Iceblood Read online

  Annotation

  More than two hundred years after a nuclear holocaust all but vaporized America, a new order evolved from the Deathlands to inflict its rule on the fortified cities beyond whose walls are the newly christened Outlands.

  Deep in Cerberus redoubt, Kane, a renegade magistrate from the united baronies, experiences a shocking mind probe. It imprints him with a knowledge that propels him to the other side of the world, with the archivist Brigid and brother-in-arms Grant.

  In the heart of Tibet, Kane and his Outlander companions pursue a legend, only to discover they are not alone in their search for the Chintamani Stone. The ancient relic has the power to conduct the final assault on the Earths destiny… or to destroy the destroyers.

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  James Axler

  Prologue

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  James Axler

  Iceblood

  When Man's blood is of the broth of ice, his life is measured by a wanton throw of the dice; In the midnight hours he broods in a lonely state with spirit dead and desolate.

  Justin Geoffrey

  OCR Mysuli: [email protected]

  The Road to Outlands — From Secret Government Files to the Future

  Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath — forever known as sky-Dark — reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

  Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands — poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated lifeforms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

  What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

  Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here in the hellzones that humanity survived, living with chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

  In the villes, rigid laws were enforced to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons' public credo and their right-to-rule.

  Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology… a question to a keeper of the archives… a vague clue about alien masters — and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he abandoned his friends and pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters.

  But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what would be left?

  Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid's only link with her family was her mother's red-gold hair; green eyes and supple form. Grant's clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

  Parents, friends, community — the very root of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux — when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

  For Kane, it wouldn't do. So the only way was out — way, way out.

  After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville's head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

  With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

  Prologue

  The Byang-thang Plateau, northwest Tibet

  Clots of frozen blood glittered like rubies dropped from a broken necklace. They stretched back over the hard-packed snow as far as Grigori Zakat could see, swallowed by the shadows cast by the titanic peaks of the Cherga Mountains.

  His booted feet had barely left their imprints on the hoarfrost overlaying the crust of snow, but the drops of blood left an unmistakable trail in crimson for his pursuers.

  Zakat stumbled, a rushing wave of dizziness engulfing him. He sank down to the snow, supporting himself by his left arm, keeping his right hand pressed tightly against the pressure bandage taped over the throbbing wound beneath his ribs. Blood oozed around the edges.

  He shook his head and remembered he had only one pursuer now, and that was death itself. Boro Orolok and his Mongol clan-brothers were at least a thousand miles behind him and could no longer threaten him with their bundhi daggers.

  Zakat didn't know what had turned the followers of the Tushe Gun against the Russian garrison in the Black Gobi, but he suspected the three Americans who had accompanied Colonel Sverdlovosk were somehow responsible. He didn't know what had happened to his superior officer, either, but whatever influence the colonel exerted over Orolok's clan had come to an obvious and decisive end.

  Zakat slowly pushed himself to his feet, despising the tremor in his legs, silently enduring the wave of vertigo. He refused to voice a cry of pain as the raw lips of his wound pulled and stretched. He was more than just a major in the Internal Security Network or even an operative of District Twelve — he was an ordained Khlysty priest and he knew pain was only of the body and could thus be controlled.

  He began walking again, concentrating on placing one foot ahead of the other. He had no destination in mind; he wanted only to put as much distance as possible between himself and the wreckage of the Tu-114 cargo plane.

  Zakat wasn't sure how much time had elapsed since the huge aircraft had crashed onto the mountain plateau. He could remember only the snowcapped peaks coming up fast, then a splintering shock, a grinding, relentless screech of rupturing metal. Something fell on him and knocked him unconscious.

  The sound of crackling flames, the stench of burning oil and scorched flesh woke him. His back was hot, and he looked around to see flames filling the interior of the ship. Fortunately the fuel tank was nearly drained so it didn't explode, but oil and other flammable lubricants were aflame. The fire was intense enough to consume the bodies of the two troopers in the passenger compartment.

  Not bothering to examine Kuryadin, slumped over in the pilot's chair with a razor-edged fragment of the foreport embedded in his throat, Zakat unbuckled the safety harness and climbed out through the port, heedless of the lacerations he received. He cut himself several times in the process.

  The broken-backed aircraft was afire from the wings back, so even if there were useful items in cargo, he couldn't reach them. He staggered away, his body a screaming mass of agony, but the most pain radiated out from the stab wound in his midsection. He stumbled across the frozen snow and forced himself to continue for hours upon ho
urs.

