My agent, Seth Fishman, was awesome as always, and as I was writing he gave me the welcome news that we’d gotten a contract for the fourth and fifth books in the Shadow Campaigns to close out the series. At the Gernert Company, I also owe thanks to Will Roberts, Rebecca Gardener, and Andy Kifer, and everyone else who helped bring these books around the world.

My editors, Jessica Wade at Roc and Michael Rowley at Del Rey UK, suffered through my bouts of angst and put up with my being late, and managed to do their usual excellent jobs in spite of my shenanigans. I owe Michael particular thanks for playing host and tour guide during my first visit to London; my thanks as well to all the Londoners who helped out the lost-looking, wrong-side-of-the-street-crossing American.

Once again, my final thanks to two really indispensable groups of people: first, everyone who works to make sure the book actually exists and turns up in stores, with a cover, not printed upside down or labeled as a Norwegian dictionary; second, everyone who read The Thousand Names and The Shadow Throne and thought they were worth talking about. Without you, I’d just be a guy telling stories to his cats.

Map

Prologue

IGNAHTA SEMPRIA

Such pretty country, to be soaked in blood.

South of the city of Desland, the valley of the river Velt flattened out into a rolling carpet of fields, gridded by neat hedgerows and punctuated by tiny orderly hamlets, each with its tall-spired church tipped by a golden double circle. The river itself traced out a series of lazy curves, as though exhausted by its frantic descent from the highlands, and it flashed like molten silver in the warm autumn sun. Here and there, lone hills rose from the endless flat farmland like islands jutting out of the sea, crowned with gnarled, ancient trees, the last remaining strongholds of the great forests that had covered this land before the arrival of men.

Atop one of those hills, at the edge of one of those primeval woods, a man sat cross-legged on a boulder and stared down at the plain below. He was a young man, barely out of boyhood, with nut-brown hair and a wispy mustache. Dressed in leathers and homespun, he could have been mistaken for a native, the son of a peasant farmer come to trap or gather wood in the old forest.

In fact, he was a very long way from home, and he had no interest in firewood or game. His name was Wren. In his saddlebags, carefully folded and secured inside a lockbox, he carried a velvet mask sewn with a layer of glittering, clicking obsidian. It marked him as a servant of an order out of legend, one that was supposedly a hundred years dead: the Priests of the Black, fell agents of the Elysian Church, its spies and inquisitors.