The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) by Brad Magnarella (best business books of all time txt) 📕

walkway and, by all appearances, still hidden. Above me, the columned palace teetered into the night sky. I stood and looked down. Far below, a courtyard led onto a lower level of the palace. But the hunting spell was tugging me in the direction of a guard tower farther along the rampart.

I entered the square tower through a low archway and descended a spiral staircase. Though torches burned in brackets in the wall, the shut-in air carried a stench of rot. After one flight, I left the stairs and crept down a covered walkway. It soon opened onto a large columned room, the hunting spell tugging me toward a doorway on its far side. Halfway across the room, I stopped cold.

I knew this place.

The large column to my right was black at its base, but not from mold. I knelt down to examine it more closely. The cracks in the floor that radiated from the column held bits of gray ash.

This is it, I thought in numb certainty. The site of my mother’s execution.

I rested my head against the column’s cold stone. Despite having experienced my mother’s death in Lady Bastet’s scrying globe, despite the event having been confirmed by Chicory, being here, now, in the same spot, made it real in a way those experiences hadn’t. My heart broke as I remembered the way her cracked lips had shaped her final words.

I love you, Everson.

“I’m here to finish what you started,” I whispered, blinking back tears.

A gargling voice made me turn. A pair of black-robed figures were entering through the far doorway. I rose slowly and, tamping down the hunting spell, gripped my sword and staff.

Were you among them? I asked silently of the two. Among the ones who called my mother a traitor? Who hurt her? Who stood here and watched her execution?

Anger tightened my grip until it hurt.

The book, a more rational part of my mind whispered urgently. You’re here to find and destroy the book. Do anything that raises an alarm, and you can kiss the mission goodbye.

That seemed to work. Forcing down my anger, I moved behind the column as the robed figures came closer, continuing their gargling exchange. I was preparing to let them pass when, deep inside their hoods, torchlight glistened over large, inhuman eyes. Fish’s eyes.

Revulsion turned to fresh rage.

You were there, I decided, lips trembling. Both of you. And you watched her burn.

With an anguished cry, I swung my blade at the nearer figure’s head.

7

The blade flashed, ripped through fabric and flesh, and came out the other side on a gout of dark fluid. Something wet thudded to the stone floor and rolled over. I glanced down to find large, vacant eyes staring up at me from a scaly face covered in the same fungi I’d seen on the wargs.

The creature’s companion let out a sputtering shriek and jumped back. Before it could get a fix on me, I drove the sword into its gut. The blade broke through an exoskeleton, and I heaved the hilt up with both hands. The creature gargled, the hood falling back from its face. A pair of vile fish’s eyes searched around in vain before seeming to settle on me.

“I can play judge and jury too,” I grunted.

The blade broke through the creature’s breastplate and cleaved its heart. I yanked the blade back, depositing the creature beside its headless companion. I then stared down at the two of them for several moments, panting in the horror and exhilaration of what I’d just done.

I dragged their bodies into a dark corner of the room and dusted the main floor with dragon sand. A whispered “fuoco” ignited the sand, evaporating the trails of fluid and hiding evidence of the slaughter. No other creatures had come to investigate, suggesting no alarms had been raised.

Need to keep my anger in check from now on, though, I thought as I cleaned my blade on the side of my pants. It had been the dual shock of standing in the same spot where my mother had been slain and then suddenly seeing the creatures who had participated in the act. Still, I didn’t know how these things communicated with one another. If it was through the fungal growth that seemed to coat everyone and everything, word of the attack could reach others.

I restored the hunting spell. As it pulled me toward the far doorway, I wondered about the two I’d just slain. I had thought the Front was a splinter group of magic-users, of humans. But those fish eyes… Was that what decades of worshiping the Whisperer had done? Devolved them?

The hunting spell led me down a corridor and up several flights of stairs. More robed figures appeared, their unhurried cadence telling me news of their murdered companions had not reached them. I eased into shadows until they passed and their gargling voices receded away.

In another flight, my cane jerked me from the stairwell and into a small courtyard on the top level of the palace. Cold wind blew around me. From a building opposite me, low chanting sounded. I stiffened as one voice climbed above the others. The forceful yanks of my cane notwithstanding, I knew the voice belonged to Marlow. The Death Mage.

My heart surged into a full gallop as I canceled the hunting spell, pulled my cane into sword and staff, and crept across the courtyard. The building was tall and narrow, moldy columns bracketing a doorway through which greenish firelight glowed. I edged along a shadow beside the doorway and peered inside, the robe of John the Baptist concealing me.

The altar-like room featured a rectangular pool of water at its center. Statues of what looked like gods and goddesses—the original saints, most likely—rose along the perimeter of the room to act as pillars. But the statues, along with the rest of the room, were covered in a gunk that dangled in thick ropes and dripped over the twenty or so robed figures chanting around the pool