Palaces Of Light

“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 to matter to me. So you chill me slow by your standards. Is that any worse than the certain knowledge that I have of the slow chilling we all endure? No—” he shook his head, his heavy frame heaving as he wheezed a chuckle “—let’s face it, K. There’s nothing you can do to bother me. And if you want to know what you’ve come here for, then you’d better get off that high horse you’ve ridden in on and start to listen. You want to know about the palaces of light. You think that’s where they’re taking them.”

K tried to answer, but his throat was tight and his mouth dry. Constriction forbade him from breathing, let alone form speech. It was all he could do to nod dumbly. His own flesh and blood… He had to find where they were going and why. That was why he had to put up with the old man and his tongue, which by rights should be cut out and roasted like the meat he slobbered on.

Morgan sighed, tossing the bone over his shoulder and wiping the blade of the knife on his vest, which was unlikely to get any greasier than it was already. He chewed ruminatively on his bottom lip, his eyes glazing over as he stared into the distance. It was as though he was recalling something told to him a lifetime ago, and it needed immense concentration to plunge memory back through the years and pluck out the memory fully formed.

K thought about his daughter and felt the tightness in his chest as the pain of anticipation almost burst his heart. Even a man who could trample hundreds of lives beneath him in the quest for power had the weakness of tender emotion somewhere within him, and for someone.

When Morgan spoke finally, it was as though he were channeling something from the distant past, no more than a conduit for a dead and forgotten time. Which, in a sense, perhaps he was.

“All things come to pass. From sand to sand, they say. None proved that more fully than those who had the greatest tech of all human history, and did little with it other than create a blizzard of fire, ice and wind that lasted for more than three generations. Men who wanted to be gods, and created a tech that should have ensured their immortality, yet did little except wipe out the records and traces of memory that they wished to be commemorated by. Iron, or something, that was what they said about it. Doesn’t matter. Point is, it shows that nothing lasts forever. But some things last longer than others. Last longer than memory.

“That’s how it is with the palaces of light…the mysterious palaces of light as they used to call them back in the day. They were there for so long that people forgot just how they got to be there in the first place. But there were some old legends that survived. Whether they were the truth or lies, I couldn’t say. I only repeat what I was told. One thing for sure, though,” he said, slipping back into the faraway tone of a man who was reciting much of his text from memory. “It’s always been a place where it pays to be fearful.”

K felt his guts churn. He hadn’t come from this part of the Deathlands, having spent his early years struggling out of a pesthole ville to ride with some coldhearts who preyed on convoys. It had been a hard and brutal training in the lessons of life, and he had acquired skills and a cynical, ruthless streak that had served him well when he ended up in a ville where the incumbent baron had grown fat, old and careless. Taking over had been a breeze, and he had used the superstition and fear of the people as a tool with which to maneuver his way to power. But the one thing he had never bargained on was that the superstition and fear was rooted in a sense of history. The words that Morgan now intoned brought that home to him, and clutched at his heart.

“There are those who say that the Mancos Canyon was gouged out of the rock by the thumbs of the gods. They needed somewhere to hide the demons that they had banished from the skies, and that was where they chose to leave them. Figures, when you look at how fucked the Mesa Verde is all around. Even before the shitstorms that the nukes brought with them it was still one hell of a place. Hell being the word. They say that the world was once a green and verdant vale—that’s another one of those phrases that means something good, although I couldn’t tell you exactly what it means.” Morgan sniffed and shrugged. “Anyways, the Mesa has always been a place that the gods skirted around with no notion of ever visiting ever again. Man wasn’t meant to tread there, but we did. Always have been some cursed souls who ended up there for want of anything better to do.

“Thing is, those who have wandered across the Mesa and not tumbled to their chilling when they reached the lip of the canyon have always seen the same thing. The mysterious palaces of light. Mysterious because they’ve been there since the dawn of time. Since before man, which kinda begs the question as to who the hell built them. Beautiful as they are, hewn out of the rock and shaped into buildings that have a light shining from them, they’ve been sheltered from everything that’s ever happened in this world. Think about it, K,” Morgan said softly, leaning forward so that his eye fixed on the baron, the paring knife emphasizing every word. “Even the nukecaust never touched these babies. That nightmare of howling winds and driving acid rains, the fire and the ice… It never touched them.”

He leaned back and sniffed back a gob of phlegm, growling in his throat.

“’Course, there are those who say that there are no such things as demons. They say that there were men who lived long before the Indians who everyone took to be the real natives that came across from where the seas now run. These were men like those who lived on the old southern lands, the ones who used to worship the sun and ripped out each other’s hearts to offer up. The kind of people you must like, K. But I tell you this—there are those who say that they built the palaces, yet they take no account of the fact that none of the temples and cities these men built looked anything like the palaces.

