Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Epilogue

If You Enjoyed This Book…

About the Author

Glossary

Maps

Acknowledgments

Prologue

The destinies of mortals flow like water droplets down a window. Fates splash together in short, staccato spurts, rivulets gaining momentum as they merge with others until they rush down in rivers toward a foregone conclusion.

In the case of the water droplets, said inevitability was to spatter against the moldering sill of the window of Jerald Fisher’s room. In the case of Jerald Fisher, it was an untimely death.

Jerald could not sleep on the night he met his fate, as he had a lot to do in the morning. The contact had put in a last-minute request to push the meeting until tomorrow, but that conflicted with his other plans. Jerald had other things to do early in the morning. The horses needed to be saddled, the rent for his room needed to be settled, and—most critically—he needed to get out of thrice-cursed Sowdock.

On a map of the Freedlands, Sowdock was a speck on the shore of a smudge between the Haerthwards and House Bethlyn. Its population barely met the qualifications for a hamlet. A handful of villagers eked out a living dragging fish in from the murky depths of Lake Baerussel, while a small band of armed Tinderkin were paid by the Dunhelm Fish Company to keep away bandits and wandering monsters. A pair of House Gnomes ran a small tavern that sold ale and home-brewed liquor to the mercenaries. They kept a spare room above the stills to rent to travelers imprudent enough to attempt a direct route from Hap’s Bend to Silvershore. Judging by the geological stratifications of dust that covered the tiny apartment, Jerald was the first such fool in a long time.

Still, it suited Jerald’s purposes. Since fleeing Andarun, he never stayed anywhere for more than a few nights, and Sowdock made the practice easy. Tonight marked his fifth evening in the hamlet and, consistent with Nove’s principles of universal irony, he was sure it would be his last.

Jerald glanced over the ciphered note again, the sharp letters written in thick, straight strokes. His own translation was written in flowing script next to it. “Delayed by complications. Meet tomorrow,” Jerald muttered. Tomorrow was too late.

The mercenaries had told him that another traveler had been seen at Sowdock’s edge two days ago, and they’d found three more sets of hoofprints out of town. It could have been a coincidence, of course. But the coincidences were piling up, as were the bodies. What was left of them anyway.

It started when Jerald learned that the Great Eagle had disappeared. The Agekeepers wanted to interview the bird who had carried both King Johan and his predecessor at the moment of King Handor’s demise. It was for their histories on the fall of Highwatch, Brother Arturan had said. Yet when they went to locate the bird, they found that the eagle had died in a dragon attack shortly after Johan’s coronation.

The Agekeeper’s tip had the stench of malfeasance about it, an intoxicating aroma to any good journalist. A veteran town crier operating on Andarun’s Second Tier, Jerald followed his nose and started asking around. True to the old Agekeeper’s word, he confirmed that the eagle that carried King Handor and Johan the Mighty on the late king’s final flight had gone missing. Yet, before Jerald could pen his script for the morning’s cry, the dragon struck again, immolating a farmstead on the outskirts of Andarun, and with it the woman who translated for the eagle’s union.

This was something big, big enough to mean a small fortune and moving up a tier or three for the town crier who figured it out. Jerald enlisted a couple of apprentice hollermen to help him uncover the truth. Medina got a tip that a bannerman who saw Handor fall took his own tumble off the New South Gate. Pinderman found out that the nestkeeper at the eagle’s aerie drowned in the Tarapin. They were definitely onto something.

And then, suddenly, they were in the middle of something.

Pinderman disappeared one day without a trace. Medina left a trace, or—more accurately—a residue on the cobblestones. The thrice-cursed dragon must have caught her walking home late at night; her neighbors heard a reptilian roar and a scream before the alley outside her apartment went up in flames.

Their disappearances helped Jerald see the big picture a little more clearly, and it was a sign pointing out of town. He moved from hamlet to hamlet under a false name, avoiding bannermen, parties of heroes, or anyone else who might want to check his NPC papers. Two days out of the city, he overheard a barmaid tell a traveler that the Dragon of Wynspar had torched the Agekeeper’s Cloister at Waerth. Jerald had a sure bet as to the whereabouts of Brother Arturan at the time.

The old town crier sucked his teeth as he looked over the note. How much did he trust this contact? His mysterious benefactor had promised him safe passage to Silvershore and a set of forged NPC papers. That was enough to secure passage on a boat down to Highport or Knifevale, which was the best chance he had of seeing another holiday. But if the contact couldn’t come through on the promises, or worse, was lying…

Jerald made up his mind and grabbed his rucksack. He’d leave a ciphered note at the meeting spot before dawn, and let the contact know the deal was off. He spared a sheet of vellum and an old quill for the purpose as he shoved his notes and journals back into the bag. He’d need to hire a fisherman to carry him across the lake and risk a day’s travel through the wilds, but hopefully be back on the road by the weekend. It was a good plan, a plan with no reason to fail, and a plan that he desperately needed to work, all of which, unfortunately, made it a plan on a collision course with Nove’s principles of universal irony.

