The Scattered Word

Before the Flood, the Word was whole. Every syllable of it was true, and the earth was made to hear it. It was broken apart and buried, and for four thousand years the pieces have been working their way back to the surface. A seam of bronze in a Colorado slide. A sealed jar in an Iraqi vault. A plate lying on the floor of the Atlantic. Most of them found by accident. None of them found by anyone who understood what he was holding. Caleb Dale reads the ground for a living. When a quake shears the east face of a ridge above his camp, he climbs up expecting rock and finds something a man was never meant to dig up alone. What he carries down brings the rest of it with him. An uncle he has spent years avoiding. A blind scholar who reads the fragments with his hands, faster than anyone who can see them. An order that has spent centuries gathering the pieces in order to command the world with them, and a remnant that would rather see them destroyed than spoken. The hunt runs from a Colorado mountainside to a monastery library, an Alpine pass, a glacier, and at last to the black water of the deep Atlantic. Every man who reaches for the Word learns the same thing, and every one of them learns it too late. It cannot be taken. It cannot be decoded, or bought, or earned. It can only be received. The Scattered Word is Book Twenty-Three of the Unseen Truth Series. Like every book in the series, it stands on its own.