The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [2]
But this calm was not to last. Red Shoes, the Choctaw shaman, followed signs into the great western plains and found an army on the march, an army composed of Russian, Mongol, and Native American troops, led by the mysterious and powerful Sun Boy. In Charles Town, Ben confronted the sudden appearance of James Stuart, the Pretender to the English throne, come to claim the American colonies as his rightful kingdom. Ben quickly discovered that Stuart was backed by Russian submersibles and troops. After making the knowledge public, Ben fled Charles Town to a wilderness fort, where he and other leaders of the English colonies met with James Oglethorpe, the Margrave of the renegade colony of Azilia, with various Native American leaders, and with a band of free Africans known as Maroons. They determined to resist the Pretender and any other continental power that threatened to extend its influence in the New World.
Ben then set off for New France, through the territory of the powerful Coweta tribe, in hopes of winning both the French and the Coweta to his cause. On reaching the Coweta, he discovered that the Pretender's men had already arrived by air under the leadership of a malakim warlock named Alexander Sterne. Captured by the Coweta, Ben faced torture and death until rescued by his ally Don Pedro of Apalachee.
In Russia, the tsar mysteriously vanished, and Adrienne found herself facing a hostile new leadership and an even more hostile church. Assembling her students and soldiers loyal to the tsar, she set forth to discover Peter's whereabouts. In doing so, she discovered the secret invasion of North America, and worse, that its leader—the Sun Boy—was her own lost child, Nicolas. She also found that the philosopher Swedenborg had invented dark engines capable of allowing the most powerful of the malakim to wreak havoc in the world of matter. Facing one of these engines, she could do nothing more than flee, for no science or spell in her possession could affect it.
Tsar Peter, meanwhile, a captive of his own lieutenants, escaped them with the aid of Red Shoes. He vowed to regain control of his nation and end the war. Guided by Red Shoes, a Wichita man named Flint Shouting, and a former pirate named Tug, the Tsar set off for New Paris.
On the journey, however, Red Shoes was forced to fight a powerful malakus, and in defeating it became corrupted by its power. His companions watched in horror as he murdered the people of Flint Shouting's village. They escaped Red Shoes, continuing alone.
This did not concern Red Shoes, for in his power-driven madness he had conceived a new agenda—the destruction of the world and the making of a new one.
From the aether, the malakim guide their army and marshal their dark engines, bent on destroying the last bastion of resistance to their plans—New Paris.
Prologue
Dimitry Golitsyn watched the eye of hell slowly shut.
“Why? Why send it back?” he asked, though the sight of the thing, even as it diminished, made him tremble. It was now half the size it had been, a great black cyclone with a heart of crackling white fire. His airship, the Elisha, was poised high above that terrible eye. Around and beyond, the plains of America stretched away, rolling and bare as the steppes of his native Russia.
“Because it is not yet time,” Swedenborg's detached voice answered.
“No. That makes no sense,” Golitsyn snapped, fingering his mustache nervously, watching the storm shrink further. “The dark engines work. You've proved it. We should send them ahead of us, lay waste our enemies from a distance.”
“It is not yet time,” Swedenborg repeated, turning his face toward Golitsyn. The prince shivered again. The sorcerer's face was framed by wild, unbound hair;