The Killing God
Chapters (44)
- Cover
- OTHER BOOKS BY STEPHEN R. DONALDSON
- Dedication
- PROLOGUE
- PART ONE
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- PART TWO
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- PART THREE
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- PART FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- EPILOGUE
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- What’s next onyour reading list?
Cover
OTHER BOOKS BY STEPHEN R. DONALDSON
“The Great God’s War”
Seventh Decimate
The War Within
“The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever”
Lord Foul’s Bane
The Illearth War
The Power That Preserves
“The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant”
The Wounded Land
The One Tree
White Gold Wielder
“The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant”
The Runes of the Earth
Fatal Revenant
Against All Things Ending
The Last Dark
“Mordant’s Need”
The Mirror of Her Dreams
A Man Rides Through
“The GAP Sequence”
The Real Story
Forbidden Knowledge
A Dark and Hungry God Arises
Chaos and Order
This Day All Gods Die
The Axbrewder-Fistoulari Mysteries
The Man Who Killed His Brother
The Man Who Risked His Partner
The Man Who Tried to Get Away
The Man Who Fought Alone
Short Fiction
Daughter of Regals and Other Tales
Reave the Just and Other Tales
The King’s Justice: Two Novellas
Dedication
To Ross Donaldson and Perryn Donaldson Pugh for making me proud
to Wyatt and Willa Pugh for bringing joy to our family
and to Jennifer Dunstan for everything.
PROLOGUE
OTHER INTENTIONS
Somewhere between life and death, or perhaps between wakefulness and slumber, Elgart floated. If time passed, he did not know it. If he had ever drawn breath, he could not remember it. But he did not feel the lack. He felt nothing except a lassitude that resembled a reprieve, a release from something unendurable. He had no desire to remember what it might have been. In this oblivious drifting, nothing could reach him. He would not be troubled by agony, or by the memory of suffering, or by the fear that pain may have drawn his secrets from him.
As he was, he did not have to choose his fate.
Nevertheless choices were made that changed his circumstances. They gathered the shreds of his mind. Fragments of memory emerged. At first, he felt nothing more than a vague sense that he did not want to sink lower. Somewhere below him lurked an excruciation that destroyed whatever it touched.
He wanted to rise. How else could he escape?
Perhaps he was rising; but the experience was not pleasant. As he drifted farther from the source of his agony, he remembered more of it. By increments, his tattered wits coalesced into a terrible shape.
Moving from agony to dismay, he recalled Archpriest Makh.
Yes, that was it: the source, the helplessness, the ordeal. The possibility that he had betrayed King Bifalt and Belleger.
Archpriest Makh.
Despite his swaddled drifting, Elgart felt a new pain. His memory of Makh had teeth. It bit like the jaws of a wolf. Involuntarily, he remembered that he had brought his ruin on himself.