Karl Edward Wagner's KANE: "Cold Light"

I am running out of applicable Kane images for these articles. So today I'm just going to repeatedly regale you with covers for "Death Angel's Shadow." Oooh. Ahh.

"Cold Light" unfurls itself like it's sledding down a mountain: slowly at first, gaining speed until it becomes one of the most action-packed, epic Kane stories I've read yet. I say that now, but it is so hard to pick favorites among these things. 

Genuinely, it does start a little slowly. Kane is experiencing one of his bouts of lethargy. Boredom has just about defeated him and he lazily escapes to a desolate part of the world, clopping his horse into an all but dead town in the region of Demornte. Demornte's an odd little setting: bordered by inhospitable desert on all sides, it's a stretch of lush, green country that's seemingly inhabited by one city, called Sebbei. It would be a great little place to visit except for the fact that everyone here walks around like the living dead.

That is to say, some time ago, a plague swept through Sebbei, killing all but a few hundred of its residents, and now the city is calcified in its misery. Every reaction from the townspeople is no stronger than a shrug of the shoulders.

Kane finds respite here for a while, and even companionship in the character of Rehhaile, a young blind woman with a "second sight" that allows her to tap into the minds of nearby people and see through them.

Hot on Kane's trail is a band of self-styled crusaders and avengers, ready to bring the "cold light of good" and justice to our evil wanderer. Each of them has an understandable bone to pick with the red-headed immortal as he's done them all wrong at some point or another in the past. There are nine of them against Kane's one (two if you count Rehhaile), so they're confident they can take him out.

The story paces itself well as we watch Kane dwindle the numbers against him one by one until he's got a more manageable load that he can fight with just his sword.

There's a lot going on in "Cold Light," thematically speaking. The crusaders are confident that they are arbiters of justice and uncomplicated good while they kidnap, rape, and attempt to burn the entire city of Sebbei down in pursuit of Kane. By contrast, Kane seems like the good guy here as he's done nothing but lounge by a lake and drink wine since he's arrived. He's befriended Rehhaile and they seem to have a good thing going on. Does that absolve him of his crimes? Of course not; if Putin or Netanyahu or Trump decided to spend the rest of their days sitting by a lake, not hurting anyone else, it doesn't erase the evil that they've already wrought. Still, it inverts the usual order.

It's interesting contrasting the toxic, all-consuming revenge-driven action of the "crusaders" against the toxic, do-nothing attitude of the people of Sebbei. In one climactic moment of the story, the gang closes in on Kane in an old warehouse filled with unused medicines covered in dust, symbolic of their ability to do nothing about their problems. I've said it before and I'll probably say it again: both are doomed in their own ways!

"Cold Light" was incredible. It clearly takes place later in Kane's timeline as he's wondering Lartroxia West. But because other characters mention Carsultyal, I wonder if it takes place a little earlier than some of the stories where Carsultyal is so ancient it's seemingly only remembered by Kane...

I read on a very old Dale Rippke blog post that Wagner said all the short stories appear in chronological order in each collection, so that helps me out a bit.