The Pastel City: M. John Harrison

Book I of the Viriconium series. In the distant future, a medieval system rises from the ruins of a technology that destroyed itself. Armored knights ride their horses across dunes of rust, battling for the honor of the Queen. But the knights find more to menace them than mere swords and lances. A brave quest leads them face to face with the awesome power of a complex, lethal technology that has been erased from the face of the Earth - but lives on, underground. For millennia, the Pastel City had been the sole centre of civilisation. But now the coloured towers were charred and tottering, as the Old Queen and the Young Queen fight for supremacy, armed with the relics of a culture that had already destroyed the world once. tegeus-Cromis, the moody Lord of Methven, left his seashore retreat to fight for the Young Queen against the barbaric hordes of the old. He travelled and fought among the wasted deserts and marshes of Viriconium, only to find that the War Of The Two Queens was merely a prelude of a vaster and more dangerous conflict. Can a poet, a braggart and a heroic dwarf save the Empire? Cover art by Bruce Pennington.