Palaces Of Light. James Axler
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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
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
“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