Praise for J. Gregory Keyes's
The Age of Unreason
Book One: Newton's Cannon
“The opening blast of his planned Age of Unreason trilogy is powerful enough to make readers grab Book Two, A Calculus of Angels, when it arrives.”
—USA Today
“A new myth-maker, a new star of the fantasy genre has arrived. Like Ursula K. LeGuin in the ‘60s, John Varley in the ‘70s, and Orson Scott Card in the ‘80s, author J. Gregory Keyes may well be the leading fantasy writer of the 1990s.”
—BookPage
Book Two: A Calculus of Angels
“Masterful … A bravura performance … [An] ingenious mélange of Age of Unreason period details, stunning psychic and alchemical phenomena, [and] fetching poetic descriptions … Lavish and thoughtful.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Book Three: Empire of Unreason
“The most original fantasy I have read in years.”
—KEVIN ANDERSON Bestselling coauthor of Dune: House Atreides
“Keyes still is a master of the details that make much of this universe believable, and the amount of action definitely makes the book exciting.”
—Booklist
By J. Gregory Keyes
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group:
The Chosen of the Changeling
THE WATERBORN
THE BLACKGOD
The Age of Unreason
NEWTON'S CANNON
A CALCULUS OF ANGELS
EMPIRE OF UNREASON
THE SHADOWS OF GOD
The Psi Corps Trilogy
BABYLON 5: DARK GENESIS
BABYLON 5: DEADLY RELATIONS
BABYLON 5: FINAL RECKONING
STAR WARS®: THE NEW JEDI ORDER:
EDGE OF VICTORY: CONQUEST
STAR WARS®: THE NEW JEDI ORDER:
EDGE OF VICTORY: REBIRTH
Books published by The Ballantine Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.
For
Steve Saffel,
Del Rey Books
Contents
What Has Gone Before
Prologue
PART ONE
THE DESIGNE OF THE APOCALYPSE
1. New Paris
2. Faith
3. Return of the Margrave
4. Big Mile
5. King Philippe's Reception
6. Geneaologies
7. Guns on the Altamaha
8. In the Navel of the World
9. Old Acquaintance
10. Hercule
11. Downstream
12. To Slay the Sun
13. Demonstrations Quaint and Curious
PART TWO
ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
1. Abomination
2. An Interesting Outcome
3. The Sound
4. Defeat
5 Another Old Acquaintance
6. A New Matter
7. Ghosts and God
8. Brawls and Battles
9. An Unlikely Welcome
10. Things Broken
11. Three Kings
12. No Retreat
13. Hard Wind
14. The Roof of the World
15. The Duel
16. Castle, Tree, and Cord
17. Epiphanies
18. Cognac and Consequences
Epilogue: Declaration
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the editing team—Veronica Chapman, Martha Schwartz, Betty Harris, Melanie Gold, and Alix Krijgsman, who managed things. As usual, Terese Nielsen provided a wonderful painting, which Min Choi and art director Dave Stevenson transformed into a terrific cover. Thanks to Nell Keyes, Kris Boldis, and Ken Carleton for giving me their impressions of the manuscript.
What Has Gone Before
In 1681, in his laboratory at Trinity College, Isaac Newton discovered Philosopher's Mercury, the key to matter and energy, and from this discovery came a flood of inventions.
Heatless alchemical lights brightened the night streets of London and Paris. Aetherschreibers sent messages instantaneously around the globe. Kings and princes commissioned terrible new weapons with which to fight their wars.
And in Boston, a young man named Benjamin Franklin sought his destiny. Not happy as his brother's printing apprentice, Ben longed to study the scientific. He read and dreamed in his spare time, and through his studies, he found a way to modify an aetherschreiber to receive not only the messages intended for it, but also to eavesdrop on any that might be floating in the aether. He fell into correspondence with an unknown mathematician, one striving to complete a complex calculus equation. Blinded by his love for science, when Franklin saw the solution to the problem, he shared it immediately.
