“Srem” sounds an awful like “sram” which means “shame” in Russian. It’s probably just a coincidence, but it’s been needling my brain ever since I saw it in Crisscross. What did all those ladies say? No more coincidences for Jack?

Also, in a rather unrelated way, would it have anything to do with a city of Srem in Serbia? Google is not a friend.

“Srem” sounds an awful like “sram” which means “shame” in Russian. It’s probably just a coincidence, but it’s been needling my brain ever since I saw it in Crisscross. What did all those ladies say? No more coincidences for Jack?

Also, in a rather unrelated way, would it have anything to do with a city of Srem in Serbia? Google is not a friend.

I think I remember Louis L'amour talking about Srem as an anciet village, but he talks about so many it's hard to keep them strait.. It could very well be a word FPW pulled out of his..... I mean a word FPW came up with.


KRW

You are probably right, but all those Lit classes I had to take drilled it into my head to question most names and titles in pieces. It's almost second nature.

You are probably right, but all those Lit classes I had to take drilled it into my head to question most names and titles in pieces. It's almost second nature.

I'm reading "The Walking Drum" at the moment and it's set back before Columbus. About the time the Huns really started to become a force. Your post had me thinking about Srem so I decided to reread the book to see if that's where I had heard it. What a good book!


KRW

“Srem” sounds an awful like “sram” which means “shame” in Russian.

Do you speak Russian? Just curious. I took two years of it in my early college career, but I remember very little of it now. I regret that. It's a beautiful language. I can still sound out words written in the Cyrillic alphabet (often slowly), but the meaning usually goes right by me now. I should really find an excuse to practice it again.

Come to think of it, if anyone comes up with a solid source for FPW books in Russian, feel free to send them on to me. I seem to remember FPW himself mentioning a publisher to me, but I couldn't find a place to order them.

Blake

Do you speak Russian?
Blake

I do indeed. I can even read and write (although on a much lower level than I do in English.)

I'm not sure about Russian publishers. I could ask my cousin. She prowls the Russian book message boards. Maybe she heard something.

It's been some time since I read The Keep but weren't there some books hidden in the keep?

It's been some time since I read The Keep but weren't there some books hidden in the keep?

Of course there was. You think one might have been the compendium? :eek:

If you do, I'd agree with ya!


Welcome to the board!


KRW

It's been some time since I read The Keep but weren't there some books hidden in the keep?

Welcome to the board.

As KRW points out, there were bad books there. But I don't remember the Compendium being mentioned by name. I'll bet one of the books in the Keep ends up playing a role in the Circle's rituals in The Haunted Air.

Welcome to the board.

As KRW points out, there were bad books there. But I don't remember the Compendium being mentioned by name. I'll bet one of the books in the Keep ends up playing a role in the Circle's rituals in The Haunted Air.

from Crisscross:

"It was banned in the fifteenth century by the Catholic Church.”

“Six hundred years . . . pretty old book.”

“That was merely when it was banned. It’s much older than that. No one is quite sure how old. The Compendium first came to the Church’s attention during the Spanish Inquisition when it was discovered in the possession of a Moorish scholar whose name is lost. He was put through unimaginable agonies before he died, but either could not or would not say who had given it to him.

“The Grand Inquisitor himself, Torquemada, is said to have been so repulsed after reading only a part of the Compendium that he ordered a huge bonfire built and hurled the book into the flames. But it would not burn. Nor would it be cut by the sharpest sword or the heaviest ax. So he dropped it into the deepest well in the Spanish Empire; he filled that well with granite boulders, then built a monastery over it.”

Jack gave a low whistle. “What the hell was in it?”

“Many things. Lists and descriptions of unspeakable rites and ceremonies, diagrams of ancient clockwork machines, but the heart of the Compendium is the outline of the Opus Omega—the final process that will assure the ascent of what it calls ‘the Other world.’ ”

Jack felt a chill. “The Otherness. Even back then?”

“Surely you realize that this cosmic shadow war is about far more than humanity. The millions of years since the first hominid reared up on its hind legs are an eye blink in the course of the conflict. It began before the earth was formed and will continue long after the sun’s furnace goes cold.”
Jack did know that—at least he’d been told that—but it was still hard to accept.

“And as with all forbidden things,” Herta went on, “the Compendium could not stay buried. A small subsect of monks within the monastery spent years digging tunnels and secretly excavating the well. They retrieved the book, but before they could put it to use they were all slain and the book disappeared for five hundred years.”

“If a boulder-filled well with a monastery overhead couldn’t keep it out of circulation, where did it hide during those centuries?”

“In a place built by the Ally’s warrior—”

“You mean the one Anya told me about—the one I’m supposed to replace? He’s that old?”

Here was another thing Jack couldn’t or wouldn’t accept: Like it or not, he’d been drafted into this cosmic war.

“Much older,” Herta said. “Almost as old as the Adversary. More than five centuries ago he trapped the Adversary in a stone keep in a remote pass in Eastern Europe. He sealed away many forbidden books there as well, to keep them out of the hands of men and women susceptible to the Otherness. But the fortress was broached by the German Army in the spring of 1941. Fortunately the Adversary was killed—albeit temporarily—before he could escape.”

“But this Compendium thing made it out?”

“Yes. It and other forbidden books ended in the hands of a man named Alexandru, one of the keep’s caretakers. After the war he sold them to an antiquarian book dealer in Bucharest who in turn sold the Compendium to an American collector. A quarter of a century later, the collector was murdered and the book stolen.”