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scoring the dark figure, clipping and prodding the armour, tattering the grim cloak. But he could draw no blood.
    “What are you?” the Nonman cried in fury.
    There was one space between them, but the crossings were infinite . . .
    Kellhus opened the Nonman’s exposed chin. Blood, black in the gloom, spilled across his breast. A second stroke sent the uncanny blade skittering across snow and ice.
    As Kellhus leapt, the Nonman scrambled backward, fell. The point of Kellhus’s sword, poised above the opening of his helm, stilled him.
    In the freezing rain, the monk breathed evenly, staring down at the fallen figure. Several instants passed. Now the interrogation could begin.
    “You will answer my questions,” Kellhus instructed, his tone devoid of passion.
    The Nonman laughed darkly.
    “But it is you, Anasûrimbor, who are the question.”
    And then came the word, the word that, on hearing, wrenched the intellect somehow.
    A furious incandescence. Like a petal blown from a palm, Kellhus was thrown backward. He rolled through the snow and, stunned, struggled to his feet. He watched numbly as the Nonman was drawn upright as though by a wire. Pale watery light formed a sphere around him. The ice rain sputtered and hissed against it. Behind him rose the great tree.
    Sorcery? But how could it be?
    Kellhus fled, sprinted over the dead structures breaking the snow. He slipped on ice and skidded over the far side of the heights, toppled through the wicked branches of trees. He recovered his feet and tore himself through the harsh underbrush. Something like a thunderclap shivered through the air, and great, blinding fires rifled through the spruces behind him. The heat washed over him, and he ran harder, until the slopes were leaps and the dark forest a rush of confusion.
    “ANASÛRIMBOR!” an unearthly voice called, cracking the winter silence.
    “RUN, ANASÛRIMBOR!” it boomed. “I WILL REMEMBER! ”
    Laughter, like a storm, and the forest behind him was harrowed by more fierce lights. They fractured the surrounding gloom, and Kellhus could see his own fleeing shadow flickering before him.
    The cold air wracked his lungs, but he ran—far harder than the Sranc had made him run.
    Sorcery? Is this among the lessons I’m to learn, Father?
    Cold night fell. Somewhere in the dark, wolves howled. Shimeh, they seemed to say, was too far.

PART I:
     
    The Sorcerer
     

CHAPTER ONE
     
    CARYTHUSAL
     
    There are three, and only three, kinds of men in the world: cynics, fanatics, and Mandate Schoolmen.
    —ONTILLAS, ON THE FOLLY OF MEN
     
     
The author has often observed that in the genesis of great events, men generally possess no inkling of what their actions portend. This problem is not, as one might suppose, a result of men’s blindness to the consequences of their actions. Rather it is a result of the mad way the dreadful turns on the trivial when the ends of one man cross the ends of another. The Schoolmen of the Scarlet Spires have an old saying: “When one man chases a hare, he finds a hare. But when many men chase a hare, they find a dragon.” In the prosecution of competing human interests, the result is always unknown, and all too often terrifying.
    —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
     

Midwinter, 4110 Year-of-the-Tusk, Carythusal
     
    All spies obsessed over their informants. It was a game they played in the moments before sleep or even during nervous gaps in conversation. A spy would look at his informant, as Achamian looked at Geshrunni now, and ask himself, How much does he know?
    Like many taverns found near the edge of the Worm, the great slums of Carythusal, the Holy Leper was at once luxurious and impoverished. The floor was tiled with ceramics as fine as any found in the palace of a Palatine-Governor, but the walls were of painted mud brick, and the ceiling was so low that taller men had to duck beneath the brass lamps, which were authentic imitations, Achamian had once heard the owner