Wrath of a Mad God
The Darkwar, Book 3
Raymond E Feist
To Lacey,
With thanks for sticking around and keeping your sense of
humour.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, I could not have completed this work, another chapter in the vast Riftwar Cycle, without the foundation given to me by the original creators of Midkemia.
Again, my family and friends, for providing much-needed balance in my life and keeping me sane, or as close to it as I’ll get.
Jonathan Matson, who has been a rock upon which I have built a career and without whose sage counsel and patient attention I would not have come half as far.
And, especially, I wish to thank my editors at HarperCollins, Jane Johnson, Jennifer Brehl, Katherine Nintzel, and Emma Coode, for always understanding, especially in times of difficulty, that it’s about the work and for showing their willingness to adjust to chaotic times and provide vital support to me. I hope your faith in me remains justified and your passion for the work never flags. I absolutely could not have done this without you.
Raymond E. Feist
San Diego, CA 2007
CHAPTER ONE - Escape
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 – a disciplined fraction of her consciousness – 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.