Total pages in book: 161
Estimated words: 162269 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 811(@200wpm)___ 649(@250wpm)___ 541(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 162269 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 811(@200wpm)___ 649(@250wpm)___ 541(@300wpm)
She’d studied there. She could guide them.
This was good.
For the priests were being exceedingly unhelpful.
Case in point, the one who had lifted his white robes at the front of him and was jogging to keep up at Mars and Cassius’s sides.
Doing this speaking breathlessly.
“As you were told, back in our Communion Hall, it would take no time at all to discuss this amongst the Go’En and garner approval for you to enter the Narration Hall.”
“We do not need approval,” Mars countered, still striding.
“I understand that things are quite…unresolved between our peoples, but no one enters the Narration Hall without prior approval of the Go’En,” the priest said. “We were caught unawares by your visit, and—”
“Turn left up ahead,” Elena instructed.
“Really, this is…gulk!”
Mars held him aloft by his throat.
“You are trying me,” he growled.
“My darling,” he heard his wife say.
He tossed the priest aside, ignoring the man’s cry, and the thud his body made when he hit a wall, and Mars continued striding.
They turned left as Ellie had said, and all saw it up ahead.
It couldn’t be missed.
The ornamentation was spartan, but regardless, the colossal circular building was grand.
And they went right to it.
They pushed through the double doors, but they barely took five steps in before they all stopped.
Not because what lay before them, in a round, was spectacular.
The acres of curved shelves at the outer walls that rose stories and stories up high and were filled with books. The ornately carved, whitewashed desks scattered about with the long feathery, white plums of the quills drifting in the air, stuck at an angle in their beds beside ornate ink pots made of white porcelain. The white marble floors with veins of gold.
No.
They did so because they all felt it.
Farah spoke first and it was tremulous.
“True.”
Mars looked to her as True demanded, “Take the women outside.”
“They stay with us,” Aramus decreed.
“Then cover their eyes,” True shot back.
But it was too late.
He heard his wife gasp.
Gods bloody damn it.
He walked that way and saw another piece of lore that it was clear was passed through the generations as successfully notated information.
The demons drank from the necks of their victims.
Three mauled corpses lay behind a short shelving unit, heads torn from bodies, pools of blood forming from the separation.
The heads were not close to their remains. They lay some ways away. There was gore at the neck, but no blood had leaked out onto the floor.
“They might still be here,” Cass said low.
“Then we all must stay close,” Aramus decreed.
“Fuck, fuck, shite,” Mars bit, not wanting his Silence anywhere near this madness, but taking hold of his wife and pulling her to his back.
Pushing aside his mantle, she curled her fingers around the waist of his trousers.
When she had a hold on him, he lifted his hand behind his neck, grasped the hilt of his sword and released it from its scabbard.
He heard the other men do the same.
They advanced together, Cassius with Elena and Aramus with Ha-Lah at the lead, Mars and Silence fanned to their left, True and Farah to their right.
In this manner, they walked down the center aisle to the middle of the spherical building.
“By Chas!” they heard exclaimed.
The priest had caught up.
None of them slowed.
They found more carnage amongst the desks and shelves and stacks.
And more.
The center of the great building had a circular railing, and peering over it, they could see the structure led into the earth. The shelves that rose above them were accessed by ladders of varying lengths that rolled along the walls.
The shelves and floors below were accessed by a spiral of stairs.
They headed down it
The epicenter of activity, they found on a floor two down from the ground level.
And it was not of carnage.
It was what appeared to be a great frenzy of books pulled from shelves, opened, pages torn or smeared with blood.
“They’ve found what they wanted, and they’re gone,” Mars murmured.
The men scabbarded their swords.
Elena and Silence bent by the pile of books.
“This is a desecration!” the priest shrieked, and Mars watched as he indicated his words did not share his feelings about the gruesome deaths of his brethren when he threw himself down to the volumes close to Elena, holding his hands above them as if afraid to touch them. “The word! The art! The history!”
“You passed at least fifteen of your brothers, torn to bits on your way to this location,” True pointed out, and the man whipped his head around and back to glare up at True.
“There is nothing more important than the tomes,” he snapped.
“What are these particular tomes about?” Mars asked.
The priest looked down at them, but was apparently so beside himself, he couldn’t answer.
Thus, he didn’t.
“They are, many of them, in the old or ancient tongue,” Silence said.
“They should not be touched unless your fingers are protected. They are old and ancient for they are of the Collected,” the priest stated.