Stephen R. Lawhead
American, best-selling author known for novels that blend elements of science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction.
Here’s to dodgy adventures with disreputable relatives!
Jump blind and you might find yourself on the rim of a raging volcano, or smack in the middle of a battlefield during a savage war, or on a swiftly tilting ice floe in a tempest-tossed sea.
The air crackled with the presage of lightning, and a heavy mist descended around them.
The very idea of a near-infinite array of universes made his head swim.
“Time is the central mystery of our existence. It confines and defines us in many ways.”
Before Egypt, long before travelling to that time and place—or any other—became even a remote possibility, Mina had paid her dues. Haltingly, painstakingly, maddeningly.
Little Archie’s story is darker, more desperate, and yet drearily familiar.
People did not go jumping from one place to another with nothing in between. It simply did not happen.
Certainty sent a sick dread snaking through his gut: he was being stalked.
You spend too much time alone, too much time watching television, and too little time cultivating the inner man. You live in a squalid little flat in what is referred to as a no-go zone from which your friends, of whom you see less and less, have all fled for the suburbs long ago with wives and sprogs in tow. You are exceedingly unlucky in love, having invested years in a romantic relationship which, as you know only too well, is neither romantic nor much of a relationship. In short, you have all the social prospects of a garden gnome.
London had vanished. In place of the lively, thrusting metropolitan conurbation was an empty rural wilderness of damp brown fields under low autumnal skies.
He was a stranger in a strange land: lost in the cosmos, a man with neither compass nor guide, sitting in a tomb in Egypt surrounded by the dead, with Giles—a man his own age, but separated by class and sensibility and four hundred years—looking to him for answers.
The great hulking eminence of the stone-age mound stood out as an ominous dark shadow.
When next you turn your eyes to the vast reaches of heaven, gentlemen, you would be well advised to remember that not only is it far more magnificent than the human mind can fathom, it is far more subtle. All the universe is permeated, upheld, knit together, conjoined, encompassed, and contained by the Elemental Ether, which we recognise as an all-pervading, responsive, and intelligent field of energy, eternal and inexhaustible, which is nothing less than the ground of our very being and the wellspring of our existence—that which in ages past and present men have been pleased to call God.
“If the heat doesn’t kill you,” he mused, “the flies surely will.”
How very bright this empire of stars, he mused. Which poet had said that?
I’ve moved heaven and earth to find you.
Once again he felt the now-familiar tingle on his skin, as when, just before a lightning strike, the air becomes electrically charged.
If her hunch was right, the earl’s explorations were connected in some way to ley travel: that peculiar phenomenon that had plucked her from the twenty-first century and dropped her so rudely into the seventeenth.
His last thought, as sleep overtook him, was that it was true what Cosimo had said: the universe was far stranger than anyone imagined, or could imagine.