McLeod Godhead

Book I of the Aldariad
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-88-940221-3-1
Verlag: Christopher McLeod
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 650 Seiten

On Vereld, a dark god rises from the grave to plunge the world into chaos and ruin. Named Redeemers by an autistic savant's prophecy, Anili, Jon and Orrin soon discover that - apart from an ancient mage and a five year-old girl - they are all that stands between the world's continued existence and ultimate destruction. On Earth, a cabal of powerful men have discovered a link to Vereld in secret Nazi archives. Now, they are preparing to take over a whole new world and suck it dry. But worse is yet to come, as an aeons-old, infinitely dangerous entity struggles to break free of its prison in the darkness beyond the stars.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McLeod, Greg

Leseproben

As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. Protagoras 3 The Madal Skog When the gods divided up the earth among the tribes of man, so the story went, the Skogon came last. By then, the only thing left was the Madal Skog, the badlands north of the plains of Gomilar. It was bleak, unforgiving country, its inhabitants as harsh and unwelcoming as the land they lived on. In the Madal’s warren of mesas and canyons they made a meager living planting crops on the steep, terraced slopes of narrow valleys, herding sheep and goats, and mining and smelting ore. Once every three-month, a band of dark-clad, hard-faced clansmen brought a pack train’s worth of iron ingots to Ulan Bok, a caravanserai and trading post in northern Gomilar, where they sold their product and bartered for supplies. Here too they kept themselves apart, foregoing the inns and taverns for a camp outside the walls, communicating with outsiders only in order to sell or buy, and leaving as soon as the last ingot had changed hands. Truth be told, no one was sorry to see them go, for these dour, taciturn men with their black head-cloths and veils exuded a hard-bitten joylessness, a grim, oppressive atmosphere of sour superiority and unspoken reproach that made others for no good reason feel somehow in the wrong, as if found inadequate and judged wanting on some obscure, intangible scale of reckoning. As every year at the beginning of October, the clans were gathered in Hunter’s Valley for the annual ceremonies in honor of Uilmaz the Riven, God Protector and Father of the Skogon. More than a thousand yurts were clustered around the Great Hall built outside Rivensend, a small box canyon that was no more than a gash in the side of the valley. There, legend said, Uilmaz had fled when he was pursued by six demon-gods sent to kill him by his evil, treacherous brother Eill the White. The demons found him, in the end, and murdered him, cutting up and dividing his body into six pieces, which they scattered all over the badlands. But, Uilmaz being a god, his flesh was immortal, and so it came that from the six parts of his divine body grew the six clans of the Skogon: Stone, Water, Sky, Mud, Snake, and Black Yurt. So much for the orthodox version. The more occult mysteries fostered by the Mud and Black Yurt clans predicted that, some day, all six parts of the god would be found and reunited, returning him to his former power and glory. It was a matter of bitter dispute between the Muds and Black Yurts on the one side and the rest of the clans on the other, the latter holding that the god had long since risen and the clans themselves were his living members, with Uilmaz existing in and through them, and thus it was impossible to bring back to life a god who had already been resurrected. This year, for the first time ever, the ceremonies had been interrupted and the council of elders convened in the Great Hall to deal with an unprecedented emergency. Hands and feet bound with heavy chains, accused of having committed murder not only during God’s Festival but in the holiest of holies, in Rivensend itself, Morlic Silt stood before the council of Skogon elders in the hastily converted Great Hall where he was to be questioned and judged. There was no doubt as to whether he’d done the deed, had killed in cold blood and in the process created a horrific carnage that had threatened to turn even the most hardened stomachs of those who’d had the misfortune to behold what he’d left behind. The man even admitted to the deed. But alas, the rest of the story was not so simple, much to the chagrin of Jekkim Flint, chief and priest of the Stone clan, who found himself fervently wishing that there was no ‘rest of the story’, that the whole sorry mess would sim-ply go away, that he might wake up back in his yurt and shrug it all off like a bad dream. Jekkim’s eyes wandered to the thing lying on a low table set to one side, covered with a white cloth. White, at least, and not black, the color of the god. He shuddered. Abomination! Those thrice-damned, pig-headed Mud and Black Yurt people: fools, fools and heretics, the lot of them. And the guilty man himself – surely not your average murderer. Not that Jekkim had any experience with murderers, the Skogon being what they were: proud and unforgiving, quick to take offense and quicker to retaliate, a people to whom killing was a matter of honor, not of malefaction. Had Morlic committed his crime at any other time and place, the matter would have rested with the victim’s family, and revenge would have been swift and merciless. But this was a different kettle of fish altogether. Murder was the least of it. What this had quickly become and was now really about was the foundation of Skogon faith. It was about the never-ending dispute between the orthodox and the heretics. It was about doctrine, it was about dogma – meaning, it was about politics. And there was another factor to consider in all of this: Asukan, High Priestess of Uilmaz, accompanied by her sidekicks Halima and Tomay, a trio of black vultures watching the proceedings with hard, glittering eyes, silent for now but ready to pounce whenever it suited them. For all that there were male priests in every clan, these women represented the real power in all matters spiritual, and from this fact they most unfortunately extrapolated the right to have a say in all other clan affairs as well. Not yet forty, big-boned and strong-featured, good-looking if you appreciated the aesthetics of, say, a keen blade polished to a high gloss, Asukan was young for the job but had already held it for nearly a decade. Purportedly she had magic, was capable of miraculous feats such as turning water into wine or levitating. But no one outside her inner circle of dedicated followers had ever witnessed such a deed, and Jekkim wasn’t prepared to concede these hardcore fanatics – fanatics firstly of Asukan, and only secondly of the god – much credibility. Asukan herself neither confirmed nor denied the rumors, only adding to the mystery surrounding her person and fuelling the superstitions about her supposed powers. Sly tactics, in Jekkim’s opinion. Asukan, he knew, was all about power, and she possessed the necessary patience for long-term strategy, the deviousness to hide her true motives and objectives, and the iron will and determination to fulfill any task and reach any goal she set herself. At the end of the day, if she didn’t see a greater gain for herself in staying out of it altogether, it would be she who would decide over whatever religious and political dispute arose in the course of Morlic Silt’s trial. Which meant he had to give this his very best shot. Jekkim was aware that he was supposed to be an unprejudiced and impartial judge, whatever that meant, but he admitted to himself that, right from the start, he’d felt a spontaneous and intense dislike for the man Morlic. There were reasons enough. Short and skinny, with a too-large head, jug-handle ears, close-set eyes, a weak chin and a prominent, permanently bobbing Adam’s apple, his appearance alone did nothing to attract anybody’s sympathies. Just hearing the little turd use the honorific for elder, dras, every time he answered a question, made Jekkim feel like puking. And the man was a member of the Mud clan. To make matters even worse he was all false, slimy attentiveness and obsequious nods and bobs, a willing helper at his own condemnation. The fellow almost succeeded in making one feel somehow complicit, as if one were sharing the same side of the argument with him. Disgusting. With an effort, Jekkim forced his attention back to the proceed-ings. This was his one chance – barring interference from Asukan – to shut the Muds and Black Yurts up for good and finally put an end to their heretical fantasies. They thought they had their grand revelation lying there on the table, but he’d show them different. The man Morlic was one of theirs. Jekkim was going to rub their noses in that until he drew tears. The moment he’d heard of the murder and the culprit’s clan affiliation, he’d sent out a host of agents to gather every shred of intelligence they could find. In a surprisingly short time they had unearthed some very interesting stuff, and he intended to use every last bit of it. Morlic, on the other hand, in a fit of dangerous hubris most likely provoked by the afterglow of the killing and the undivided attention he was getting, was almost enjoying himself. The doddering old fools were about as sharp as wooden knives, and easy to play. The three women gave him the creeps, but they seemed to be there only as observers – and anyhow, no woman was going to dare interfere with Morlic Silt. One glance from him, packed with meaning, would be enough to show them all the horrors that lay in store for them if they did, and shut them up smartly. Or so he reckoned. The real challenge for him was keeping straight the voices in his head and making sure that only one of them spoke out loud, and the right one at that. If the others ever managed to get a word in sideways, he was done for. He found his eyes wandering to the thing on the table. Pay attention, he told himself. This is a game you’re good at. Better than them. Elder Jekkim, a stout, square man with a broad peasant’s face and large, calloused hands, cleared his throat and sat up in his low-slung ceremonial chair. ‘Do you mind?’ he interrupted elder Fasik, who during the past quarter-hour had...