Stones Of Power - The Complete Chronicles Of The Jerusalem Man Part 1

Gemmell, David.

Stones of Power.

The Complete Chronicles of the Jerusalem Man.

FOREWORD.

Of the many characters I have created over the years, few have captured the imagination of readers as powerfully as Jon Shannow, the Jerusalem Man.

Alan Fisher, the award winning author of Terioki Crossing, and a fan of the film Casablanca, has a phrase that sums up characters like Shannow. 'They walk out of Rick's Bar, fully formed and real. The author doesn't have to work on them at all. There is no conscious act of creation. One moment they don't exist - the next they stand before you, complete and ready.'

I remember the moment Shannow walked out of Rick's Bar.

It was at the end of a miserable, wet day in Bournemouth at the start of autumn in 1986. I was the group managing editor of a series of newspapers stretching from Brighton to Portsmouth on the south coast. The previous week I had a call from my father to tell me that my mother was in hospital and that surgeons feared she had terminal cancer. They were right. A year before she had suffered the amputation of her right leg, and fought back to make a dramatic entrance at a Christmas Dance. This time there would be no fightback.

I had visited her in London, and then driven to Bournemouth for a business meeting, concluding it at around ten that night. I was Staying in a small hotel of remarkable unfriendliness. The kind of place - as Jack Dee once said - where the Gideons leave a rope!

I hadn't eaten since the previous evening and I called the night porter. He said the kitchen staff had gone home, but there was a plate of olives someone had left at the bar. Nursing the olives and a very large gla.s.s of Armagnac I returned to my room and opened the Olympia portable typewriter.

I was at the time preparing a Drenai novel, featuring the Nadir Warlord Ulric, which my publishers had commissioned. According to the contract the book was to be called Wolf in Shadow and was, loosely, a prequel to Legend. I had completed around sixty pages. They weren't good, but I was powering on as best as I could.

Sitting by the window, looking out over Bournemouth's glistening streets, I tried to push the events of the week from my mind. My mother was dying, I was waiting to be fired, and staff, who had joined my team in good faith, were facing redundancy. After the fifth large Armagnac I decided to continue work on the book. I knew I was drunk, and I also knew that the chances of writing anything worthwhile were pretty negligible. But forcing my mind into a fantasy world seemed infinitely more appealing than concentrating on the reality at hand.

The scene I was set to continue had a Nadir scout riding across the steppes. The intention was to follow him to the top of a hill and have him gaze down on the awesome army camped on the plain below.

I focused on the typewriter keys and typed the following sentences....

The rider paused at the crest of a wooded hill, and gazed down at the wide, rolling empty lands beneath him. There was no sign of Jerusalem...

The walls of the mind came crashing in as I typed the word Jerusalem, thoughts, fears and regrets spilling over one another, fighting for s.p.a.ce. There followed a bad hour, which even Armagnac could not ease.

But after midnight I returned to the page and stared down at it. It called out to me. Who is he, I thought? What is he looking for, this Jerusalem Man?

And suddenly he was there. Tall and gaunt, seeking a city that had ceased to exist three hundred years before. A lonely, tortured man on a quest with no ending, riding through a world of savagery and barbarism.

The story flowed in an instant, and I wrote until after the dawn.

Through all the despair that followed in those next painful months I found a sanctuary in the company of Jon Shannow. Through his eyes I could see the world clearly, and understand how important it is to be strong in the broken places.

As a result Shannow will always be one of my favourite characters.

For a while back there he was the best friend I'd ever had.

David A. Gemmell Hastings, 1995

PROLOGUE

The High Priest lifted his bloodstained hands from the corpse and dipped them in a silver bowl filled with scented water. The blood swirled around the rose petals floating there, darkening them and glistening like oil. A young acolyte moved to kneel before the King, his hands outstretched. The King leaned forward, placing a large oval stone in his palms. The stone was red-gold, and veined with thick black streaks. The acolyte carried the stone to the corpse, laying it on the gaping wound where the girl's heart had been. The stone glowed, the red-gold gleaming like an eldritch lantern, the black veins shrinking to fine hairlines. The acolyte lifted the stone once more, wiped it with a cloth of silk and returned it to the King before backing away into the shadows.

A second acolyte approached the High Priest, bowing low. In his arms he held the red ceremonial cape which he lifted over the priest's bald head.

