CHAPTER ONE

Lone Survivor

Night begins the day, and in the darkness of night the first day of spring was being born. In the west, great Chariot was rising, bright with hope as it re-entered the world. No other moon was in the sky, but Chariot’s light filled up the snow-covered plain of the Gap of Lone, and the gray-caped thain walking on it.

The thain went his way toward the base of the cliff with slow deliberate steps, as if he had all the time in the world. His gray cape of office was charred with fire and stained dark with dried blood. Fresh blood, black in the moon’s blue light, was running down his legs and squelching in his shoes, staining his footprints in the new snow like mud.

Among the gray stones of the cliff face was a hollow. In the hollow hung a golden bell. The thain picked up the copper striker that lay below it. He didn’t trust his trembling fingers to hold the slender stalk of metal so he gripped it with both hands, as if it were the handle of a sledgehammer. He struck the bell as hard as he could (which wasn’t so very hard): three times. Then he waited there, although he could hear his pursuers loping toward him through the snow, voiceless though they were. He struck the bell three more times and fell dead in the shallow snowdrifts at the base of the cliff.

The bell rang in the little hollow. It rang in the watchroom of the Gray Tower, the Graith’s guardpost over the Gap of Lone. It rang in the thains’ Northtower, on the border of Thrymhaiam in the far north. It rang in Anglecross Tower in the west of the Wardlands, in Islandkeep that guarded the Southhold, in the Graith’s chamber in the city of A Thousand Towers. The same bell, or an image of it, swung in all those places. The same signal sounded in all those places.

Many thains had set out to send that signal, but only the one survived to deliver the news before he died: the Wardlands had been invaded.

When his enemies found him dead, they cut up his body and rendered it down for soup, as was their custom. But they could not work the striker loose from the thain’s hands, so they cut them off and left them there at the base of the cliff.

Long the hands lay there in the bitter snows, waiting for nothing.