I stood beside Flin in the cold early light of dawn. My hands were busy checking that the saddle was on right, while my mind was focused on the journey ahead.
It had been a week since my discussion with Thaddeus. I thought back over the discussion I'd had with him. I didn't like the task that I had before me to do. I remembered what Thaddeus had told me in the hidden room and now more than ever I felt that the ancestral knowledge should be destroyed, but I wished that there was a better way.
He had given me instructions, as to where to find the secret hiding place of the real ancestral artifacts, but there was one problem with that. I had never really traveled in the Attorgron forests much, especially not the area of the forest that he was sending me to and I told him as much. Without a guide or a basic familiarity with the land it would be very easy to get lost in the jungle like habitat of the forest.
He had told me, "Father John will be your guide. He knows the area well enough having been born and raised there for part of his childhood. We'll keep your party small so as not to attract undue attention. I doubt you should run into any trouble providing of course that you can avoid the natives."
Besides destroying the knowledge Thaddeus had laid one more task onto my shoulders that he had said was almost as vital as destroying the knowledge. After destroying the knowledge was complete he wanted me to travel down through the forest to Santarus and pick up information there from a trusted spy contact of his.
The information the spy had apparently contained details concerning the Zoarinian Empire's invasion plan, which was unlikely to be tainted with misinformation like the other spy's intelligence had been. At least that is what Thaddeus had said.
I didn't like the extra excursion, because it involved exposing ourselves to the enemy far more than the original smash and dash plan had. Our extraction involved going through Zoarinian held territory, which I was not overly fond of either, but if the information helped us win the war it would be worth it. At least I hoped so.
Coming back to reality I made sure that I had Thaddeus's letter to his spy contact. Letter was a small word for it, for all intensive purposes it appeared to be a two hundred year old book complete with musty stained pages.
Thaddeus got a bit too much into the whole spy/intrigue thing I thought to myself. But then he had managed to keep the family secrets safe during his watch over them. Now it was up to me to finish it.