  The air, though bitingly cold, was quiet and still. So far, his heavy topcoat, fleece-lined gloves and insulated boots had kept him from freezing. He knew, however, that once the sun dropped behind the distant peaks, the temperature would plummet. He would have to find shelter or perish of exposure. Even the superhuman vitality granted to him by his faith had its limits.

  He recalled the details of the martyrdom of Saint Rasputin, how he had survived poison, multiple gunshot wounds, blows to the head and near drowning. At last, he had succumbed to the freezing temperature of the waters in Moika canal.

  Zakat fumbled beneath his blood-stiffened woolen shirt to finger the token of his faith hanging from a thong around his neck. He touched the tiny wooden phallus and caressed the stylized crystal testicles affixed to it.

  The emblem symbolized Rasputin's penis, cut off by one of his assassins, then recovered and preserved in a velvet container by his devoted followers. Upon his initiation into the priesthood, Zakat had been permitted to glimpse but not touch the blackened, desiccated holy relic.

  As he staggered onward, Zakat mouthed Rasputin's last words, "I will not die. I will not die!"

  He continued whispering the mantra in an under-the-breath singsong as he had been taught. Even someone near him wouldn't be able to understand the hymn hissing from his lips.

  No one, not even his superior officers, suspected he was a Khlysty priest. The few members of his sect who held high posts in the Russian government had helped him to dodge the rigorous background checks prior to his assignment to District Twelve, the ultrasecret arm of the Internal Security Network.

  Zakat was his Khlysty name not his birth name, but no one questioned it, even though it meant "twilight." The few people who had glimpsed the pattern of wealed, raised scars on his back, the result of numerous flagellation rituals, had kept their curiosity in check. In the Internal Security Network, it was considered bad form to question a comrade, and even quite dangerous to make personal inquiries of an officer. It hinted at ambition. Primarily because he didn't appear to be ambitious, Grigori Zakat had advanced rapidly as a District Twelve officer under the command of Sverdlovosk.

  Zakat went to great lengths to present the image of an aesthete, an effete intellectual who wrote charming verse for his own amusement in his off hours. Tall and slender, with a high pale forehead beneath sleek black hair and a languid manner, he didn't look as if he entertained any ambitions more taxing than rising by noon.

  But of course he did. He couldn't be a Khlysty priest otherwise. He approached the obstacles to his ambition differently than other men. His approach relied on an offhand comment made to a superior officer regarding rivals, the discreet planting of black market contraband among their possessions or, if they were particularly impressionable, a campaign of subtle suggestions that they were being treated unfairly, passed over for advancement. When his competitors filed their complaints, they tended to either disappear or be reduced in rank, and Zakat easily stepped into the power vacuum.

  He had achieved the rank of major less than a year ago, after he arranged matters to make General Stovoski believe he had been seduced by his middle-aged, oversexed wife. Zakat managed to smile at the memory of Stovoski's face when the general stumbled into the parlor to find his wife kneeling before him, clawing at his trousers, oblivious to his pious protests.

  The stupid cow of a woman, her brain saturated with vodka, had been childishly easy to manipulate, never realizing that the strength of Zakat's will had overwhelmed hers. And if his mind was exceptionally strong, his body complemented it. None of his comrades or even the surprisingly perceptive Sverdlovosk knew he had the strength in his delicate-appearing hands to throttle a man to death, something he had done as part of the ordination ceremony.

  Much of his Khlysty training revolved around camouflage, infiltration and deception. Through years of long practice, he could make his gray eyes reflect nothing but a mild, dull disinterest in his surroundings.

  His eyes glinted now with flinty sparks of a fierce determination not to die on this desolate waste. He knew he could survive a long time without food, sustained only by his faith and the power of his convictions.

  "I will not die," he chanted. "I will not die!"

  He trudged on, the terrain steepening gradually. Sometime toward late afternoon — he guessed it was late afternoon, since his wrist chron had been damaged in the crash — clouds thickened over the face of the sun.

  At first he was grateful because the cloud cover reduced not only the glare from the hoarfrost but also the chances of contracting snow-blindness. Then a wind sprang up and slashed at him with icy talons.

  Sleet began slicing across the rocky plain, turning his surroundings to formless, misty shapes. Zakat squinted against the stinging ice particles and kept moving, uncomfortably aware he could be only a few steps from a bottomless crevasse. The blood on his clothing froze hard as a sheathing of metal.

  Tearing a strip from the lining of his greatcoat, he tied it around his eyes so his lids wouldn't freeze together. The driving sleet rendered him almost blind anyway.

  He forced himself to concentrate only on what lay ahead, to plod through the swirling curtain of white. His body lost all sensation, even pain, numb to anything other than putting one foot in front of the other. Then, he put one foot in empty air.

