Turning my attention to Hellen, she started to look at the cold leather book covers and I started to notice she was shivering in her Procurator cloak. I couldn't blame her it was approaching nine o'clock at night and it might be summer. But down here that didn't matter!
Stepping forward, I went to one of the bookcases and started to look at the large leather book covers. I wasn’t looking at the covers. I needed to look at the dust on the bookshelves. Nobody ever comes down here so a book without a thick layer of dust in front of it was strange.
Hellen wandered over, tapping her big stick as she did, and she pointed to a book cover at the bottom.
Knowing I wasn’t going to pick it up, Hellen rolled her eyes and picked it up. Her face pulled a drained expression. I couldn’t blame her, the book looked to be over twenty kilograms. She dumped it on the wooden table that cracked a little under the weight.
“Thank you,” I said as I threw the book cover open and started to page through it.
“What ya looking for?”
“Even if Ares knew no one would demand to see a legal justification of the Greenscales siege. He would have made one and that’s what we’re looking for,”
“Why put the doc in a book from two centuries ago? That sounds boring,”
“I don’t think 200 year old legal cases are meant to be fun,”
“I donna know. I’ve seen some great 500-year-old cases. People did some creative murders back then,”
I simply nodded as I paged through more of the book.
“Don’t ya just shake the book?”
She had a point. I could just lift up the two-hundred-year-old of book and see what falls out but knowing my luck everything would fall out.
Grabbing the edges of the book covers, I lifted up the book, fighting against the strain in my arms, and shook the book a few times. Three pieces of crystal white parchment fell on the floor.
Hellen picked them up and shook her head.
“These doesn’t look like two-hundred-year-old parchment,” she added as she passed me two sheets. “This all seems fine. This talks about the intelligence reports showing Mortisical amassing an army,”
Turning to Hellen, I laid out the three sheets of parchment on the wooden table and I pointed to each of the pairs of signatures on them.
Her eyes widened.
“I didn’t think the Queen knew about the siege,”
“She doesn’t, Hellen. These are fake. Someone faked the Queen’s signature. Even some of these facts are wrong or bending of the truth. That report outlined in your sheet is the one I wrote three years ago,”
Hellen shook her head.
“This is all built on a bed of lies and deception. The men that Ares’ controls are believing in lies,” I explained.
Hellen was about to open her mouth when multiple footsteps came from the maze of the main archive.
She grabbed her stick.
I whipped out my sword. Its cold hilt in my hand.
Five females in dark cloaks walked out.
One immediately fired a crossbow at me.
It grazed my left shoulder.
Pain flooded my body.
The females advanced.