Ruin and Rising Read Online Free Page A

come to loathe the sight of them—useless, confusing, and most importantly, incomplete. He described his hypotheses regarding amplifiers, his tracking of the stag, his two-year journey aboard a whaler seeking the sea whip, his theories on the firebird, and then … nothing. Either there were journals missing or Morozova had left his work unfinished.
    The prospect of finding and using the firebird was daunting enough. But the idea that it might not exist, that I might have to face the Darkling again without it? The thought was too terrifying to contemplate, so I simply shoved it away.
    I made myself turn the pages. The only means I had of keeping track of time was David’s watch. I didn’t know where he’d found it, how he’d gotten it working, or if the time he’d set it to had any correlation to time on the surface, but I glared at its face and willed the minute hand to move faster.
    The Priestguards came and went, always watching or bent to their texts. They were meant to be illuminating manuscripts, studying holy word, but I doubted that was the bulk of their work. The Apparat’s network of spies reached throughout Ravka, and these men considered it their calling to maintain it, deciphering messages, gathering intelligence, building the cult of a new Saint. It was hard not to compare them to my Soldat Sol, most of them young and illiterate, locked out of the old mysteries these men guarded.
    When I couldn’t bear any more of Morozova’s ramblings, I twisted in my seat, trying to release a crick from my back. Then I pulled down an old collection of what were mostly debates on prayer, but that turned out to also contain a version of Sankt Ilya’s martyrdom.
    In this one, Ilya was a mason, and the neighbor boy was crushed beneath a horse—that was new. Usually, the boy was cut down by a plow blade. But the story ended as all the tellings did: Ilya brought the child back from the brink of death, and for his trouble, the villagers threw him into the river, bound by iron chains. Some tales claimed he never sank but floated out to sea. Others vowed his body had emerged days later on a sandbank miles away, perfectly preserved and smelling of roses. I knew them all, and none of them said a word about the firebird or indicated that Dva Stolba was the right place to start looking for it.
    All our hope for finding the firebird resided in an old illustration: Sankt Ilya in Chains, surrounded by the stag, the sea whip, and the firebird. Mountains could be glimpsed behind him, along with a road and an arch. That arch had long since fallen, but I thought the ruins could be found at Dva Stolba, not far from the settlements where Mal and I had been born. At least, that’s what I believed on my good days. Today, I felt less sure that Ilya Morozova and Sankt Ilya were the same man. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the copies of the Istorii Sankt’ya anymore. They lay in a moldy stack in a forgotten corner, seeming less like portents of some grand destiny than children’s books that had fallen out of fashion.
    David picked up his watch, put it down, reached for it again, knocked over a bottle of ink then righted it with fumbling fingers.
    “What’s with you today?” I asked.
    “Nothing,” he said sharply.
    I blinked at him. “Your lip is bleeding.”
    He wiped his palm across it, and the blood beaded up again. He must have bitten it. Hard.
    “David—”
    He rapped his knuckles against his desk, and I nearly jumped. There were two guards behind me. Punctual and creepy as always.
    “Here,” David said, handing me a small tin. Before I could take it, a guard had snatched it up.
    “What are you doing?” I asked angrily. But I knew. Nothing passed between me and the other Grisha without being thoroughly inspected. For my safety, of course.
    The Priestguard ignored me. He ran his fingers over the top and bottom of the tin, opened it, smelled the contents, investigated the lid, then closed it and handed it back without a