Sanctus and The Key: 2 Bestselling Thrillers
Conspiracy thrillers don’t come any bigger or better than SANCTUS and THE KEY – the first two books in Simon Toyne’s bestselling apocalyptic series: ‘Plenty of action, plenty of intrigue and wonderfully imaginative.’ Kate MosseSANCTUS: When a man leaps to his death from a mountainous citadel in the historic Turkish city of Ruin, the media ensures his act is witnessed by the world. For a select group, it’s the sign they’ve been waiting for. But the fanatics within the Citadel fear that it threatens everything they have built – and they will kill, torture and break every law to protect their secrets. For Liv Adamsen, New York crime reporter, it begins a journey into the heart of her own identity. And at that journey's end lies a discovery that will change everything…THE KEY: Liv Adamsen now lies in an isolation ward in Ruin. She knows she entered the ancient Citadel, but remembers only darkness. A strange whisper within her says she is ‘the key’: but to what? Hunted across continents by those who would use her for their own ends or ensure her silence forever, Liv turns to the only person she can trust – charity worker Gabriel Mann. Together their paths lead to an explosive discovery – a secret with devastating consequences for them and all they hold dear…
Читать Sanctus and The Key: 2 Bestselling Thrillers онлайн беплатно
TWO BESTSELLING THRILLERS: SANCTUS & THE KEY
Simon Toyne
Table of Contents
To KFor the adventure
Table of Contents
I
A man is a god in ruins
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
1
A flash of light filled his skull as it struck the rock floor.
Then darkness.
He was dimly aware of the heavy oak door banging shut behind him and a thick batten sliding through iron hasps.
For a while he lay where he’d been thrown, listening to the pounding of his pulse and the mournful wind close by.
The blow to his head made him feel sick and dizzy, but there was no danger he was going to pass out; the agonizing cold would see to that. It was a still and ancient cold, immutable and unforgiving as the stone the cell was carved from. It pressed down and wrapped itself round him like a shroud, freezing the tears on his cheeks and beard, chilling the blood that trickled from the fresh cuts he himself had inflicted on his exposed upper body during the ceremony. Pictures tumbled through his mind, images of the awful scenes he had just witnessed and of the terrible secret he had learned.
It was the culmination of a lifetime of searching. The end of a journey he had hoped would lead to a sacred and ancient knowledge, to a divine understanding that would bring him closer to God. Now at long last he had gained that knowledge, but he had found no divinity in what he had seen, only unimaginable sorrow.
Where was God in this?
The tears stung fresh and the cold sank deeper into his body, tightening its grip on his bones. He heard something on the other side of the heavy door. A distant sound. One that had somehow managed to find its way up through the honeycomb of hand-carved tunnels which riddled the holy mountain.
They’ll come for me soon.
The ceremony will end. Then they will deal with me …
He knew the history of the order he had joined. He knew their savage rules – and now he knew their secret. They’d kill him for sure. Probably slowly, in front of his former brothers, a reminder of the seriousness of their collective, uncompromising vows: a warning of what would happen if you broke them.
No!
Not here. Not like this.
He pressed his head against the cold stone floor then pushed himself up on all fours. Slowly and painfully he dragged the rough green material of his cassock back over his shoulders, the coarse wool scouring the raw wounds on his arms and chest. He pulled the cowl over his head and collapsed once more, feeling his warm breath through his beard, drawing his knees tightly under his chin and lying clenched in the foetal position until the warmth began to return to the rest of his body.
More noises echoed from somewhere within the mountain.
He opened his eyes and began to focus. A faint glow of distant light shone through a narrow window just enough to pick out the principal features of his cell. It was unadorned, rough-hewn, functional. A pile of rubble lay strewn across one corner, showing it was one of the hundreds of rooms no longer regularly used or maintained in the Citadel.
He glanced back at the window; little more than a slit in the rock, a loophole carved countless generations earlier to give archers a vantage point over enemy armies approaching across the plains below. He rose stiffly to his feet and made his way towards it.
Dawn was still some way off. There was no moon, just distant stars. Nevertheless when he looked through the window the sudden glare was enough to make him squint. It came from the combined light of tens of thousands of street lamps, advertising hoardings and shop signs stretching out far below him towards the rim of distant mountains surrounding the plain on all sides. It was the fierce and constant glow of the modern city of Ruin, once the capital of the Hittite Empire, now just a tourist destination in southern Turkey, on the furthest edge of Europe.
