Empire of Dust Read Online Free Page A

explorations. The architect twists a large scallop shell as if it were a door handle. A small door, cleverly concealed in the decoration, pops open.
    The smell that escapes hits Heph with the force of a mace, knocking him back as he retches. It’s as if a living thing with a thousand legs crawled up his nostrils and lodged itself inside him. Covering his nose and mouth with the cloth, he stoops to enter the small, windowless room.
    On the floor is a decomposing body.
    Heph lowers himself on one knee and holds the torch close to what had been the face. There, underneath a coating of soot, is Leonidas, the palace librarian. Heph’s stomach lurches and bitter bile rises in his throat. Leonidas had been missing since the fire a week ago, and Alex, suspecting a traitor on the Royal Council, speculated that he’d been an Aesarian spy.
    It seems even princes can be wrong.
    Leonidas wasn’t just the guardian of the library. He had also been both Heph’s and Alex’s teacher for years until they turned thirteen and went to Aristotle’s school at Mieza. Though he was strict and as likable as a burr in a saddle, the old man did not deserve this fate.
    â€œAchaus,” Heph calls over his shoulder, “tell the men to bring a stretcher. And a blanket to put over him.”
    Holding his breath, Heph moves the torch across the body. It’s not burned. Nothing in this small room is burned, not the table, chair, or lamps. Leonidas crept in here and died from breathing in the smoke. But why come in here at all? He squints in the flickering torchlight and notices something in the right hand of the corpse. A scroll.
    He pries the stiff dead fingers off the tattered parchment and carefully unrolls it. The heading identifies it as one of the Cassandra scrolls, a list of prophecies supposedly uttered by the doomed Trojan princess hundreds of years ago.
    Squinting at the writing, he tries to decipher the archaic letters. A few words jump out at him immediately: Age , Man , and Monster . His frown deepens. The scroll seemed to be describing the end of the Age of Gods and the coming of a new age—something philosophers have written about and spoken of for many years now. He himself knows nothing of it, but ever since the eclipse of the full moon a few weeks ago, murmurs have been circulating the palace that the time has come. Some whisper that the eclipse heralded a transitional time when seemingly insignificant decisions would have unexpectedly large consequences. But Heph never thought that Leonidas was one to put his faith in the stars. He preferred knowledge and action over an oracle’s song.
    Heph decides to take the prophecy upstairs to the main reading room, where the assistant librarians sorting out the mess of smoke-and water-damaged scrolls can reshelve it. But then he spots something in the margins. Contemporary Greek, written in a familiar scrawl. It’s Leonidas’s handwriting. In the dim light, it’s hard to make out his teacher’s notes. Holding the parchment as close as he can to the torch’s light without scorching the hide, Heph scans the words.
    As the message sinks in, blood begins to pump in his ears. For a moment, he feels as though he’s at the edge of a cliff, that one brush of air will send him over and down into Tartarus.
    Quickly, he stuffs the scroll into his tunic, feeling the stiff, cracked parchment rub against his skin.
    Alexander must never see this scroll.
    No one can.

Chapter Three
    KATERINA CLINGS TIGHTLY to the brown mare as she races across the wide fields behind the palace walls. She has never ridden like this before, as if she is astride a lightning bolt. Back in Erissa, before she knew she was a princess stolen at birth—back when she was an innocent child—she and Jacob used to play around on the family donkey. But that was a far cry from sleek Kokkymo, who tears through the grass with the speed of a lion and the grace of a doe. Despite