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edge. Behind his eyes, a corridor of flame opened up. His knees buckled. A yawning black funnel tugged at him, invited him into its depths.
    Strong hands steadied him and led him back a pace. He glanced up at his father’s face, saw the concern in his eyes.  
    The hard-men of the Coastal Watch nodded and grumbled. Some of them unconsciously stroked the hafts of spears and axes. Others wrapped fingers around the hilts of scabbarded swords.
    “See them now, boy?” Jarl said.  
    Dark smudges lay behind the ocean spray. Deacon squinted until he could make out the black sails of three ships plowing through the surf, white horses leaping away from their keels.
    “Them’s reavers, right enough,” Jon Mori’s father said. He was a big man, as wide as he was tall. With his breastplate hitched up over his paunch, he looked like the comedy knights in the morality plays. “Carracks, if I ain’t very much mistook, but they ain’t from Gallia, of that you can be sure.”
    “Where then, Konin?” Jarl said.
    “That flag they’re flying’s ‘The Impaled Man’. Only scum that will sail under it are from Verusia.” Konin touched his forehead with two fingers in the Nousian manner.  
    It came as a surprise, seeing as Jon Mori said his father shat on Nousians; said they were milksops and cowards who hid weakness behind piety. It didn’t make any difference how often Deacon pointed out it was a weakness that had won the Templum most of the known world.
    “Verusia?” Jarl said. There was hesitancy in his voice, as if he didn’t want to believe what he was hearing. “You sure? Bit out of the way for the Lich Lord’s minions to come pillaging, isn’t it?”
    “I tell you, that’s their flag, Jarl,” Konin said. “I got a bad feeling about this. We should send word to the Templum.”
    Jarl shook his head. “Templum don’t care about us. Maranore’s the arse-end of the Theocracy, far as they’re concerned. And, anyhow, who they gonna send? The nearest garrison’s Londdyr. Unless you sprout wings and fly there, it’d take days to get a message to them, and longer for them to make the march, even if they could be bothered.”
    “So, what, then?” a gap-toothed old warrior said. “We evacuate?”
    “That ain’t what I’m saying, Gurn.” Jarl switched his gaze to Deacon and said, “Boy, you best get home. Tell Aristodeus… Just tell him. If anyone knows what to do, he does.”
    Deacon nodded and started back from the edge. Before he’d gotten out of earshot, someone asked, “What have we got that the dead want, Jarl? I mean, it ain’t like any of us has anything worth looting, and even if we did, what would they do with it?”
    Deacon paused just long enough to catch his father’s answer.
    “If what the Gallians say about Verusia is true, they ain’t here for plunder; they’re here for our men, women, and children—fodder for the Lich Lord. So, let’s get busy, lads. Light the beacons.”
    Deacon had never been afraid for his father before. Jarl was a brute of a man, and noble with it. He’d stand toe to toe with anyone and likely get the better of them. But something like dread had crept into his voice, and it seeped beneath Deacon’s skin like an infection.
    He ran along the clifftop a ways then followed the dirt trail down into a gully overlooking a secluded bay. Waves lashed the shore in violent breakers hundreds of feet below. Riding them toward the beach was a fourth ship.  
    Deacon’s heart lurched, and he took a faltering step back up the trail, meaning to tell his father; but when he looked again, the ship had gone.
    He shuddered. There had been a black sail, so ragged it could have been woven from cobwebs. He could still almost see it, a phantom against the squall; but the harder he looked, the more he grew convinced it was a trick of the light amplified by his fear.  
    It’s not what he was supposed to feel. Fear was weakness. He had a message to deliver, one his father had entrusted