Crusader

41. The Avenue (#litres_trial_promo)

42. Of Commitment (#litres_trial_promo)

43. StarLaughter’s Quest (#litres_trial_promo)

44. The Heart Incarnate (#litres_trial_promo)

45. Trouble (#litres_trial_promo)

46. Hidden Conversations (#litres_trial_promo)

47. The Door (#litres_trial_promo)

48. Gwendylyr’s Problem (#litres_trial_promo)

49. The Butler’s Rule (#litres_trial_promo)

50. The Memories of the Enemy (#litres_trial_promo)

51. Sliding South (#litres_trial_promo)

52. A Marital Reunion (#litres_trial_promo)

53. Sigholt (#litres_trial_promo)

54. A Troubled Night’s Dreaming (#litres_trial_promo)

55. A Tastier Revenge Than Ever Imagined (#litres_trial_promo)

56. StarLaughter’s Awful Mistake (#litres_trial_promo)

57. South, Ever South (#litres_trial_promo)

58. Sweetly, Innocently, Happily… (#litres_trial_promo)

59. Midwiving Deity (#litres_trial_promo)

60. The General’s Instructions (#litres_trial_promo)

61. For the Love of a Bear Cub (#litres_trial_promo)

62. Katie, Katie, Katie… (#litres_trial_promo)

63. Hunting Through the Landscape (#litres_trial_promo)

64. The Most Appalling Choice of All (#litres_trial_promo)

65. Abandoned (#litres_trial_promo)

66. Choose, DragonStar! (#litres_trial_promo)

67. Bring Me My Bow of Burning Gold… (#litres_trial_promo)

68. Twisted City (#litres_trial_promo)

69. Light and Love (#litres_trial_promo)

70. The Witness (#litres_trial_promo)

71. The Waiting (#litres_trial_promo)

72. The Tree (#litres_trial_promo)

73. The Garden (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Glossary (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Sara Douglass (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Prologue: An Evil Released (#ulink_340b7660-e3ca-5ae3-8fcb-d1fe0fe92bb9)

“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.