“Same way as others used to say that it was the Norsemen who built them. The ones who were supposed to sail on rafts across the raging seas centuries before the one called Columbo came and claimed the old lands, naming them Amerigo.” He frowned. “Something like that.” He shook his head as if to dismiss the confusion. “Thing about them is that, like the ones from the south, they couldn’t have done it because they had nothing like it in their own lands. Besides which, they were coming from the far coast, and how the fuck were they going to get across the plains when all they could do was build rafts of wood that must have got them here more by luck than any kind of skill?”

K interrupted. He felt almost as if it was wrong to do so; his mouth, too, was dry with fear of what Morgan was leaving between the words. “If not them, then who? The demons of who you spoke?” he asked.

A smile, almost mocking, wreathed the old man’s face. “You really believe that there are such things as gods and demons? It’s all a story, K. Just a story. Evil comes from men, but perhaps—just perhaps—it’s the case that the evil in men can somehow become instilled in a place, where it becomes magnified and acts as a draw to those who would think and feel the same way. Then again, mebbe I’m just plain wrong, and the story about there being gods who gouged the earth to throw down devils is right, and those devils built the palaces of light. One thing of which I’m certain, because it’s the only thing that runs through every story I was ever told, is that the men who built those palaces weren’t the Indians, nor the blond North men who were said to come before. These were men who came from a time before that, and had skills that could hew things of beauty out of ugly, harsh rock. That speaks of some power, some knowledge. And that’s still in there, K. It ain’t good, and it’s always done nothing else but attract its like.

“The dark ones—be they a kind of power or gods and demons—have always protected the canyon. Through the days of skydark and right till now. And whoever lives there is evil. If not to start with, then it’ll soon infect them.

“And that’s where they’re going, K. Into the heart of darkness and into the palaces of light. Remember, my baron, that not all light is good. The light that came with the nukes wasn’t good. Mebbe this is that kind of light.”

K was frustrated. He turned away from the old man, not wishing him to see the confusion that was written on his face. This talk of gods and demons was shit. But evil, real tangible evil that could infect a man, running from man to man like a disease. That was something he understood only too well. The palaces were places of legend. The legends were swathed in shadow, like the physical stones that hung over the canyon edge, protecting the palaces from the elements, just as they always had.

Hiding them from prying eyes—all but those of the most questing.

All but those, he hoped, of the ones he had sent to discover the truth.

Chapter One

Heat—dry and oppressive, unrelenting, bore down on them with every step the companions took. It was the kind of heat where, if they had any sense, they would seek out any shelter they could find and wait for the sun to sink in the sky, and the cool of night to start sweeping across the plain.

But the companions could only do that if they had time. And that was the one thing they were sorely lacking. There was no time for them to waste. The group they were trailing was obviously used to traveling in such conditions, and moved swiftly across the blasted and scorched plain. Swiftly enough to set a punishing pace.

“Oh, that we could have had the use of a wag,” Doc bemoaned in a voice that was cracked and parched, both by the dry atmosphere and the effort of an enforced march in such conditions. “Even a gas-guzzler…a mere wooden effort on wheels, powered by nothing more than the power of a mule would have satisfied me. But no, we are to be denied even that Spartan comfort in the search for our prey. How, pray tell, are we to be in a fit state to face them when we eventually confront them when we have had to suffer such unendurable conditions?”

“Doc, if they were unendurable, you would have bought the farm, and I wouldn’t have to listen to your interminable complaints,” Mildred countered in a voice that was as dry as Doc’s. Albeit that she had preserved hers by holding her peace for what seemed to be far too many miles while the old man moaned and droned on, his voice like the drip of water wearing away at her patience. At that, the fact that it made her think of water at a time when they were preserving theirs and putting aside thoughts of slaking their ravaging thirst was something that only served to increase her irritation.

“All I am trying to point out is that the baron may be rewarding us well for our endeavors if we achieve our goal, but he has not exactly given us the tools with which to finish the job.” He paused for a moment, his head cocked in thought, much to Mildred’s relief. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to last, and before she had a chance to breathe a sigh of relief he had started again, albeit on a different tack.

“Strange, but by the Three Kennedys, that phrase strikes a resonant chord deep within the caverns of remembrance! Perhaps it was something that one of the three blessed ones themselves uttered at some point. Or some such personage, one who shared an exalted position similar to that—”

He was cut short with a sudden action. Mildred, realizing that his sudden ramblings, now that they had veered from the simple grumblings of before, presaged a descent into the kind of temporary madness that blighted his life—and therefore by extension hers and those of her fellow travelers—turned and slapped him across the face. Hard. She was about five yards from him, just in front, and so to achieve this action she had to spin and then take a step back that added to the momentum of her swinging arm. She caught the old man with a full and open palm.

