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
Away across the night the great paired mountains spewed arcs of orange fire. Their fury could be felt as well as heard, a continual mutter of thunder, punctuated by blasts that pained Raven’s ears. If the fury of the old gods wasn’t soon appeased with the blood and souls of the evildoers, so the priest Howling Wolf said, that pillar would grow to hide the heavens, choke sun and moon and stars, plunging all beneath into gloom. It had happened once before, during the time legend called the Great Skydark.
Only this time, Howling Wolf said, the dark would never end.
Reflected hoops of orange, distorted and wavering, were the only hints that a great lake lay like a discarded obsidian mirror between the fire mountains and the hogsback ridge behind which the horde was camped. Although the eyes of the man named Raven were no longer so keen close up as they had been in his youth, his far vision remained to justify his name. If he didn’t gaze toward the flame fountains for a time, he could just make out tiny fugitive glimmers of light closer at hand, here and there down in the valley, and even in the rotted corpse of the dead city itself, which lay in the lake like a broken giant sprawled facedown in the pond that had drowned him.
Dead no more. Men once more crawled like maggots among the great bones of metal and stone and pale glass.
Screams beat like the buffets of the wind at Raven’s bare bronzed back. In the great encampment captives were being cut and burned in sacrifice to the ancient gods. When the wind blew one way, it stank of sulfur; another way, and it reeked of blood and fear and charred flesh.
At such times Raven chose to walk away from the camp when he could. He was a hunter, a warrior, living in a land devoid of mercy; had he ever shrunk from the most brutal necessity he would never have lived long enough to take a man’s name. It was the necessity of such cruelty he questioned.
His absences from the rituals of offering didn’t please the priest or his acolytes. They had dropped hints that Raven, of all people, should display more piety. He ignored their threats. For he of all people they dared not harm—not the flesh and blood of the very one whom Howling Wolf said the old forgotten gods, so thirsty for blood and pain, had sent to save the people and all the world.
Over the cries of terrible anguish, he could hear the priest’s voice, knew the sense of the words even though he was not close enough to actually hear them: once more the wicked seek to probe the lost evil secrets, to wake the dark powers that once devastated the world. They would revive the city, which forsook the gods and mocked the sky with its haughty towers. If we the chosen do not stop them, the wickedness they unleash this time will destroy the world utterly.
And so it might be, he thought. It was certainly true that the valley in which the lake lay was green and fertile despite the frequent shaking of the earth and the lethal clouds that sometimes flowed over it from the fire mountains. Likewise was it true that the high country where the people had dwelt time out of memory was becoming uninhabitable, racked by alternating drought and terrible storms that blew down from the lands of death to the north, with their strange hissing rains that could melt the
