The Relic Thief Kneels Before Dawn

von Connie Houston

84 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

A hollow saint. A manufactured divinity. A six-century debt of blood and stone.For six hundred years, Mount Sumeru has stood as the gleaming citadel of the sacred world-a mountain fortress of five hundred stupas perched high above mist-choked river valleys, revered for producing the miraculous crystallized relics that guarantee imperial prosperity. Pilgrims crawl through winter salt to worship its living boy-god, the Golden Buddha, whose calcified Heart Relic is hailed across the empire as the supreme triumph of human enlightenment.Then the sealed sanctuary is breached.Jinpa is an outcast novice condemned to scrub frozen flagstones beneath the abrasive weight of a wooden penitential collar. When a routine delivery brings him to the highest grotto, he finds the ancient iron wax seals torn from within. Inside, seated upon the silk lotus dais, sits the boy saint: split open from sternum to navel, his thoracic cavity completely vacant, his sacred heart vanished. Before Jinpa can flee, the monastic guard breaches the chamber, brandishing his cleaning iron as the murder weapon and naming him the thief who defiled heaven.With a total solar eclipse forty-eight hours away, Commander Keith Peterson's Imperial Iron Guard surrounds the mountain with ballistas and an ultimatum: surrender the Heart Relic for the Grand Cleansing Rite, or Mount Sumeru burns to ash. The High Council demands Jinpa's immediate execution, but Master Wonhyo-the Council's blind karmic inquisitor-invokes the unrepealable Lex Karmica. Chaining Jinpa's wrist to his iron staff, Wonhyo drags the condemned boy into the mountain's sealed sub-foundations to retrace the theft.What begins as a claustrophobic forensic inquest descends into an alchemical nightmare. Jinpa's observant scavenger eyes quickly uncover what the pious monks ignored: the dead boy was an expendable decoy, butchered without a crystallized relic to begin with. Deep within boiling quicksilver vats and submerged ossuaries, Jinpa and Wonhyo unearth the Sangha's darkest secret: the holy relics are not divine blessings, but toxic calcifications harvested from poisoned ascetics.Worse still, Jinpa's own hands begin to unlock secret doors sealed for centuries. His mind ruptures under violent past-life recall: he was Grand Abbot Khyungpo, the revered founder who engineered this gilded industry six centuries ago to seal away an ancient terror-a pulsing shard of Mara's marrow sleeping beneath the bedrock.Now, as siege horns echo and the sun turns to ash, the subterranean seals are shattering. To extinguish the cosmic contagion he engineered, Jinpa must confront his own ancestral pride and make the ultimate Bodhisattva's sacrifice.Fusing the forensic monastic mystery of The Name of the Rose with the visceral dread of dark Eastern fantasy, The Relic Thief Kneels Before Dawn is an unforgettable epic of institutional deceit, manufactured faith, and radical spiritual redemption.

• Themen: Belletristik Kriminalromane und Mystery Historische Kriminalromane und Mystery
• ISBN: 9798182776653
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 14.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Connie Stonecipher Houston