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Howard loved the
panoramas of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance history, which
his imagination populated with daring adventurers who rival Conan
and Kull for valor and brawn. Crusaders clash with Saracens in
the Holy Land of Richard the Lion-Hearted and Saladin ... mercenaries
hire their swords to the highest bidder in the Europe of Henry
VIII and the Borgias ... cannons thunder on the Spanish Main as
gold-crazed buccaneers swarm over besieged treasure galleons –
and in the swirl of battle, Howard’s fighting men and women
loom tall.
“Hate! – and the glutting of vengeance!” is
the battle cry of Cormac Fitzgeoffrey, a half-Irish, half-Norman
man of war who follows Richard the Lion-Hearted to 12th Century
Palestine – Outremer – under the banners of the Third
Crusade. Even Richard voices admiration for Cormac’s skill
with sword and battle-axe, a prowess direly tested when Cormac
single-handedly invades the enemy stronghold of Saladin the Great.
His quest: to rescue a beautiful Persian slave. And more peril
awaits further east, in the castle called the Gate of the Devil,
where Cormac crosses blades with fellow outlaws from a hundred
lands to seize the glittering, lethal Blood of Belshazzar.
“Proud, poor, beautiful, her flaming red hair cascading
onto her shoulders, Agnes de la Fere faces an arranged marriage
to a brutal husband in 16th Century France. Cutting short the
ceremony with a dagger-stroke, Agnes flees to escape her abusive
father and follow the guidon of Guiscard de Clisson, a mercenary
captain bound for the warring states of Renaissance Italy. Dark
Agnes’ instinctive skill in combat wins her the name of
Sword Woman. That skill is tested on the coast of France, where
she foils a plot by Britain’s devious Cardinal Wolsey to
undermine the French king, and again in the benighted alleys of
Chartres, as she faces the vengeance of an executed sorcerer who
will not die.
In the age of Henry Morgan, Captain Blood, and the other legendary
pirates of the Red Brotherhood, Black Vulmea is the most audacious
of all, a hulking Irish buccaneer who charts the hazardous course
of treasure in the West Indies and the Americas. Wrecked off the
Gulf Coast, he embarks across miles of wilderness, pursued by
Indians, to stake his life in a deadly game to win the fabled
jewels of Montezuma. Hunted by cannibals in a ruined treasure
city on the remote jungle coast of South America, he faces his
greatest challenge when he is beseeched for mercy by an English
sea captain whom he has sworn to kill.
De Montour of Normandy is on a mission for a French duke when
his trail takes him through the haunted, gloom-enshrouded forest
of Villefere. There he meets a mysterious stranger from whom he
inherits the horrid curse of the werewolf. Under the full moon,
he finds himself possessed by a savage, bestial spirit from the
dawn of time. De Montour roams the world to elude the pursuing
evil spirit, fleeing at last to a remote African outpost. But
the wolf-spectre always hovers close at hand, ready to transform
him into a murderous beast. Small wonder that the face of De Montour
is that of a man who has gazed into the maw of hell.
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