"Julian May - The Pliocene Exiles 04 - The Adversary" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

brain trauma she had apparently lost her awesome powers of
farsensing and redaction and reverted to the "normal" state. In
despair at having been shut out of the metapsychic Unity she
had rejoiced in, Elizabeth elected to pass into the Pliocene.
There she would be among others like herself, since no operants
were allowed to undertake time-travel.

To her horror, Elizabeth discovered that the shock of
temporal translation had begun the restoration of her lost
powers. Convalescent, at first terrified and then consumed with
rage at the irony of her situation, Elizabeth heard the Tanu
overlord Creyn tell her that a "wonderful life" awaited her in
the Many-Coloured Land. As the only torcless operant, she
would be considered a unique treasure: The Tanu King himself
would be her consort ...

That evening, two caravans set out from the Tanu Castle
Gateway. Group Green had been split in half. Bound north for
the city of Finiah on the Proto-Rhine was a sizeable mob of

normal humans destined to become ordinary slaves and brood
stock. These included Claude, Sister Amerie, Richard, and
Felice--who had confided to her friends that she planned not
only to escape, but also to "take" the entire Tanu race!

The southbound caravan was much smaller. En route to the
Tanu capital of Muriah in the Mediterranean Basin were the
Tanu overlord Creyn, Elizabeth, Aiken Drum, two other silver-
torced humans named Sukey Davies and Raimo Hakkinen, the
gigantic driller Stein, who had been fitted with a grey torc in
preparation for life as a gladiator, and the untorced anthropolo-
gist Bryan Grenfell, whose expertise was strangely valued by
the Tanu and who looked forward to finding his lost lover
somewhere in Muriah.

The caravan bound for Finiah was soon involved in a prisoner
revolt, engineered by the erstwhile professional athlete, Felice.
Abnormally strong, with powerful coercive latencies that let her
mind-control animals, Felice had smuggled a small steel dagger
past the searchers at Castle Gateway. Working with Richard,
the starship captain, and two men named Yoshimitsu and Tatsuji
who were costumed as samurai, Felice engineered the killing of
the female overlord Epone as well as the entire prisoner escort
of grey-torc human troops.

One group of freed prisoners elected to follow Basil
Wimborne, a mountain climber and former Oxford don, who
felt the best plan of escape lay beyond Lac de Bresse in the Jura
highlands. Claude, the old paleontologist, convinced his three
Group Green friends that they would be safer fleeing into the