James Axler - Palaces Of Light

“That’s how it is with the palaces of light…the mysterious palaces of light as they used to call them back in the day. They were there for so long that people forgot just how they got to be there in the first place. But there were some old legends that survived. Whether they were the truth or lies, I couldn’t say. I only repeat what I was told. One thing for sure, though,” he said, slipping back into the faraway tone of a man who was reciting much of his text from memory. “It’s always been a place where it pays to be fearful.”

K felt his guts churn. He hadn’t come from this part of the Deathlands, having spent his early years struggling out of a pesthole ville to ride with some coldhearts who preyed on convoys. It had been a hard and brutal training in the lessons of life, and he had acquired skills and a cynical, ruthless streak that had served him well when he ended up in a ville where the incumbent baron had grown fat, old and careless. Taking over had been a breeze, and he had used the superstition and fear of the people as a tool with which to maneuver his way to power. But the one thing he had never bargained on was that the superstition and fear was rooted in a sense of history. The words that Morgan now intoned brought that home to him, and clutched at his heart.

“There are those who say that the Mancos Canyon was gouged out of the rock by the thumbs of the gods. They needed somewhere to hide the demons that they had banished from the skies, and that was where they chose to leave them. Figures, when you look at how fucked the Mesa Verde is all around. Even before the shitstorms that the nukes brought with them it was still one hell of a place. Hell being the word. They say that the world was once a green and verdant vale—that’s another one of those phrases that means something good, although I couldn’t tell you exactly what it means.” Morgan sniffed and shrugged. “Anyways, the Mesa has always been a place that the gods skirted around with no notion of ever visiting ever again. Man wasn’t meant to tread there, but we did. Always have been some cursed souls who ended up there for want of anything better to do.

“Thing is, those who have wandered across the Mesa and not tumbled to their chilling when they reached the lip of the canyon have always seen the same thing. The mysterious palaces of light. Mysterious because they’ve been there since the dawn of time. Since before man, which kinda begs the question as to who the hell built them. Beautiful as they are, hewn out of the rock and shaped into buildings that have a light shining from them, they’ve been sheltered from everything that’s ever happened in this world. Think about it, K,” Morgan said softly, leaning forward so that his eye fixed on the baron, the paring knife emphasizing every word. “Even the nukecaust never touched these babies. That nightmare of howling winds and driving acid rains, the fire and the ice… It never touched them.”

He leaned back and sniffed back a gob of phlegm, growling in his throat.

“’Course, there are those who say that there are no such things as demons. They say that there were men who lived long before the Indians who everyone took to be the real natives that came across from where the seas now run. These were men like those who lived on the old southern lands, the ones who used to worship the sun and ripped out each other’s hearts to offer up. The kind of people you must like, K. But I tell you this—there are those who say that they built the palaces, yet they take no account of the fact that none of the temples and cities these men built looked anything like the palaces.

“Same way as others used to say that it was the Norsemen who built them. The ones who were supposed to sail on rafts across the raging seas centuries before the one called Columbo came and claimed the old lands, naming them Amerigo.” He frowned. “Something like that.” He shook his head as if to dismiss the confusion. “Thing about them is that, like the ones from the south, they couldn’t have done it because they had nothing like it in their own lands. Besides which, they were coming from the far coast, and how the fuck were they going to get across the plains when all they could do was build rafts of wood that must have got them here more by luck than any kind of skill?”

K interrupted. He felt almost as if it was wrong to do so; his mouth, too, was dry with fear of what Morgan was leaving between the words. “If not them, then who? The demons of who you spoke?” he asked.

A smile, almost mocking, wreathed the old man’s face. “You really believe that there are such things as gods and demons? It’s all a story, K. Just a story. Evil comes from men, but perhaps—just perhaps—it’s the case that the evil in men can somehow become instilled in a place, where it becomes magnified and acts as a draw to those who would think and feel the same way. Then again, mebbe I’m just plain wrong, and the story about there being gods who gouged the earth to throw down devils is right, and those devils built the palaces of light. One thing of which I’m certain, because it’s the only thing that runs through every story I was ever told, is that the men who built those palaces weren’t the Indians, nor the blond North men who were said to come before. These were men who came from a time before that, and had skills that could hew things of beauty out of ugly, harsh rock. That speaks of some power, some knowledge. And that’s still in there, K. It ain’t good, and it’s always done nothing else but attract its like.

“The dark ones—be they a kind of power or gods and demons—have always protected the canyon. Through the days of skydark and right till now. And whoever lives there is evil. If not to start with, then it’ll soon infect them.

“And that’s where they’re going, K. Into the heart of darkness and into the palaces of light. Remember, my baron, that not all light is good. The light that came with the nukes wasn’t good. Mebbe this is that kind of light.”

K was frustrated. He turned away from the old man, not wishing him to see the confusion that was written on his face. This talk of gods and demons was shit. But evil, real tangible evil that could infect a man, running from man to man like a disease. That was something he understood only too well. The palaces were places of legend. The legends were swathed in shadow, like the physical stones that hung over the canyon edge, protecting the palaces from the elements, just as they always had.

Hiding them from prying eyes—all but those of the most questing.

All but those, he hoped, of the ones he had sent to discover the truth.

Chapter One

Heat—dry and oppressive, unrelenting, bore down on them with every step the companions took. It was the kind of heat where, if they had any sense, they would seek out any shelter they could find and wait for the sun to sink in the sky, and the cool of night to start sweeping across the plain.

But the companions could only do that if they had time. And that was the one thing they were sorely lacking. There was no time for them to waste. The group they were trailing was obviously used to traveling in such conditions, and moved swiftly across the blasted and scorched plain. Swiftly enough to set a punishing pace.

“Oh, that we could have had the use of a wag,” Doc bemoaned in a voice that was cracked and parched, both by the dry atmosphere and the effort of an enforced march in such conditions. “Even a gas-guzzler…a mere wooden effort on wheels, powered by nothing more than the power of a mule would have satisfied me. But no, we are to be denied even that Spartan comfort in the search for our prey. How, pray tell, are we to be in a fit state to face them when we eventually confront them when we have had to suffer such unendurable conditions?”