Citadel of the Sky (Thrones of the Firstborn Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

up again.
    “Here! The catacombs!” Tiana sat down and smoothed the paper, focusing. Lisette read over her shoulder, and Kiar leaned across the table on the other side, reading upside down. “He says people used to live down there. Hundreds of years ago.” She ran her finger across the fading penciled lines, tracing the common strolls.
    Kiar flicked at her fingers. “Don’t touch, Tiana. You’ll make them fade faster. I’ll get a scribe to recopy them in ink.”
    Tiana flipped through several pages of the catacombs and then back to higher levels of the castle, poring over the diagrams. Finally, she sat back, running her hands through her hair. “There should be a down staircase. I don’t see that symbol, though.” She fought against the rising tide of frustration that brought the thump-thump of the beating phantasmagory with it.
    “Here, let me look.” Kiar pulled the map away. “Well, this is a down staircase symbol.” She flipped quickly through the catacombs maps. “And no, there aren’t any marked on the catacombs.”
    “Always so fast, Kiar,” complimented Lisette.
    Kiar’s cheeks turned pink. “No, I’m not,” she muttered, and flipped through the pages again. “Here, there’s a door marked on the edge of the map. And here’s another one.” She leaned in to read the writing. “One’s locked. The other leads to a collapsed stairway. He thinks there’s a flooded sub-basement. The masonry there dates from… at least six hundred years ago. He’s got a note to return and investigate further, but I guess he never got around to it.” She looked up and her smile was brief and pleased.
    “Locked doors are not a problem,” said Tiana happily. “Come on. Let’s get some lights and go see. If you can memorize it, we can leave the map here, Kiar.”
    Kiar’s smile flashed again. “I don’t have your father’s gift for memorization. But I can recopy it. Hold on.”

Chapter 3

And Through The Stone
    P arts of the catacombs were clean and well-lit, with lamps maintained by the housekeeping staff. The main promenade was popular for strolling, and past generations had left a wealth of art on the walls to admire. Someone was employed to take care of those. Most days there was always somebody down here, cleaning or doing a restoration. Not today, though. Today was a day of mourning, even for the staff.
    Both ancient frescoes and contemporary murals lined the wide corridors, illustrating the great victories of the Blood. The lamps occupied niches in the wall. Old sculpture and dusty crockery were casually displayed in some of the rooms that opened off the main promenade, alongside damaged carvings and wall segments rescued from one renovation or another. Tiana paused alongside one, looking through the archway at the broken mural someone was painstakingly reassembling.
    It was old, showing an interpretation of the events surrounding the founding of Tiana’s family. Shin Savanyel, seven feet tall and bearded, wielded a white sword against a shadowy figure that dominated half the fragment. The white sword was painted with the curls that indicated eidolons and emanations in older works; it was just a symbol for the family magic.
    The shadow clearly represented the first Blighter, whom Shin had destroyed when it had risen up after the Firstborn’s removal from the world. That part of the mural had been mostly reassembled, but the flecks and cracks made it seem like something hidden lurked under the shadow of faded paint.
    Tiana shook her head and kept moving. Somewhere in the library she knew there were nearly-contemporary accounts of her ancestor’s days. But they were written in an old dialect and hard to follow, and very often boring. Or so she’d read, in the foreword of a novelization of a play commissioned in her great-grandmother’s day, The Chosen King .
    The play and novel made dusty history very exciting, and while Tiana was technically aware that probably Shin hadn’t quite done those