James Axler - Palaces Of Light

Lost vistas

Remnants of America’s past are littered across the postapocalyptic landscape, but little remains of the predark ideals of law and order. Survival is a blood quest, and lethal force the means to power. Still, a handful retains their humanity among thecoldhearts, and in a world where nothing lasts forever, hope is a commodity as precious as jack.

Divide and conquer

Steeped in beauty and mysticism, the canyons of Mesa Verde, Colorado, survived the blast that altered the American west. Hired to track a group of missing children, Ryan Cawdor and his band follow the trail to a legendary city carved in stone, older and stronger than the nukecaust. The inhabitants of the palaces of light are more than warriors and survivors; they are masters of mind games that prey on illusion. And true believers in a metaphysical end game poised to push the companions over the edge of reality…into certain death.

Jak stared into the abyss

The abyss stared back. With a lurching fear, an emotion foreign to him, Jak felt the desire to throw himself off the edge and into the welcoming arms of…what?

Breathing hard, he hurriedly stepped away and looked up at the sky. It was cold and distant, yet reassuring compared to what he had just seen.

The land beneath the lip of rock had seemed to disappear beneath a blanket of darkness that had nothing to do with the absence of light. The darkness was almost a presence that seemed to have a life of its own, acting as a cover for what lay beneath it, and fiercely protective of its charge….

Palaces of Light

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

With equal or even inferior power…he will win who has the resolution to advance.

—Ardant du Picq,

1821-1870

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope....

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Prologue

“Time…time is a funny thing, my friend. Time is something that is the master of all of us. Even the greatest of barons who have ever walked across the soil that gives us what we laughingly call life is at the mercy of the ticking of the chron. Eventually we become part of that dust that we stomp beneath the heels of our boots. We’re nothing when it comes down to it. We fuck and fight and think that we’re really important, but it doesn’t matter jackshit. Everything comes from the dust, and returns there sooner or later. What comes in between seems kinda important at the time, but all it really amounts to is our own sense of our self-importance. I guess some of us think we’re more important than others. That’s why some of us try to become better than others. Why some of us become barons, and waste our time trying to get somewhere, when at the end of the blacktop there ain’t nothing but the same darkness that greets everyone.”

Baron K frowned. In the darkness of the hut, it was hard to see if the grossly fat man seated in front of him was smiling. His tone betrayed nothing of the sort, but even in measured tones the weight of his words carried a reproach that the baron found irritating. Would the old man in front of him dare to be so dismissive of the efforts that had brought K to this point? Would he risk the wrath of the baron, and the violence that it could wreak?

“Careful what you say, Morgan. You have a great wisdom, but even so—”

“I could go too far, eh?” Morgan spit through the tangled skein of his gray beard onto the dirt of the floor. It was just the clearing of phlegm, but such was the aura of the old man that it seemed to carry greater import.

“I have seen men chilled for less,” K replied, keeping his tone even.

Morgan fixed him with a gimlet eye that glittered bright, despite his age. He raised the paring knife that had been carving charred meat from the bone of an unrecognizable animal, and used it to gesture at the baron.

“Mebbe you have, at that. But I’m too close to the end of the blacktop for it to matter to me. So you chill me slow by your standards. Is that any worse than the certain knowledge that I have of the slow chilling we all endure? No—” he shook his head, his heavy frame heaving as he wheezed a chuckle “—let’s face it, K. There’s nothing you can do to bother me. And if you want to know what you’ve come here for, then you’d better get off that high horse you’ve ridden in on and start to listen. You want to know about the palaces of light. You think that’s where they’re taking them.”

K tried to answer, but his throat was tight and his mouth dry. Constriction forbade him from breathing, let alone form speech. It was all he could do to nod dumbly. His own flesh and blood… He had to find where they were going and why. That was why he had to put up with the old man and his tongue, which by rights should be cut out and roasted like the meat he slobbered on.

Morgan sighed, tossing the bone over his shoulder and wiping the blade of the knife on his vest, which was unlikely to get any greasier than it was already. He chewed ruminatively on his bottom lip, his eyes glazing over as he stared into the distance. It was as though he was recalling something told to him a lifetime ago, and it needed immense concentration to plunge memory back through the years and pluck out the memory fully formed.

K thought about his daughter and felt the tightness in his chest as the pain of anticipation almost burst his heart. Even a man who could trample hundreds of lives beneath him in the quest for power had the weakness of tender emotion somewhere within him, and for someone.

When Morgan spoke finally, it was as though he were channeling something from the distant past, no more than a conduit for a dead and forgotten time. Which, in a sense, perhaps he was.

“All things come to pass. From sand to sand, they say. None proved that more fully than those who had the greatest tech of all human history, and did little with it other than create a blizzard of fire, ice and wind that lasted for more than three generations. Men who wanted to be gods, and created a tech that should have ensured their immortality, yet did little except wipe out the records and traces of memory that they wished to be commemorated by. Iron, or something, that was what they said about it. Doesn’t matter. Point is, it shows that nothing lasts forever. But some things last longer than others. Last longer than memory.