The King clapped his hands twice and the girl's body was lifted from the marble altar and carried down the long hall to oblivion.

'Well, Achnazzar?' demanded the King.

'As you can see, my lord, the girl was a powerful ESPer, and her essence will feed many Stones before it fades.'

'The death of a pig will feed a Stone, priest. You know what I am asking,' said the King, fixing Achnazzar with a piercing glare. The bald priest bowed low, keeping his eyes on the marble floor.

'The omens are mostly good, sire.'

'Mostly? Look at me!' Achnazzar raised his head, steeling himself to meet the burning eyes of the Satanlord. The priest blinked and tried to look away, but Abaddon's glare held him trapped, almost hypnotized. 'Explain yourself.'

The invasion, Lord, should proceed favorably in the Spring. But there are dangers . . . not great dangers,' he added hurriedly.

'From which area?'

Achnazzar was sweating now as he licked dry lips with a dry tongue.

'Not an area, Lord, but three men.'

'Name them.'

'Only one can be identified, the others are hidden. But we will find them. The one is called Shannow. Jon Shannow.'

'Shannow? I do not know the name. Is he a leader of men, or a Brigand chief?'

'No, Lord. He rides alone.'

'Then how is he a danger to the h.e.l.lborn?'

'Not to the h.e.l.lborn, sire, but to you.'

'You consider there is a difference?'

Achnazzar blanched and blinked the sweat from his eyes. 'No, Lord, I meant merely that the threat is to you as a man.'

'I have never heard of this Shannow. Why should he threaten me?' 'There is no sure answer, sire, but he follows the old, dead G.o.d.'

'A Christian?' spat Abaddon. 'Will he seek to kill me with love?'

'No, Lord, I meant the old dark G.o.d. He is a Brigand-slayer, a man of sudden violence.

There is even some indication that he is insane.'

'How do these indications manifest themselves - apart from his religious stupidity?'

'He is a wanderer, Lord, searching for a city which ceased to exist during Blessed Armageddon.'

'What city?'

'Jerusalem, Lord.'

Abaddon chuckled and leaned back on his throne, all tension fading. 'That city was destroyed by a tidal wave three hundred years ago - by the great mother of all tidal waves.

A thousand feet of surging ocean drowned that pestilential place, signaling the rein of the Master and the death of Jehovah. What does Shannow hope to find in Jerusalem?'

'We do not know, Lord.'

'And why is he a threat?'

'In every chart, or seer-dream, his line crosses yours. Karmically you are bonded. It is so with the other two; in some way Shannow has touched - or will touch - the lives of two men who could harm you. We cannot identify them yet - but we will. For now they appear as shadows behind the Jerusalem Man.'

'Shannow must die ... and swiftly. Where is he now?'

'He is at present some months' journey to the south, nearing Rivervale. We have a man there, Fletcher. I shall get word to him.'

'Keep me informed, priest.'

As Achnazzar backed away from his monarch, Abaddon rose from the ebony throne and wandered to the high arched window, gazing over New Babylon. On a plain to the south of the city the h.e.l.lborn army was gathering for the Raids of the Blood Feast. By Winter the new guns would be distributed and the h.e.l.lborn would ready themselves for the Spring war: ten thousand men under the banner of Abaddon, sweeping into the south and west, bringing the new world into the hands of the last survivor of the Fall.

And they warned him of one madman?

Abaddon raised his arms. 'Come to me, Jerusalem Man.'

CHAPTER ONE.

The rider paused at the crest of a wooded hill and gazed down over the wide rolling empty lands beneath him.

There was no sign of Jerusalem, no dark road glittering with diamonds. But then Jerusalem was always ahead, beckoning in the dreams of night, taunting him to find her on the black umbilical road.

His disappointment was momentary and he lifted his gaze to the far mountains, grey and spectral. Perhaps there he would find a sign? Or was the road covered now by the blown dust of centuries, disguised by the long gra.s.s of history?

He dismissed the doubt; if the city existed, Jon Shannow would find it. Removing his wide-brimmed leather hat, he wiped the sweat from his face. It was nearing noon and he dismounted. The steeldust gelding stood motionless until he looped the reins over its head, then dipped its neck to crop at the long gra.s.s. The man delved into a saddlebag to pull clear his ancient Bible; he sat on the ground and idly opened the gold-edged pages.

