McLeod King of Dreams

A Vereldan Tale
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-88-940221-4-8
Verlag: Christopher McLeod
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 520 Seiten

Everybody's on the run: Laurin the dwarf, sent on an improbable errand by a dead king, ends up with an assassin on his tail. Bryn of Bailon, heir to a dark and troubling secret, discovers there's no escaping the impossible burden that's about to be placed on his shoulders. And Rhea Redbreast, apprentice Headhunter, makes it onto her own guild's hit-list when she seeks justice for her parents' killers. But the real trouble is just beginning: shipwrecked on the frozen shores of the Ice Wastes, eternal victim Nudd Wiggin stumbles onto an ancient weapon and is turned into something more - and less - than human. As the cruel and devious King of Dunmark unleashes a war that quickly spreads to the neighboring kingdoms, a weaponized Nudd raises terror after terror, driving an immense wave of desperate, battle-hardened Nordsmen south towards the war-torn kingdoms' borders.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McLeod, Greg

Leseproben

1 After fifteen endless days the storm let up, but not the sense of foreboding that had begun to haunt Anuun already long before the massive front rolled in from the west, the air thrumming with violence, the light diseased, the sky heavy and roiling with menace like nothing he’d ever seen before, not once in all his many years. This far north, blizzards could strike in any season, even at the height of the short Arctic summer, and this one was only slightly early for a first serious blow heralding the onset of winter. What set it apart was that it raged for two weeks straight without a break, howling with a cutting, rending ferocity that for the middle of September was unusual even in these high latitudes – which was why Anuun didn’t notice the disruption in the pattern until it was too late. When the high winds finally did relent and he became aware of the intrusion, he immediately set off, deeply disquieted, taking the shortest route to the place where his finely attuned Iceling senses had detected the disturbance. Traveling underice, he flowed swiftly through the blue-green depths, now a fleeting shadow, now a streak of livelier color, now a whitish string of icebound bubbles freed by elemental magic to move with ease through compact matter. Only when the offshore ice became too fragmented to allow him smooth passage did he surface. His essence pouring into form like water into a sturdy-sided jug, he assumed his bodily aspect: a head shorter than an average human, stocky, broad-shouldered and immensely powerful, his curly hair and beard the silvered grey of finely spun frost, his eyes the profound ultramarine of deep-core ice. At the site of the disturbance he found an Orrian ship, completely imprisoned by the pack ice. Albatross, she was called, but her days of flying before the wind over sun-sparkled waves were forever over. Massive floes piled up three and four deep all around her creaking, groaning hull had already begun their slow, relentless work of destruction, crushing, grinding, splintering until, come spring, nothing would be left of the once-proud vessel but a handful of flotsam, free to drift off into the vastness of the northern sea once the strengthening sun beat back the ice. Inspecting the ship and its cargo, Anuun reckoned that the purpose of her voyage had been to trade with the Nordsmen, probably for pelts and the odd bit of gold. Blown hundreds of miles off course by the storm, she’d never reached Nordsmen shores, that much was clear from her hold still filled with Orrian trade goods – and with nineteen seamen huddled together under decks in a clump of frozen bodies, their faces blued and rimed with hoarfrost. Snow had drifted in through a broken hatch, and the deck was scorched and charred where they’d tried to start a fire, so desperately cold they’d risked burning down the whole ice-bound ship around them for a bit of warmth. For whatever reason, they’d failed to keep the fire going, and died a little faster for it. Anuun couldn’t help a breath of relief. Tragic as the death of these men had been, it had likely served to prevent an incomparably greater catastrophe. For their ship had come to rest worryingly close to the Forbidden, a place no man must ever be allowed to set foot in, a locus inhabited by something far beyond any mortal’s, and even an Iceling’s, grasp, something buried under the ice thousands of years ago for a very good reason. Ages past, Icelings had been assigned to guard against any living being intruding on this place, deliberately or otherwise, and they’d faithfully fulfilled the task to this day – though the passing of so many eventless centuries had perhaps begun to dull their vigilance a mite. Maybe earlier times would have seen one of Anuun’s predecessors brave a storm similar to the one just past, doing the rounds regardless of the inferno outside instead of sheltering underice until the weather cleared. And maybe not. At this point, the question was already entirely moot. What Anuun had no way of knowing was that the ship’s crew had originally numbered twenty-four. Four had been taken