The First Stone by Mark Anthony

The First Stone by Mark Anthony

Author:Mark Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307418470
Publisher: Bantam Dell
Published: 2009-03-03T16:00:00+00:00


You should not read this. Because if you do—if you learn the secrets contained within this journal, if you come to see the Philosophers for what they truly are—then I will have doomed you just as surely as I doomed her over three hundred years ago. They will condemn you, they will hunt you with all their powers, and they will destroy you.

Yet I beg of you, in the name of Hermes, keep reading.

Forgive me the recklessness of these words, for I must write them in haste. It is ironic, for a being who is immortal, that I should have so little time in which to fill these pages, but they will soon turn their eyes in my direction. Unlike the ones they seek to understand, they do not sleep and have always kept watch on me. From the very beginning they have doubted my intentions, even as they transformed me into one of their own and brought me into their order.

But then, is it not safer to keep the wolf where you can see him? Except I know now it is the lamb I am to play in this bit of mummery, and for good or ill it is nearly at an end. Would that I could use a computer to set down these words more quickly, but they monitor all such devices, and perhaps it is just as well that I compose this on paper with an old-fashioned quill pen. It reminds me of a time long past. Of my time.

I did not seek to become immortal—that is the first thing you should know. On the contrary, when he first found me, life had no worth to me whatsoever, and at the ripe old age of fourteen I was doing everything I could to throw mine away. It was spring, in the year 1668, and Edinburgh was just beginning to stink.

In that era, Edinburgh was one of the most densely populated cities in all of Europe, for the entire citizenry—compelled by fear of the English—had crammed itself within the confines of the city’s stone walls. They had come seeking protection. What they found instead were filth and poverty, disease and death.

In Greyfriars graveyard, along the Cowgate below St. Giles, layers of corpses were stacked with barely a layer of soil between them, so that after a hard Scottish rain limbs would jut out of the ground like tree roots. The living fared little better. With no room to build out because of the constricting embrace of the city’s walls, the people of Edinburgh built up instead. Wooden tenements sprouted from the tops of stone buildings like fungi encouraged by the damp air. They were wretched structures, drafty in winter, stifling in summer, and rat-infested at all times, with narrow windows that opened only to allow the foul contents of a chamber pot to be thrown onto the street— and any unwary passersby—below.

The tenements were always catching fire, or falling down entirely, taking their unlucky occupants with them, and thereby contributing to the population of Greyfriars.



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