Sunset Warrior by Eric Van Lustbader

Author:Eric Van Lustbader [Van Lustbader, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-7089-7
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 2014-02-18T23:08:00+00:00

Turn the page to continue reading from the Sunset Warrior Cycle

There is no journey’s end.

—Bujun saying

ONE

Ice

SOARING THROUGH FRIGID MISTS and roiling clouds, he stretches fully his long wings upon the unpredictable currents. Streamers of silvered plumage, running bilaterally across his wings and cresting his majestic questing head, ripple and blur in the wind. He banks and dips. There is a moaning in his ears. His large liquid eyes stare unblinkingly ahead at the immense eye of the setting sun, its face a broad and flattened disk, wider at the sides as if caught in a vise of immeasurable proportions. Then thick ribbons of cloud of a metallic gray ride before it like the ghostly remnants of a once vast, victorious army, reaving it.

He banks again, deftly avoiding a treacherous downdraft, and turns his incurious gaze beneath him, through the layers of cloud and mist, to the painful twisting of the earth far below.

High peaks beaten by age and scraped by merciless weather, crowned in bitter frost, sealed in pearl and emerald ice, thrust their humped backs in snaking lines against the whipping winds which, forever swirling, gather layers of fine powdery snow from the mountains’ slopes, turning them into rising sheets, hurling them forward, like giants striding across the barren land.

He floats over sheer gorges, frosted thickly in gleaming sheets of periwinkle ice, plumes of loose snow drifting along their flanks like smoke from a funeral pyre. His keen eyes trace the vertiginous descent from dancing ice crystaled green-turquoise-magenta in the dying light to the violent violet of their yawning and uneasy depths: precipitous chasms sliced out of the land as cleanly as if by a cruel blade of immense size. Powerful wings flutter as out of these depths now is heard the agonized groaning of shifting rock. Ozone and sulphur fill the air as the earth shudders and trembles. Shards of ice shear off in the dense clusters with infinite slowness, hanging impossibly in mid-air, crumbling in layers until, with an abrupt and complete swiftness, they explode silently into vast spurts of hyalescent spray high in the sky that turn to rainbow arcs as they catch the last oblique rays of watery light.

He wheels in the colored, suddenly solid air, unperturbed.

Everywhere is ice and draperies of snow with only the occasional tired fist of granite or twisted schist rising like ancient tombstones in an alien desert, useless punctuation on a blank and crumbling page.

Against this inimical icescape nothing moves.

The bird banks and glides in the sky, his black-irised eyes scanning the dreadful sameness of the land. Into the setting sun he flies, his majestic plumage stained a dilute scarlet and, glancing once more earthward, he sees a dark and tiny shadow limned before the glare of the ice. Muscles respond to the brain’s command and the wings dip, their silver plumage losing for a moment the scarlet wash, turning a rich lustrous gray, as he heads southward for a closer look.

Resolution of image comes far too swiftly, for the shadow is huge.

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