They were not exotics but human beingsтАФ
free humans who had escaped from exotic bondage and now
lived an outlaw life.
Their leader was a well-rejuvenated old woman wearing
a golden torc; the widow of the time-gate's discoverer and


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the ultimate author of Pliocene humanity's degradation...
Angelique Guderian.
On the last day of August, the four members of Group
Green, Madame Guderian and her band, and some 200 other
"Lowlives" (as the free humans proudly styled themselves)
came to a hiding place in a giant hollow tree deep in the Vosges
Mountains. The forest now swarmed with Tanu and their gray-torc
henchmen, sent by Lord Velteyn of Finiah to search out
the killers of his sister, Epone. Velteyn himself, proficient in
the metafaculties of psychokinesis and creativity, was con-ducting
personal sorties as the head of his Flying Hunt, a cadre
of glorious Tanu knights in glass armor, made levitant by their
lord's mental power.
Safe in their sanctuary, the Lowlives and Green Group en-gaged
in mutual assessment. Madame told the newcomers of
her grandiose plan to free all of Pliocene humanity from Tanu
bondage, a task she had undertaken in expiation of her own
guilt. She had engineered a fragile alliance between Lowlives
and Firvulag against the common Tanu enemy; but the entente
had been only minimally productive.
The Tanu were oddly invulnerable to the vitredur glass and
bronze weapons commonly used by all three races. Tanu might
suffer injury, but after a recuperative course administered by
redactorsтАФmetapsychic healersтАФeven the worst wounds would
be cured. Madame and her chief fighter, a Native American
named Peopeo Moxmox Burke who had once been a judge,
were keenly interested in how Group Green had managed to
dispatch Epone. Until this time, no Lowlife had ever been able
to kill a Tanu. Felice displayed her little steel knife, and a fact
that Amerie had already suspected became confirmed: Iron was
poisonous to the Tanu, perhaps acting in some way to destroy
the linkage between the exotic brain and the golden torc. (Felice
looked upon Madame's own golden torc with some speculation
at this point, but the intrepid old woman simply pricked herself.with the blade to show that