A continent away, Adrienne de Mornay de Montchevreuil was also searching for her path in life. Not content with the roles available to her gender, her forbidden love for mathematics found a release when she became secretary to the philosopher Fatio de Duillier. De Duillier was employed by Louis XIV, the absolute monarch of France, and his work was of an urgent and secret nature.
Though Adrienne never understood—or much cared about—the purpose of the research she was participating in, when a mysterious correspondent on the aetherschreiber offered her part of the solution, she immediately saw the implications and made practice from theory.
Thus together, Benjamin Franklin and Adrienne de Montchevreuil solved a mathematical problem and changed the world as profoundly as Newton had.
Each independently concluded that they had given Louis the XIV the weapon he needed to end his war with England. Each raced desperately to stave off disaster. Ben sailed to England, in hopes Sir Isaac could help. Adrienne turned to the dangerous intrigues of the French court.
Both failed.
Using their calculations, the philosophers of the Sun King pulled a comet from the heavens and obliterated London. But they hadn't foreseen the full consequences of their actions. Much of Europe was also devastated, plunging western civilization into a new dark age.
Ben was in London, apprenticed to Sir Isaac, when the comet began its fall. Seduced and kidnapped by Vasilisa Karevna, an agent of the Russian tsar Peter I, he watched in helpless horror as the center of the English Empire was destroyed. He lost a brother, many friends, and his innocence.
Adrienne—whose quest brought her to the very bed of the insane King Louis—lost much more; her true love, Nicolas, her virginity, and her hand. Then, in the aftermath of the comet, she made yet another discovery—she was with child, the child of Louis XIV.
Moving behind the bright world of matter, other forces were at work. In the spaces between atoms, certain beings who did not want humanity to possess the secrets of alchemy— beings who had subtly guided the course of human history— now began to be less subtle. However, unable to work directly in the world of matter, they used human agents to achieve their ends, posing as angels, demons, or djinni. The cataclysm precipitated by Ben and Adrienne was ultimately of their design, and they planned more damage to humanity.
Newton called these beings the malakim, naming them for the angels of the Old Testament.
The malakim moved carefully, offering their aid to certain philosophers, plotting the deaths of others.
Rescued from Karevna by Newton, Franklin continued his apprenticeship with the great philosopher, whose work had turned entirely to a science of the malakim. Adrienne, too, was seduced by their power. Her missing hand was mysteriously replaced with the hand of an angel, enabling her to see the very structure of the aether and of matter—and to alter it as she saw fit. Gradually, she became mo
re sorceress than mathematician and learned that the malakim, too, were torn by strife. One of their factions desired to suppress humanity's search for knowledge. The other sought the absolute extinction of the race.
Meanwhile, the world plunged further into turmoil. Driven by ever-harder winters, Tsar Peter built a fleet of airships and embarked on a quest to conquer the weakened nations of Europe. Across the Atlantic, a Choctaw shaman named Red Shoes joined with the Sieur de Bienville, the pirate Edward Teach, and the Puritan minister Cotton Mather in an expedition to discover what had become of the Old World.
All were drawn together in a battle for the city of Venice. In that battle, Ben watched as Adrienne was forced to kill Isaac Newton. And for Adrienne there was another tragedy—her infant son, Nicolas, was kidnapped by the malakim.
Adrienne found a new home in Russia, as a philosopher in the court of Peter the Great, and Benjamin returned to the American colonies to settle in the city of Charles Town, South Carolina.
For ten years, an illusory calm prevailed. The Russian Empire, foiled at Venice, instead pushed eastward, across Siberia to the western shores of America. In Saint Petersburg, Adrienne attracted students and sycophants and built ever-more terrible weapons for the Tsar. Benjamin created a secret society to keep the Americas free of the influence of the malakim.
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; and he wore a pair of oculars that made him look like some sort of a blind insect.
“Professor Swedenborg, with all due respect, I am the commander of this expedition in matters military. I need a better explanation than that. Why should I waste the lives of my men or trust our untested Indian and Mongol troops when we have that?”
The eye was nearly closed. Where it had passed nothing remained but white ash. Tens of miles of ash. No tree, no living thing, not even bones were left to tell that once there had been life where Swedenborg's dark engine had churned.
