The noise from the village stopped. No more screams. No more shouts. No more crossbows twanging, arrows whistling through the air or swords met in sparkling fury. Nothing but the slow, methodical footsteps of one man.

Kosar held his breath and raised his head slightly, looking back over his shoulder, the only sound now the thick water dripping from his hair. His hands were slowly sinking into the mud at the bottom of the ditch, his wounded fingertips stinging under the cold caress. It felt as if they were pressing into spilled guts, and the image horrified him. He was a thief, not a murderer.

How would he know what spilled guts felt like?

And then he realized. As his eyes drew level with the dried grass and he saw the man in red strolling among the dead, he knew. He knew the feel of guts because he had seen them spilled, smelled their tangy scent, heard the screams of their owners as they tried to catch them. He knew because he had stood by and watched those children die, when he could at least have warned them that this man was danger, this man was death. And because a sick realization suddenly dawned and he knew this man, who he was and where he was from. He’d heard whispers of legends, listened to outlandish stories by campfire light or the smoke-hazed atmospheres of taverns a lifetime from here.

The stranger was a Red Monk.

Which meant that somewhere in the land, magic was living again.

FROM THE HEIGHTS above Trengborne, Kosar watched the Red Monk wandering the silent village. From this distance, the Monk resembled a huge spider, body bristling with arrow spines, his web a trail of blood in the dust. Sometimes he went inside the buildings, and occasionally there was a distant scream as he found someone hiding and silenced them at last. By the time his bloody route crossed and recrossed itself, he was barely moving.

Kosar hid in the shadow of an overhanging rock on the valley slope, fascinated and terrified by what he was seeing. And seconds before he saw the Monk keel over and lie still at last, he caught sight of another shape beyond the village. It was on the facing hillside, so distant as to be little more than a speck moving on the gray rock face. Someone climbing quickly, fear urging them on. Another survivor.

Kosar wondered who it was. There were plenty down there he would never mourn, but there were also those that had shown him some measure of kindness. Looking at the sun bleeding down into the horizon, he knew that he had to find out. He would follow the survivor and perhaps they would share their stories.

Kosar was a branded thief who had lost the only place he had ever even thought of calling home. There was nothing better for him to do.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2