In the quiet of the arid and deserted plain, with no sound from the others beyond the muffled padding of boots on hard-packed sand, the blow sounded large and shocking. Doc’s head snapped on his neck, his eyes wide with shock and his jowls shaken by the impact of the blow. It resounded so loud in their collective silence that the others stopped to turn and face Doc and Mildred.

For a moment Doc stared blankly into Mildred’s face. From his expression she couldn’t tell if he would cry, yell, hit her or pass out.

He did none of those things. Instead, a slow grin spread across his face as he held a hand up to his stinging cheek.

“Madam,” he said slowly, “there must be other, and perhaps better ways in which to bring a man back from the brink of the abyss. But I would doubt if there are any that would have such an immediate effect. Do you know, for a moment there I could hear myself and found it quite hard to credit the things that were coming from my mouth. It is very hard to describe, as though one is separated from oneself and observing from a distance. To be back in a place where the mind and body occupy the same place is a pleasure. Even if—” he added, looking around “—it is such a place as this.”

The others had stopped to watch, taken aback by the sudden explosion of violence in Mildred’s behavior. Doc’s mumbling moan had become little more than a background sound to them, marking and punctuating each footfall. In truth, each of them was finding the going tough, and to waste time on the disjointed grumbling of the old man was more effort than they felt they could spare.

Now, almost forced into a halt by the turn of events, it became obvious that they had become mechanical in their actions, and for the first time in several hours under the baking skies they stopped to look at one another.

“He’s right about the wag, though,” Krysty said in a voice ravaged by the climate and by the lack of water. “At least we could have made some kind of shelter for the worst of the day.”

Ryan shook his head slowly. To speak was a great effort, so he used his words sparingly. “Can’t get too close. They’re on foot. Too much risk of them seeing dust clouds if we used wheels.”

Jak sniffed. “Get too far, lose touch.”

J.B. cast a long glance into the far distance. Toward the horizon, it seemed as though the vista in front of them was devoid of life. Only toward the edge of land and sky, where the two met in an indistinct haze, was there anything that could in any way be construed as signs of life. Even then, the specks that moved in the sealike mirage of wavering light might have been nothing more than phantoms of imagination. Following the Armorer’s gaze, Ryan could barely focus his only functioning orb on them. If he was honest, he knew they were real only because he had been tailing them for so long, and in an area about thirty miles back where there had been some jagged outcrops that jutted savagely from the earth to provide some kind of cover, he had been able to get close enough to take stock of the enemy.

“Should have taken them then,” J.B. murmured, as though able to read the one-eyed man’s mind.

Ryan allowed a grin to crack the previously grim set of his jaw. J. B. Dix had traveled with him for so long that each man knew the other’s way of thinking.

“You know why we couldn’t do that,” he said simply, for the Armorer, as he was also known, was only too well aware.

“Yeah. Can’t lose the captives. Can’t return without them. And if we don’t, then there’s no point in us having come this far.”

Ryan shrugged. There was nothing more to say. With a gesture, he indicated that they should start to move forward. Wearily, and with a resignation born of knowing that objective could only be achieved with further suffering, they began to move in a straggling line once more.

Ryan and Krysty were at the front, almost side by side. Jak came in their wake, with J.B. behind him. Mildred hung back a little, partly because she wanted to avoid the choking and irritating dust that they raised with their heels, and partly because she felt beholden to keep an eye on Doc. The old man—in some ways, and yet not others, as he was centuries old in conception yet had lived a span not much longer than any of them—was lagging behind. The ravages of his past experience made it hard for him sometimes to keep up in extreme conditions, his body having suffered at the hands of too many to sustain the levels of stamina sometimes needed. His tenacity, however, and sheer determination could sometimes equalize him with his peers.

As they made their weary way in the wake of the party they trailed, Ryan played over the options in his mind.

They had to have been crazy to take this one on. Sure, they needed the jack and the supplies that this would bring, but at what cost? It irritated him when they were reduced to hiring out their services like the mercies of the days before skydark. The highest bidder got the service, and screw what the mission may be. There were certain things that they wouldn’t do. Honor might have been a word that had lost all meaning postnukecaust, but Ryan still had to be able to look at himself in a mirror and be satisfied with what he saw. In their own ways, all of them had codes that they lived by. And those codes were basically the same. It was one of the things that bound them together.