The rider removed his steel mask and bowed deeply
The crowd jumped to its feet, cheering.
Amid the tumult, something on the far side of the center ring caught Ryan’s eye. Something flashed behind the mirror wall of the facing trailer. And for a fraction of a second, the silver reflective glass became vaguely, hazily transparent, as if through a pall of oily brown smoke.
Then it was over.
In that frozen moment Ryan glimpsed a ghostly figure whose afterimage was burned deeply into his brain. Spindly-limbed. Slouching. Menacing. Even if he hadn’t seen the glare of the light on the steel, he would have known who it was.
The Magus.
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
Pilgrimage to Hell
Red Holocaust
Neutron Solstice
Crater Lake
Homeward Bound
Pony Soldiers
Dectra Chain
Ice and Fire
Red Equinox
Northstar Rising
Time Nomads
Latitude Zero
Seedling
Dark Carnival
Chill Factor
Moon Fate
Fury’s Pilgrims
Shockscape
Deep Empire
Cold Asylum
Twilight Children
Rider, Reaper
Road Wars
Trader Redux
Genesis Echo
Shadowfall
Ground Zero
Emerald Fire
Bloodlines
Crossways
Keepers of the Sun
Circle Thrice
Eclipse at Noon
Stoneface
Bitter Fruit
Skydark
Demons of Eden
The Mars Arena
Watersleep
Nightmare Passage
Freedom Lost
Way of the Wolf
Dark Emblem
Crucible of Time
Starfall
Encounter: Collector’s Edition
Gemini Rising
Gaia’s Demise
Dark Reckoning
Shadow World
Pandora’s Redoubt
Rat King
Zero City
Savage Armada
Judas Strike
Shadow Fortress
Sunchild
Breakthrough
Salvation Road
Amazon Gate
Destiny’s Truth
Skydark Spawn
Damnation Road Show
James Axler
O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
O life, no life, but lively form of death;
O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds.
—Thomas Kyd,
1558-1594
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….
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
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Evening hung dead still and oppressively humid over the shallow, five-acre, seep-fed lake, the lavender dome of sky perfectly reflected in its mercury-smooth surface. Encircling the muddy bank was a fringe of stripped, bleached skeletons of trees. The intense quiet was neither peaceful nor serene; the very air seemed to vibrate in anticipation and dread. Terrible forces of nature were about to make themselves known.
Swish-swish.
Swish-swish.
From the north end of the lake came a rhythmic sound.
Not a bird, not an insect. Sensing the impending hell show, the birds and insects had gone to ground.
A tall human figure stood on the bank in hip boots, waving a nine-foot-long, flexible rod back and forth. And as he did so, he sailed a bright-yellow line through the air, forward and back, forward and back, in a tight loop, out over the purple mirror of sky. The man wore a long, pointy, black goatee and his black hair was loosely tied in a ponytail, which hung to the middle of his back. On his head was a tatter-brimmed straw cowboy hat. His eyes were hidden behind wraparound sunglasses.
What face was visible was long, gaunt, perhaps tragic, certainly suffering, certainly world weary.
As the man cast, the water in front of him swirled and gurgled. The head of a huge mutie lungfish appeared in the middle of the ripples. The fish looked up at the man, then struggled out of the pool, walking on the bony spikes of its pectoral fins. Greenish-gray on the back with a light cream-colored belly, the mutie was easily five feet long and weighed more than sixty pounds. As it dragged itself from the world of fish into the world of men, its large, rubbery lipped mouth and its gill covers opened and closed, breathing air. Grunting from the effort, the lungfish crawled up beside the man. An odor rose up along with it—the smell of a slaughterhouse in August.
“You have no fly on the end of your line,” it said in a strange, gravelly voice that was half croak, half belch. “You can’t catch anything that way.”
“I’m not fishing for anything,” the bearded man said as he continued to cast far out over the smooth water, in the direction of the evening star.
“You’re fishing for nothing?” the lungfish said.
“That’s right.”
“Are you catching any?”
“I’m catching and releasing nothing,” the man replied.
As he continued to cast, to his left, a two-wheeled cart drawn by three men appeared over the rim of the slope. The lake sat on a stair-step rise in the land. Above it was mountainside; below it, the ground—mostly bare, eroded limestone—angled three hundred feet down to a broad flat spot between surrounding peaks. There, in a grove of low, scrubby trees, stood the remote ville. Even by Deathlands standards, it was a scab-assed place: dirt-floor shacks and lean-tos built up against the outer wall of the ville’s only permanent structure, a predark concrete blockhouse. Most of these shanties were big enough to house one or two people, and not tall enough to stand in.
Читать дальше