Empire of Bones by N. D. Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

stirred up the transmortals against the Order. Now the beasts have been loosed and our eyes must be on them. The great transmortals need no time at all to begin their destroying. Radu Bey will be drawing servants to him—men and women will flock to him without even knowing what draws them, like metal shavings to a magnet.”
    Rupert locked his jaw and gripped the side of the bunk bed. Old wood popped and Cyrus exhaled slowly. He’d rarely seen Rupert angry, and even now he knew the bigman was holding back. Clenched fists and muscle-striped arms were ready to hurl the whole bed against the wall. Rupert’s ribs rose and fell, and he seemed ready to shake the little cabin with a roar, but when he spoke again, his voice was calm and cold.
    “My anger is with my own Order, Cyrus. Not with you. The O of B exists for such times as this. It exists only for such times as this, and yet it is the first to offer up sacrifices to the old darkness. Even good men and women of the Order now duck their heads and hide, hoping to avoid this war, hoping like so many fools through the ages have hoped before them, that only a few of the weak will die and then this storm of devils will quiet itself. You and I and your sister have been cast out to the Dracul, like the children of centuries ago, sent to feed a dragon.”
    He sighed, shook the bed slightly, and dropped his head onto his extended arms.
    Cyrus had no idea what to say. His calf must have been ashamed, because already the screaming pain in his leg had muted slightly. He lowered his right foot to the ground and forced weight onto it.
    “So,” Cyrus said, “the last couple months …”
    “Have been nearly pointless,” Rupert said. “We have quietly gained a few assets, but fewer allies. Beyond the Boones and the Livingstones, there are no families willing to openly defy the Order.”
    “And the Smiths,” Cyrus said. “And the Greeveses.”
    Rupert laughed, looking at Cyrus. “I had hoped to build an army. But we are the army. We must somehow quell the old gods, and even if we do and we survive, Phoenix will not have wasted his time. He and his new gods will be waiting for us.”
    Cyrus leaned against the bed. “But what about, you know, normal people? Cops? Soldiers? If the transmortals start smashing a town or something, won’t everyone try to stop them?”
    Rupert nodded. “Some will try. And that will add to the tragedy. When the great transmortals rise, the leaders and the powerful among men and women are the first to drop to their knees. Some will submit out of cowardice, while others have always worshipped and fed on power. When they encounter power raw, power primal, they will do anything to taste it, to be near it, to be enthralled. Sacred groves, ziggurats, fiery crags and labyrinths and valleys of bones, wherever the great transmortals make their homes, there also they will be worshipped with the shed blood of men and women and children. Agamemnon sacrificed his own child to such power, in exchange for his greatness. Babylon. Cambyses the Persian. The Scythians and their Amazon brides. All of them made blood sacrifices, all of them paid for strength and power with the lives of others. Wild and savage like the Picts, or ordered like the Aztecs, the Romans, the Nazis—it doesn’t matter. The dark ones demand bodies, they givepower, and they drive those who serve them into deeper and deeper madness.”
    Rupert turned and looked directly, deeply, into Cyrus’s eyes. Cyrus blinked, but he could not look away.
    “Cyrus Smith,” Rupert said, “you and I were raised in a world where good men feared only the darkness of other men—and that is enough—where children could laugh at nonsense dragons in nonsense books, where monsters and giants had long ago been chained and hidden away in the deep places, devouring no one, so thoroughly defeated that even wise men and women believed magical to mean the same thing as imaginary . But the dark truths that lie beneath the