Alaric's attention was quickly brought to the guard that screamed inside the crypt. He looked up to to see a small knight swiftly deal with said guard before shouting "Iron roses! charge!", a command followed by the knight he'd passed outside beginning as assault on the guards responding to the alert.
'so these are the Iron Roses' he thought to himself as they began to make fairly short work of the guards. looking through their forces he noticed one particularly small one with a big sword. It wasn't the blade that got his attention, no, it was that she was an undead, he's seen more than enough of those kind to tell, corpses pretending they still walk the earth, the filth. He could hardly imagine an order stemming from the lover of the goddess he so revered resorting to such things just to bolster their ranks. He pushed aside his anger for now as, given the circumstances, it could wait.
It made things easier anyway, with the Iron roses fighting through the guards he was able to simply begin walking through the crypt past the conflict intent on heading straight for the necromancers. At least until he caught sight of the defenses being set up further on by the guards. While letting the Iron Roses take on the guards for him made his mission easier, he wasn't intent on waiting for them. So he hefted his hammer, flames igniting through the designs engraved on it's head as well as radiating from his eyes to make his appearance more intimidating, and with a vicious war cry he charged. The suddenness and speed of his advance left only the time for a single bolt from a crossbow to be loosed at him, being deflected of his shoulder plate.
He first smashed his hammer upon one of the set shields, a blast from the impact destroying it and sending shrapnel back toward the guards that had set it. He continued straight through where the shield had been to get at the rest of the defenders, his strikes blowing bodies and limbs apart. At one point he struck his hammer along the ground to send a small wave of flames at a guard out of his reach, incinerating them, before continuing his rampage.
The short discussion of books was sidetracked by the sudden groping of the court mage's rather bountiful bosom by one of the knight, who was then run out of the room by the appearance of some guy through the window who offered pancakes and stories after leering at just about every female in the room.
Ian just shrugged at the whole thing and, with the princess occupied by calming down the embarrassed mage and hearing the pancakeman's stories, made his was over to Gillian and took a seat beside him asking "hey, um, would you mind if I borrowed that copy of yours sometime if your not using it? I would like to finish my read of it"