Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor, #1)

by Mark Lawrence

IT IS IMPORTANT, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy Convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men.

All the world and more has rushed eternity’s length to reach this beat of your heart, screaming down the years. And if you let it, the universe, without drawing breath, will press itself through this fractured second and race to the next, on into a new eternity. Everything that is, the echoes of everything that ever was, the roots of all that will ever be, must pass through this moment that you own. Your only task is to give it pause—to make it notice.

THE STENCH OF a prison is an honest one. The guards’ euphemisms, the public smile of the chief warden, even the building’s façade, may lie and lie again, but the stink is the unvarnished truth: sewage and rot, infection and despair.