Disquiet Gods by Christopher Ruocchio EPUB & PDF

Disquiet Gods by Christopher Ruocchio EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online

• Status: Available for Free Download
• Authors: Christopher Ruocchio
• Language: English
• Genre: Science Fiction Adventure
• Format: PDF / EPUB
• Size: 6.5 MB
• Price: Free

THE SHADOW OF THE EMPIRE
Song.
A solitary voice rose up in song—as it did at the end of every watch of
every day—from the parapet of the agiary temple that stood upon a spur of
the black mountain at my back. I hardly heard it. After more than two
hundred years of exile, the prayers of the fire priests of Jadd seemed to me
no stranger than the sunset prayers of our Chantry, though they too rang
hollow in my ears. Prince Aldia had told me many times—and my good
Neema had echoed him—that their prayers were the source of ours. The
worship of Atash, the holy fire, and of Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom,
was older—far older—than the Imperial Cult of Earth.

Our ancestors worshipped the fire and Our Lord when men were
children, the great prince told me often, voice quavering in his greatgrandfatherly way. Your ancestors did not worship the Earth until they
burned her.

I did not argue with him, though I might have pointed out that the
manner of those prayers had come to his faith much later, in the clamor out
of Earth, when they had needed ritual and song for comfort in the bitter,
lightless years that had carried their people to new suns. So it was with all
the old religions, though each claimed not to have changed at all.
Yet why should they not change?

If the god of the fire priests was real—and there are gods that are—
then surely his part in the universal story is not ended. Surely there are new
revelations at hand . . . and to come. That thought returned to me—who had
received revelations of my own—time and again. In a younger man, the
thought might have caught and kindled a fire of its own in my belly.

But I was old, and the wind that blew the words of the fire-priest’s
song back upon the mountain dragged my long and graying hair back with
it, and stoked not the embers in my heart. It was midafternoon, the start of
Uziran, that watch which ran from midafternoon until evenfall. Looking up,
I could see the acolytes in robes of Jaddian white and the neophytes of the
Fire School in tunic and trousers of the same moving toward the agiary.

I did not move to join them, but gripped the iron rail. The metal was
hot in the afternoon sun—red and huge as an apple in the pale sky—and I
leaned my weight against it. I had started just after lunch, having dismissed
Demetra for the day, and left my villa upon the sward above the beach of
mingled black and white sand. As I always did, I’d set my sights upon
Hephaistos, and walked the Scala Aspara, the White Stair, to the Fire
School.

The Fire School.
All across the galaxy, songs are sung of its shining towers, its
sweeping colonnades and intricately styled oriels. Legends are spun of

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