God of Clocks

Zusatztext “Highly imaginative . . . Readers will thrill to the hellishly dark imagery.”— Publishers Weekly     “A blisteringly good read . . . If it were ever to transform to the wide screen! you would need a director that combined Peter Jackson’s scale with Terry Gilliam’s surrealism.”— Scotland on Sunday Informationen zum Autor Alan Campbell turned down a life as a designer and programmer on the vastly successful Grand Theft Auto computer games to enter the world of fiction with his debut novel, Scar Night . God of Clocks is his third novel. He lives in Scotland. Klappentext The highly acclaimed author of "Scar Night" and "Iron Angel" returns with a new novel of a mythic struggle between man and angel, demon and god--an Armageddon of survival and annihilation that will play out on the fields of time itself. Leseprobe Chapter One Three Hours Ago Twelve angels had been released into the world from the Ninth Citadel of Hell and would return there only in the wake of all mankind. The earth shuddered and broke apart under their heels of ironclad bone. Engines pounded in their skulls and from behind armoured ribs still steaming from the portal through which they had passed. They crushed Rys's Northmen on the battlefield at Larnaig and then moved on to Coreollis, where they stove in the gates of that gaunt city. Shadow-angels on thin legs trailed them across the rolling acres of darkly stubbled grassland, burnt forest, and corpse-strewn mud. The cames of their wings made stark black silhouettes against the bloody dusk, the low sun blazing through like a leadlight vision of apocalypse. Those defenders upon the city ramparts who had remained loyal to Lord Rys now lifted their catapults' pawls and swung the wooden machines inwards. Sulphur pots arced up and burst against the giants and then fell in flaming yellow showers over innocent homes. But the battle had been fought and lost at Larnaig, and these doomed buildings were now home only to widows and fatherless children. And thus bathed in red-gold radiance, dragging chains of brimstone through the streets of Coreollis, the Twelve converged on the palace of a besieged god. Gables broke against their advancing shins, and roof joists shattered. Chimneys toppled; the slates flew spinning or slid in sheets to break upon flagstones under a veil of red dust and lemon-coloured fumes. Half a league to the east, Rachel Hael stood on the battlement of an abandoned keep set atop a motte. Rys's men had built this timber-and-sod outpost an age ago to watch the Red Road, and the heads of Pandemerian traitors and Mesmerist demons still adorned the spiked palisades around its bailey. She had laid out a simple picnic of bread, butter, and fruit on a bench behind the rampart wall. Now gripping an apple between her teeth, the former assassin raised her sightglass to follow the eyeless gazes of those grim sentinels arrayed on their spikes. She searched the road where the soil had been churned black under the armoured boots of King Menoa's legions, and then she swept the lens over the metallic pink waters of Lake Larnaig. Stands of white willow dotted the scalloped shoreline like silver pavilions; their ancient trunks crowded underneath in dens of red shadow. To the east the steel curves of the Skirl railway shone brightly beneath the ink-dark heavens. The track bisected a hamlet of burned station buildings and sheds near the northern bank, before terminating at the end of the Larnaig pier. The steamship Sally Broom had once carried Menoa's treaty of peace towards that same stone dock. Now the battered vessel lay at the end of a deep gouge in the Larnaig Field, three hundred yards from the point whence she had been thrown. Beyond the lake, the Moine Massif reared up into the clouds in gaseous blue layers of scarps and saws and cones like simmering temples...

Product details

• Authors: Alan Campbell
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 22.06.2010
• EAN: 9780553589337
• ISBN: 978-0-553-58933-7
• No. of pages: 400
• Dimensions: 106 mm x 175 mm x 27 mm
• Series: Deepgate Codex; Deepgate Codex
• Subject: Fiction > Science fiction, fantasy