  Fanning his arms, Zakat plummeted straight down, lips clamping tight over the scream forcing its way up his throat. He didn't fall far or long before his plunge turned into a head-over-heels tumble, his body plowing through banked snow like the prow of a ship. His thrashing descent ended, and he lay motionless, breathing shallowly through his nostrils.

  He continued to lie there, noting how pleasantly warm his limbs began to feel. That spreading warmth galvanized him into a floundering rush to hands and knees. He knew he was freezing to death, with the subzero wind wailing around him like the sound of distant violins.

  The fall had dislodged his blindfold, so he experimentally opened one eye. For a moment, he saw nothing but white and wondered if he was snow-blind, despite his precautions. A strong gust of wind ripped a part in the sleet curtain, and he saw the dark bulk of the monastery.

  Buildings reared above him, constructed so closely together they appeared to be pushing one another off the cliff. A courtyard barely a hundred feet squared was jammed between the monastery storehouse and a mountain wall. The roofs of the buildings looked of Chinese design, but the architecture was careless and crude.

  Struggling erect, he forced his legs to carry him toward the entrance between two tall bastions of snow-covered rock. He no longer felt his feet at all.

  A figure wearing a soiled yellow cloak and a red cowl materialized between the two rocks. With a prayer wheel spinning in his right hand and a brass bell clanging in his left, the monk shouted a warning into the courtyard behind him, then a challenge to Zakat.

  The Russian smiled humorlessly. The monk probably thought he was an earthbound Dre, a malign messenger of death that figured prominently in Tibetan legend. He lifted his left hand and gestured to the monk. His right closed around the butt of the Tokarev holstered at his waist.

  The monk's eyes narrowed to barely perceptible slits in his face as Zakat approached him, palm outward to show he was unarmed. The monk's eyes focused on his left hand. With a long-legged bound, Zakat sprang to the small man, planting the short barrel of his Tokarev pistol against the monk's jaw. He didn't speak, assuming the monk understood his actions.

  The bell and the prayer wheel flew in opposite directions. The bell gave a final, feeble chime when it struck the frost-encrusted flagstones. Gathering a fistful of soiled robe in his left hand, Zakat pushed the monk ahead of him through the monastery's gate, into the courtyard.

  As he entered, he heard the bellowing of a great brass horn and a clangor of bells from the walls. A small man in yellow robes emerged from a door on the far side of the courtyard. Worked in yellow thread on the breast of his black tunic was a swastika runnin
g to the left, the symbol of the Bon-po religious order. Like most Bon shamans, he was starkly dressed. Beneath a dark leather turban, his black hair was tied back with a clip made of a human finger bone. Oddly pale, finely textured skin stretched tight over prominent cheekbones and brow arches. Behind the round, steel-rimmed lenses of thick spectacles, his huge, fathomless eyes glittered like those of a raptorial bird.

  A bloodred baldric extended across his torso from left shoulder to right hip. A coiled whip hung from it. Tucked into the baldric was a short, curving ram dao sacrificial sword. The oak hilt was extravagantly designed with ivory and gold inlays.

  The Bon-po priest was followed out the door by a group of six excited men. Their red armbands and soot-blackened faces marked them as Dob-Dobs, the monkish soldiery. In their sashes, they carried iron cudgels shaped like oversize door keys. Rawhide thongs were looped through the handles, and already several of the Dob-Dobs were whirling them overhead. When released, the cudgels struck with deadly, bone-breaking force.

  Zakat only briefly considered triggering his pistol. Perhaps he could kill three of the monks, maybe four, but he saw no point to it. Either the Dob-Dobs would crush his skull with their crude weapons or he would perish out on the plateau. He released the monk and stood motionless, angry shouts filling his ears. His head throbbed in rhythm to the gibbering cacophony.

  The black-turbaned man gracefully stepped through the howling Dob-Dobs, and Zakat was struck by his fluid, danceresque movements. His jet-black gaze swept over Zakat, then focused on him, staring unblinkingly through the lenses of his spectacles. His almost inhumanly large eyes widened, his lips moved and a whispering, altered voice came forth.

  Zakat met that stare, transfixed, unable to tear his gaze away. Although his Khlysty training revolved around a form of psionics, of imposing the force of one will upon the other, he knew the black-turbaned man was a master. With a distant sense of dread, he realized the Bon-po shaman was invoking the angkur, the powerful one-pointedness of thought, and directing a blade of tsal energy into his mind. He felt it as a sensation of a cold, caressing cobweb brushing his brain.