Written by the greatest of the Fifth Age’s philosopher-scientists, Nove’s theories sought to explain the nature of irony in the universe through mathematical formulas. His work led to his famous principles of universal irony, laid out in several seminal works across a long and storied career. Nove’s penultimate work on the subject, the Omnibus Defectum, laid out the mathematics that doomed Jerald Fisher’s plan, and with it Jerald Fisher.

Nove’s fourth principle of universal irony proved, by way of substitution, that planning increases the possibility of an unforeseen outcome. This was widely recognized well before Nove’s time; an old Tinderkin proverb said that every wedding held at least one disaster, and the best anyone could hope for was that it wasn’t the choice of spouse. Yet it was Nove who first mathematically proved that the old adage held true precisely because so many people put so much planning into weddings. The great philosopher-scientist demonstrated that planning builds expectations for things to go right, which proportionally increases the ironic potential for things that go wrong. Blocking off avenues for expected problems only creates the sort of ironic ripples in the fabric of reality that lead to truly spectacular misfortunes, whether in wedding planning, military exercises, or—unfortunately for Jerald—desperate escapes.

Perhaps if Jerald had kept Nove’s principles in mind, he would have done the sensible thing and grabbed his bag, made a comment about how doomed he was, and fled into the night. Yet, the town crier was too busy plotting his course and considering possible risks to mitigate, right up until an unholy shriek rent the night air. A second later, there was a thunderous whumph, like the gods’ own fireplace igniting, and orange light washed into the room through the shed’s lone window.

Jerald rushed to the glass pane and looked out into the night. The inn was burning impossibly fast; the thatch of its roof was already an inferno. A couple of flaming mercenaries ran screaming for the lake. The shadow of something sinuous flitted past the moon.

He was found. The thrice-cursed dragon was here.

With a desperate cry, Jerald grabbed his satchel and burst out of the doorway. Heat and smoke stung his eyes as he sprinted through the burning hamlet with all the strength in his legs. A reptilian screech echoed above, but the town crier could go no faster with the satchel weighing him down. He hurled the bag of notes into a thicket of bushes, planning to retrieve it once the creature was gone. He still had a chance, as long as he could reach the safety of Lake Baerussel’s chilly waters. The lake lay like a black mirror just ahead of him, gleaming with the orange light of the flames, drawing closer with every frantic step.

Then something above Jerald roared, and a startled voice from above screamed a curse. He looked up in time to see something oblong and trailing flames fall from the sky, illuminating a pair of leathery wings and a face that seemed more teeth than scales. The burning projectile hit the ground and erupted in a bloom of white-hot flames that washed over the town crier and drowned out his final scream.

Chapter 1

A tormented howl echoed through the mists of the mire. In the thick fog, the deep wail seemed to come from all directions at once. It carried notes of menace and agony in equal measure; the sort of baying that made night watchmen stand at the ready, prompted children to pull the covers over their eyes, and reminded late-night travelers why inns on the Heath could get away with charging such exorbitant rates.

“Ohhhhhhh…”

Yet the ominous howl held no fear for the robed figures huddled amidst the standing stones. Twelve mossy obelisks rose from the swamp like the jagged teeth of a long-dead titan; six shadowy figures lurked between the stones in a way that suggested said titan could have done better with its flossing. Sconces ringed the stone circle, cradling green flames that danced to the rhythm of the hooded figures’ chant.

“Come… come… come… come…”

As they spoke, the infernal howl became a moan, dropping in pitch even as it grew in volume.

“Ooooohhhhhhh…”

As the moaning approached the circle, the robed figures’ chant changed and accelerated in response.

“Come and see! Come and see! Come and see!”

Now something tall and grotesque was taking shape in the dark mists: a hulking shadow against the moonlit gray. It shuffled its bloated and bulbous form forward on thick legs. Tattered rags covered most of it, but what graying flesh was visible was pocked with boils and open sores. One crimson eye shone from beneath a mass of oily hair. It grinned, its smile like a barricade of sharp, blackened teeth.

“Ohhhhh!” the hag moaned.

One of the congregants, a stout figure in an ill-fitting robe, shuffled aside to part the group and reveal what lay at the center of the ritual circle: a tiny bassinet. The chanting grew in insistent fervor. “Come! Come and partake of thy dark need!”

“Ohhhh!” The monster scuttled into the circle with sudden, unnatural speed, looming over the bassinet. The tiny figure swaddled within shook and whimpered. “Ohhhh… I really shouldn’t!”

“Oh, thou must,” intoned the robed figures. “Partake of thy dark need.”

The bloated monstrosity hovered over the bassinet, talons waving at the ends of her long, spindly arms. “Oh no! I couldn’t,” she croaked. “I been eatin’ too much as is, and I’m supposed to be watchin’ my figure.”

The robed figures intoned the next part of the ritual automatically, “What speakest thou? Thou lookest wondrous. Partake as it pleases thee!”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to be a bother!”