Wrath of a Mad God
The final book in The Darkwar series from the world-wide best-selling author of Magician.Wrath of a Mad God witnesses the cataclysmic end to one of Feist’s best-loved worlds.The Darkwar has fallen upon the worlds of Kelewan and Midkemia; a time of heroes, trials and destruction.Following their dangerous mission to the realm of the alien Dasati, Magnus and the other members of the Conclave must now find a way to use what they discovered to help save their own people from the wrath of a mad god.
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RAYMOND E. FEIST
Wrath of A Mad God
Book Three of The Darkwar
HarperVoyager An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperVoyager 2008
Copyright © Raymond E. Feist 2008
Cover Illustration © Nik Keevil
Raymond E. Feist asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007244317
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007347506
Version: 2018â11â08
To Lacy,
With thanks for sticking around and keeping your sense of humour.
Table of Contents
Chapter Fifteen: Investigation
Chapter Nineteen: Counterstrike
MIRANDA SCREAMED.
The searing agony that seized her mind relented for the briefest moment, and in that instant she found what she had been seeking. The preponderance of her awareness was occupied with the battle of wills with her captors, but a tiny fragment â a disciplined fraction of her consciousness â had been readied. Over the days of interrogation and examination she had used every respite to partition off this one sliver of her intellect, to somehow overcome the blinding pain, and observe. During the last four encounters with the Dasati Deathpriests she had achieved that detachment and willed her body to withstand the pain. It was there, she knew, inflamed nerves protesting about the alien energies coursing across the surface of her mind, probing it, seeking insights into her very being, but she had learned to ignore physical pain centuries before. The mental assaults were more difficult, for they attacked the root of her power, the unique intelligence that made her a supreme magician on her home world.
These Dasati clerics lacked any pretence of subtlety. At first they had ripped open her thoughts like a bear pulling apart a tree stump looking for honey. A lesser mind would have been savaged beyond recovery on the first assault. After the third such onslaught, Miranda nearly had been reduced to idiocy. Still, she had fought back and knowing there was no victory if there was no survival, she had focused all her considerable talents first on endurance, then insight.
Her ability to shunt aside the terrible assault and focus on that tiny sliver of knowledge she had gained kept her sane. Her determination to overcome her captivity and return with that knowledge gave her purpose.
Now she feigned unconsciousness, a new ploy in her struggle with her captors. Unless they possessed finer skills than she had so far encountered, her charade was undetected: to them she appeared incapacitated. This counterfeit lack of awareness was her first successful conjuration since her captivity began. She risked just enough body awareness to ensure that her breathing was slow and shallow, even though she suspected the Deathpriests who studied her still knew too little about humans to understand what physical signs to observe. No, her struggle was in the mind, and there she would eventually triumph. She had learned more about her captors than they had about her, she was certain.
Individually the Dasati were no match for her, nor even for one of her more advanced students back home. She had no doubt without the snare concocted by Leso Varen to disorient her, she would have easily disposed of the two Deathpriests who had seized her. But Varen was a force to reckon with, a necromancer with centuries of experience, and she alone would be hard pressed to best him: three times one of his bodies had been killed that to her knowledge, by multiple foes and taken by surprise, but still he survived. Between Varen and the Deathpriests, she had been quickly overwhelmed.