by the storm, swept overboard by waves that towered higher than the masthead before they came crashing down and cleared the deck of anything that wasn’t twice and threefold battened down. Maybe the four went in silence, or maybe screaming for help – with the howling wind and thundering waves it would have made no difference. And whether it was the water or the cold that claimed them first was anybody’s guess. The deep took them either way, with a swiftness that was close to mercy. Twenty-four. Four drowned, nineteen in the hold. One was missing from the count. That one had come through the storm alive. Owing perhaps to an exceptional constitution or to one of those twists of fate that border on the bizarre, he’d survived the cold as well, at least long enough to leave the stranded ship and head off across the pack ice to where he hoped to find land, the storm erasing his tracks almost as soon as he’d made them. But Anuun was nothing if not thorough, and he was warned. Near impossible as it seemed, his questing Iceling senses found the feeble traces of the human’s passage. When they did and when he realized where the man had gone, his heart went colder than the deepest ice cave. This should never have been allowed to happen. Not on his watch. Storm or no, he’d neglected his duty, broken the trust placed in his kind, risked bringing shame on the whole Iceling nation. Only one thing he could do: find the man before it was too late and untold horrors were loosed on the world. Desperate, he plunged back into the ice, a streak of white lightning ripping landward. *    *    *    Now skidding over patches of wind-swept ice, now laboring through waist-high drifts of fine, powdery snow that crept into his boots and melted down his shins in icy trickles, Nudd Wiggin repeatedly cursed fate, the gods, and anyone else who’d ever done him an injustice. Since that list included practically everyone he’d ever met, it made for an impressive litany, with the captain of the Albatross currently ranking second only to the filthy, whoring slut who’d given birth to Nudd between turning tricks, followed by his drunkard, layabout father and then by a long string of masters Nudd had been apprenticed to, a bunch of narrow-minded, nitpicking fools none of whom had owned the sense to recognize his true potential. Looking back, he felt nothing but contempt for the lot of them... and, hell yes, a level measure of hatred as well. The last of these masters, a furrier named Brychan, was the reason Nudd had started keeping the list in earnest, and the reason he’d begun to hate with a dedication he otherwise seldom saw the need to muster: Brychan, and his daughter Dilys – Amut take the vicious slag. For months, she led him on, acting the bitch in heat when neither her old man nor the journeyman she was bespoken to were looking, until Nudd finally decided to give her what she so clearly wanted. But the moment he tried to jump her the stupid cow started screaming down the house, and suddenly he found himself cast in the role of the faithless fiend who’d tried to rape his master’s precious daughter. Brychan, the craven arsehole, let his other three apprentices beat Nudd to a bloody pulp before calling in the city watch and having him arrested for a deed Nudd told himself he’d never intended to commit and hadn’t gotten round to in any case. Choosing between the noose and three years on an Orrian war galley was the easy part. Serving his time and getting through it in one piece was another matter. As an alleged rapist, he was scum to the scum that manned the huge ship’s one hundred and twenty oars, and he was treated accordingly, as likely to accidentally run into a fellow oarsman’s fist as catch a couple of – entirely unwarranted – lashes from the overseer’s cat o’ nine tails. He consoled himself with vivid fantasies of the terrible, painful things he’d do to every single one of them, once he was good and ready to strike back. Just thinking about the bloody cocksuckers made him fricking mad all over again. Their fault, all of it. Their fault that he was stranded in this freezing shithole. Their fault that he had to wade through all this godsdamned, bleeding white shit. Seething with anger, he came to a sudden halt. Sucked a gob of brownish-pink spit from rotting teeth and bleeding gums and used it to mess up the godsdamned snow that was so fricking pristine it made him want to puke. Wished he had a load of piss to add to it, but the bloody cold seemed to have sucked all the moisture out of him and left him drier than a hag’s cunt. Satisfied that he’d done what he could, he screwed up his muddy, close-set eyes against the overwhelming brightness and trudged on, still far from finished with the past. When his three years were up, for want of a better plan he took hire on a merchant ship, the Dauntless. His list went with him, grown by over a hundred names but with room for plenty more, and a good thing, too. It took him less than a day aboard the Dauntless to figure out that her captain and crew were dead set on making his life as miserable as they could, giving him all the lowliest, dirtiest jobs and no doubt acting at the behest of the fricking gods, who’d had it in for him since the day he was born, or...