The Bloodstained God (Book 2) by Tim Stead Page B

filling her face. It was full of words. Its value was probably greater than everything she owned, not excluding the fine clothes that the lord and Henn had bought her. She flicked through the pages back to the first.
     
    A Speculative History of the Mage Lords, Their Wars, Their Customs, and The Great Conflagration That Brought Them Low.
     
    She wondered that there should be so many words in a mere title. She knew that there were men who did nothing but study and write, scholars, but she had never held or even seen such a book. She stroked the page with a finger. It was smooth as silk, thin as thread, and had taken on a faint buttery colour against which the words looked like flies, ranks of impertinent flies asking to be swatted away.
     
    But Sara did not even know who or what the Mage Lords were. Here was knowledge, albeit knowledge of a past long dead, or a place so far away that she did not know it.
     
    She glanced at Saul. He was still sleeping, eyes tight closed, face quite composed. She began to read.
     
    There were some words that she did not know, but she was able to guess their meaning well enough. The scholar who had written this seemed to repeat everything he wrote at least twice using different words, as though emphasising every sentence, and so lost the emphasis he sought. How brazen of her to criticize so wise a man! She read page after page, and learned that the mage lords were indeed a figment of the past, and a past so distant that it was placed before Avilian, before the beast realms of plain and forest, even before many of the gods themselves.
     
    Despite the turgid prose she enjoyed reading the book, enjoyed it for the story that it carried so poorly. The Mage Lords, godlike men who had ruled all the world, wielded great magic in their time, more so than Duranders, of whom she had heard, and more even than the gods. They fought wars against each other, made and broke alliances, raised vast armies of terrible men called Farheim, armed them with magical weapons and sent them one against the other. After one final great war there were just twelve mages left, the strongest twelve, and all the others had perished.
     
    She wished that there were more heroes in the tale, but the mage lords all seemed as cruel and greedy as each other. There was no justice, no fairness in their lands. She thought of all the men like Saul who must have died, all the family men with wives and children, and she hated those long dead lords just a little, though they were too distant and unreal for her to hate them very much. They were like villains in the stories her father had read to her, only really true while the words of the story were spoken.
     
    She looked up again, and saw that the light outside the windows was beginning to fade. She checked on Saul again, but the boy continued to sleep. She rose and moved quietly around the room, looking for candles, but could find none. Her eye was caught by the bell rope. Pull it and someone would come, he had said. She was hungry, too, and had not eaten since they had arrived at the house.
     
    She wondered about the man in the stable yard; the one who had been bleeding. Henn had told her that he was an assassin, that the lord had been wounded by an arrow, but the lord had not seemed much affected by the wound. She supposed that one became used to such things in battle, or perhaps the wound was not so great.
     
    She did not want to use the bell rope, but the alternative was to leave the library and wander around the darkening corridors of the great house. She could not even remember the way to the kitchens, and she did not know where she was supposed to sleep this night, if the apartment was hers yet or if she must wait a night until it was so. She could sleep here, she supposed, among the books. There were rugs on the floor, and Saul seemed happy enough. But she was hungry, so after some hesitation she pulled on the rope, a tentative pull, but it was enough. She heard a faint