For answer, the sorcerer merely turned away, lost in whatever he saw behind those thick lenses.
Golitsyn leveled a frustrated gaze on the third person clutching the bow rail, the metropolitan of Saint Petersburg.
“Your Grace, speak to him. Get some sense from him.”
The priest pursed his lips and stroked his long gray beard. “What is there to say?” he asked. “Swedenborg has the angels. The blessed saints speak to him, not to me. It is as God wills it. But he has shown me glimpses—” The metropolitan shook his head. “It is too much for mortal man, even for the patriarch. That is why Swedenborg is mad. But it is a holy madness.”
“Everyone is mad,” Golitsyn exclaimed. “I am mad. I've betrayed my tsar and led an army into the wilds of America, for what? It's all lunacy.”
The metropolitan raised an eyebrow. “Neither I nor Professor Swedenborg had anything to do with that. You did what you did from lust for power, not from any desire to serve God. Swedenborg's motives are pure. My motives are pure. Yours have never been, and so it is not your place to question us.”
“But how can you be sure? How can you be sure this—this boy we bow to is really the child of God and not the devil? What is our purpose in this limitless desert? What care we for the American colonies, when we could have the empire of the Turk at our feet, the riches of China?
“How can—” He broke off, for Swedenborg was looking at him again. The professor was a soft-spoken, polite, gentle man, and yet the words that now issued from his mouth were clipped and grim, almost another voice altogether.
“Prince Golitsyn, you do not, cannot, comprehend what lies ahead. I can. The American colonies are the last refuge of the godless science. It is where the devil has dug his cave and built his watchtower. It is where he crafts his hideous strength into knives and guns. We are the chosen, the servants of the prophet, the champions of godly science. What more do you need to know?”
“And yet we consort with the ungodly,” Golitsyn argued. “What is godly in the gibbering idolatry of the Mongols or the pagan superstitions of the Indians?” He turned to appeal to the metropolitan. “Surely, Your Eminence—”
“All will come to God,” the metropolitan said. “Though they be pagan, still they have eyes to see. They recognize the prophet for what he is. Indeed, it seems that everyone but you sees that truth.”
“I—” Golitsyn's mouth went dry. Behind Swedenborg, something had appeared. It was the shape of a nude man, a silvery, translucent cloud. It had no face as such, but it had eyes everywhere. They winked and blinked on its palms
, arms, belly, thighs. Pale blue and green eyes, all watching him, all seeing the darkness in his heart.
The thing leveled an accusing finger at him, but it was Swedenborg who spoke. “Stay on the path, Prince Golitysn. The apocalypse is done, and the world is ended. Now is only the sorting of things. All souls that do not follow me are damned. The prophet is my servant. Swedenborg is my mouth. The metropolitan is my text. I thought you were my sword. If you are not, I must forge another.”
Golitsyn dropped to his knees. “No. No! I am yours. I just don't understand why we can't use our best weapons, why we must keep them in reserve.”
“Because something remains,” Swedenborg replied huskily. “Something needs to be found. When we have it, there will be no need of the engines at all.”
“Then why—why—”
“You are a sword, Prince Golitsyn. Be content with that.”
It was a command, not a suggestion.
“Yes, my lord,” Golitsyn replied, and bowed again.
Tsar Peter the Great dipped his paddle in the water and gave an exclamation of pleasure as the canoe slid into the stream.
“It's good to be on the water again,” he said. “I've always loved ships, great and small.”
Behind him, the broken-nosed giant named Tug grunted vague disapproval.
“You don't share my love, sir?” Peter asked. “I thought you had been a sailor.”
“Damn sure I was, Peter.” He grunted. “It may be a fine life if y'r lord o' the ship ‘n’ all, but f ‘r a common sailor, ‘s more ‘n half misery. An’ rickets, and scurvy, and the black bellyache. An’ when you finally come ashore, they sell you watered rum and poxy whores. No, sir tsar, it's no life.”
“To each his own. I love the swell of the sea, the feel of a boat. When I was building my navy, I myself went in disguise to the shipyards in Holland and learned the shipwright's art, working as a common laborer.”
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