'And Saul said to David, Thou art not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him, for thou art but a youth, and he is a man of war from his youth.'

Shannow felt sorry for Goliath, for the man had had no chance. A courageous giant, ready to face any warrior, found himself opposite a child without sword or armour. Had he won, he would have been derided. Shannow closed the Bible and carefully packed it away.

Time to move,' he told the gelding. He stepped into the saddle and swept up the reins.

Slowly they made their way down the hillside, the rider's eyes watchful of every boulder and tree, bush and shrub. They entered the cool of the valley and Shannow drew back on the reins, turning his face to the north and breathing deeply.

A rabbit leapt from the brush, startling the gelding. Shannow saw the creature vanish into the undergrowth and then unc.o.c.ked the long-barrelled pistol, sliding it back into the scabbard at his hip. He could not recall drawing it clear. Such was the legacy of the years of peril - fast hands, a sure eye and a body that reacted independently of the conscious mind.

Not always a good thing . . . Shannow would never forget the look of blank incomprehension in the child's eyes as the lead ball clove his heart. Nor the way his frail body had crumpled lifeless to the earth. There had been three Brigands that day and one had shot Shannow's horse out from under him, while the other two ran forward with knife and axe. He had destroyed them all in scant seconds, but a movement behind caused him to swivel and fire. The child had died without a sound.

Would G.o.d ever forgive him?

Why should he, when Shannow could not forgive himself?

'You were better off losing, Goliath,' said Shannow.

The wind changed and a stomach-knotting aroma of frying bacon drifted to him from the east. Shannow tugged the reins to the right. After a quarter of a mile the trail rose and fell and a narrow path opened on to a meadow and a stone-fronted farmhouse. Before the building was a vegetable garden and beyond it a paddock where several horses were penned.

There were no defence walls and the windows of the house were wide and open. To the left of the building the trees had been allowed to grow to within twenty yards of the wall, allowing no field of fire to repel Brigands. Shannow sat and stared for some time at this impossible dwelling. Then he saw a child carrying a bucket emerge from the barn beyond the paddock. A woman walked out to meet him and ruffled his blond hair.

Shannow scanned the fields and meadows for sign of a man. At last, satisfied that they were alone, he edged the gelding out on to open ground and approached the building. The boy saw him first and ran inside the house.

Donna Taybard's heart sank as she saw the rider and she fought down panic as she lifted the heavy crossbow from the wall. Placing her foot in the bronze stirrup she dragged back on the string, but could not notch it.

'Help me, Eric.' The boy joined her and together they c.o.c.ked the weapon. She slid a bolt into place and stepped on to the porch. The rider had halted some thirty feet from the house and Donna's fear swelled as she took in the gaunt face and deep-set eyes, shadowed under the wide-brimmed hat. She had never seen a Brigand, but had anyone asked her to imagine one this man would have leapt from her nightmares. She lifted the crossbow, resting the heavy b.u.t.t against her hip.

'Ride on,' she said. 'I have told Fletcher we shall not leave, and I will not be forced.'

The rider sat very still, then he removed his hat. His hair was shoulder-length and black, streaked with silver, and his beard showed a white fork at the chin.

'I am a stranger, Lady, and I do not know this Fletcher. I do not seek to harm you - I merely smelt the bacon and would trade for a little. I have Barta coin and . . .'

'Leave us alone,' she shouted. The crossbow slipped in her grip, dropping the trigger bar against her palm. The bolt flashed into the air, sailing over the rider and dropping by the paddock fence. Shannow walked his horse to the paddock and dismounted, retrieving the bolt. Leaving the gelding, he strolled back to the house.

Donna dropped the bow and pulled Eric into her side. The boy was trembling, but in his hand he held a long kitchen knife; she took it from him and waited as the man approached.

As he walked he removed his heavy leather top-coat and draped it over his arm. It was then that she saw the heavy pistols at his side.

'Don't kill my boy,' she said.

'Happily, Lady, I was speaking the truth: I mean you no harm. Will you trade a little bacon?' He picked up the bow and swiftly notched it, slipping the bolt into the gulley.

'Would you feel happier carrying this around?'

'You are truly not with the Committee?'

'I am a stranger.'