• Cross and Crown
    Act I - The Return The relic was warm in Godfrey's hands, as though it contained its own heat, its own pulse, its own slow and patient fire that had been burning since the day a Roman soldier drove a spear into a hillside outside Jerusalem and tore a piece of wood from a cross that would outlive empires. He stood in the chapel of his Norman castle and watched the candlelight flicker across the...
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  • From Cinder to Crown
    The soot of Manchester did not simply stain; it baptized. Arthur Blackwood learned this truth in the hour the loom-shuttle struck him, sending his skull against the brick wall and his consciousness backward through the hot, oil-choked air of 1847 to his fifteen-year-old hands, calloused and trembling. He woke on the straw pallet in the cell he had shared with three other boys, the smell of...
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  • Shadows of the Crown
    The rain in Los Angeles doesn't wash things clean. It just makes the grime slicker. Jack Corvin knew this better than most. He had been walking these streets for thirty-five years, ever since he was a boy growing up in a house in Long Beach whose walls were thin enough to hear the neighbours arguing through. His office was on the fourth floor of a building on South Broadway that had once been a...
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  • Shadows of the Crown
    Dr. Samuel Whitfield arrived at the Graye townhouse on a wet Tuesday in March, and the first thing he noticed was the smell. It was not a bad smell exactly—more the absence of a good one, the way a room smells when no one has opened the windows in years and the air has grown tired of being trapped. The house was in Mayfair, which meant it was large and old and expensive and slightly crumbling...
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  • Shadows of the Crown
    The rain in Los Angeles doesn't wash things clean. It just makes the grime slicker. Jack Corvin knew this better than most. He had been walking these streets for thirty-five years, ever since he was a boy growing up in a house in Long Beach whose walls were thin enough to hear the neighbours arguing through. His office was on the fourth floor of a building on South Broadway that had once been a...
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  • Shadows of the Crown
    Shadows of the Crown Act I The thing about lies is that they are easier to believe the more often you hear them. I learned this during the war, when I spent six months in a basement in London listening to men in uniforms tell me things that were not true until they stopped being things and started being my memory. My name is Jack O'Malley. I was born in Chicago, in a neighbourhood that the maps...
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  • Silver Crown and Ash
    The manuscript smelled of old ink and older dust, and when I opened it, the Latin words seemed to rearrange themselves in my mind as though they had been waiting for someone who would finally understand them. It was a vellum codex, perhaps four hundred years old, discovered in the rubble of Glastonbury Abbey during construction work in the spring of eighteen eighty-eight. My father brought it...
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  • The Abandoned Crown
    They caught Old Maggie in the soup kitchen before dawn, her hands raw from scooping broth into tin cups that didn't go far enough. She was crying without making a sound—the kind of crying that happens when grief has burned through the tears and is now feeding on something older. When she saw me standing in the doorway with my coat damp from the East End rain, she tried to compose herself. It...
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  • The Abandoned Crown of Africa
    The humidity of the Congo Basin was a physical weight, a wet blanket that smelled of rotting vegetation and old blood. Captain Henry wiped the sweat from his brow, looking at the sprawling city of Zandora. It was a marvel of stone and gold, a hidden empire that the world had never known. And now, it belonged to the Crown. For two years, Henry had led a mixed force of British regulars and local...
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  • The Abandoned Crown of Africa
    The humidity of the Congo Basin was a physical weight, a wet blanket that smelled of rotting vegetation and old blood. Captain Henry wiped the sweat from his brow, looking at the sprawling city of Zandora. It was a marvel of stone and gold, a hidden empire that the world had never known. And now, it belonged to the Crown. For two years, Henry had led a mixed force of British regulars and local...
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  • The Distant Crown
    The Distant Crown By Edward Ashworth The crown sat on the oak table between them like a verdict. Three brass and silver bands interwoven, each one representing a brother—Thomas, the eldest, who held the land; Edward, the middle, who held the sword; and Henry, the youngest, who held nothing at all. Or so Thomas believed. Henry had returned from the continent in autumn, when the hedgerows were...
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