Empire: Book 2, The Chronicles of the Invaders (The Chronicles of the Invaders Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF

additions to the home of the order, rebuilt some years earlier after the collapse of its main tunnel system.
    However, it was still a place of stone and rock, its classrooms starkly lit and hard-edged, while the rest was dim and thinly coated in a layer of dust. The Twelfth Realm was used to house and train the Novices—those in their first, second, and third years—for it was thought to be beneficial for older and younger Novices to mingle easily, although Elda, had anyone cared to ask her, might have had something to say about that.
    The Twelfth was directly connected to the Thirteenth Realm. The senior Novices lived in the Thirteenth for the final two years of their education—or rather their indoctrination, as Syl preferred to think of it. The seniors were known as Half-Sisters.
    These two sections were the only Realms that could not easily be sealed off from each other. Beside them was the Fourteenth Realm, which contained the living quarters for those Sisters directly involved in the training and education of Novices, shielded from prying recruits by that wretched door.
    Syl walked past the kitchens, past the gymnasium, past the doors that led to greenhouses and lecture rooms, and into the small yet adequate quarters that she had initially kept with her governess Althea, and Ani. Each had her own bedroom, but they shared a living area, a kitchen, and a bathroom. They had settled into these close confines easily enough, and Althea had arranged a cleaning roster, but first she showed them how to use the communal laundry to wash their robesand sheets, because the highborn castle girls had never stared down at a pile of grubby washing before. Indeed, they’d never scoured a pot either, or swept a floor. Althea forced such domesticity on them, settled them in, ensured their basic needs were met, and then only last month she’d asked to speak to Syl in private.
    “Would you mind excusing us, Ani?” Althea had said, but it wasn’t so much a question as an instruction.
    Ani raised an eyebrow of sympathy at Syl before leaving them be, for over the years it had fallen to Althea to admonish Syl when she had misbehaved and her father wasn’t present, and countless times Ani had been sent on her way before the grand telling-off. But Syl knew her relationship with Althea had changed since their adventures on Earth: Althea no longer treated her as a child to be protected, nor did she defer to Syl as a hired nanny might. Instead, she viewed her charge as her equal, and an ally in the fight against the darkness that shrouded the Illyri Conquest. Like a mother acknowledging that her daughter was a woman now, Althea advised Syl, and warned her to take care, and fretted about her, but she avoided giving orders and instruction, and she also refrained from mollycoddling the girl.
    To outsiders she appeared to be nothing more than a doting nursemaid, but in private she was a force to be reckoned with.
    “Now, my dear,” Althea had said when they were alone, and there was a firmness to her voice that made Syl anxious over what would come next. “I need to go back to Earth. At least for a while.”
    “What? Why?”
    Syl felt childish tears welling in her throat.
    “I am incapacitated here, and of no use at all to anyone,” replied Althea.
    “You’re of use to me!”
    “What? To pick up your discarded underwear? To make sure you have laundered robes? To soothe your ego when they call you names? You don’t need a maid, Syl.”
    “But you came to be my maid,” Syl had said nastily, words she later remembered with shame.
    “Oh, Syl, don’t be churlish. You know very well it was a ruse sothat I could accompany you and Ani, so that you would not be alone. But you told me what happened on Earth after I last saw your father—you told me he might be infected. In Edinburgh, I am able do what I can to help, and at least I am better informed. Meanwhile here I must play the role of simpering nursemaid, forbidden from entering the