Chapter 1

The heavy, rhythmic hammer on hammer has, of course, stopped hours ago, but the forge's heat still lingers in Arvel's stones. That's home for a smith.

Leinhal was lying still on his cot, the deep, bone-weary sleep of a tradesman settling in. The air in his little room above the smithy was the usual sort: smoke, sweat, and well-oiled leather: a perfectly normal smell, a normal life.

Suddenly the room turned unnaturally cold. Leinhal's dreams vanished, replaced by suffocating darkness. Though fully aware of his surroundings, he was completely paralyzed, unable to speak or move. As disorientation swept over him, the ceiling faded, revealing a void of ash clouds above. A distinct shape then appeared in the darkness above his bed, marking the start of something deeply strange and dangerous.

A figure stood in a heavy, tattered cowl that swallowed the last of the ambient light. The hood didn't reveal a face at all, just a void. A pale blue hand emerged slowly, deliberately. The hand was like carved ice, translucent, with faint blue veins running through it, pulsing faintly.

The hand went down towards Leinhal's chest. He tried to scream, tried to roll off the cot, tried to grab the iron poker by the hearth, but his body wouldn't move.

The cold coming off that pale skin was total. It seeped straight through his linen shirt and froze his breath in his lungs. As frostbitten fingers touched his sternum, a sound ripped through the stillness of his mind.

It wasn't a voice at all; it was a deep, resonant vibration that thundered in his skull like a bronze bell being struck underwater. Volumir Returns.

Leinhal gasped, eyes shooting open as he bolted upright on the cot. He'd thrown off his wool blanket, his chest heaving as he clutched at his shirt. His skin was burning hot, and he was sweating, yet his teeth were chattering.

"Just a dream," he said into the dark, his voice a bit hoarse. He pressed his rough hands to his eyes, trying to rub the image of the pale blue veins out of his mind. "Just a madness."

He swung his legs over the side of the bed, bare feet hitting the cold pine of the floorboards. He was thirsty. He needed to go and stoke the fire in the hearth to remind himself of the comfortable, familiar warmth of the real world. As he looked across the room towards the stairwell leading down to the shop floor, a strange light caught his eye.

Right below, through the small gaps in the floorboards, a soft, pulsing light glowed. It wasn't the deep, guttering orange of a dying coal bed. It was a steady, sharp light.

Leinhal worked his way down the steps, hand sliding along the rough rail. The air in the ground-floor smithy was bitterly cold, frost riming the edge of his water trough. He stopped at the bottom step, his breath freezing in his throat.

His forge sat in the middle of the room. He'd raked the coals and put the fire out himself before going to bed. Now a single huge flame rose from the dead, blackened ashes of the hearth. No normal sounds of a fire were heard, just a profound silence as the flame moved in a violent, almost vicious manner, throwing long, writhing shadows over the walls lined with tools. It was a brilliant, terrifying blue flame.

The cold air in the smithy seemed to disappear, rushing toward the hearth as if it had been sucked in. The pale blue flame quivered in and out in a regular rhythm, matching the erratic hammering of Leinhal's heart.

Driven by sheer terror and a blacksmith's instinct, he moved forward. His bare feet were thudding on the stone. He reached out towards the fire, his hands trembling. He'd spent his life reading the color of a flame to tell him its temperature, and this light was nothing like anything he'd ever seen. It gave off no heat at all. It was just a tremendous, crushing weight of ice.

Two steps from the hearth, a sudden, agonizing heat shot through his chest. Leinhal gasped, his legs gave way, and he went down on the stone floor, clutching at his shirt as a searing pain, like an iron rivet driven white-hot into his chest, blazed right over his sternum. It wasn't the heat of a normal burn; it was the pain of freezing ice, a freezing agony that turned his blood to slush.

Panting, his vision blurring at the edges, he yanked his linen shirt collar back and forced himself to look down.

Woven directly into his flesh was a fresh, raw mark. The skin was dead white and blistered, its edge ringed with a pale, iridescent blue frost that didn't melt at all against the heat of his body. It was a perfect, jagged circle. Stamped in the center of it was the stark, unmistakable outline of a classic trade hammer - a brand that burned not just on his chest but into his very being.

Leinhal's breath came in short, sharp gasps as his hand hovered, trembling, just above the mark - too frightened to touch it, yet utterly unable to look away. His chest heaved as a raw, wordless cry got caught in his throat, and he reached out to his shirt, desperately trying to hide the brand from even his own eyes. With each pulse of that cold light, Leinhal's heartbeat stuttered - the familiar form of the hammer was now a monster. He was overwhelmed, his whole body shaking as the truth of it hit him. He felt exposed, and utterly changed. He clamped his eyes shut and shivered.

As he looked at it, the pale blue veins in the frost pulsed, and the mark throbbed. At the same time, the silent flame in his forge spiked, leaping high and casting a long, sharp shadow of the anvil across the wall. A shadow that looked less like an anvil and more like a man on his knees waiting for a command.

As the morning fog began to lift and dawn broke, Sheanna watched the rolling hills of the Tellarane province recede behind her, and the substantial, low stone walls of the city come into view.

Sheanna pulled the hood of her travel-stained cloak down over her eyes and adjusted the strap on her leather pack. To any passer-by at the eastern gate, whether a merchant or a guard, she'd be some herbalist or a wandering scribe.

As she slipped past the gate guards, paying the entry fee with a mere nod, she kept her eyes moving. Arvel was a working city, full of the clatter of cartwheels on the cobbles and the shouts of morning vendors. A definite undercurrent of unease ran beneath it, a palpable sense that something was off. People were muttering on the corners. The women hanging their washing would glance up at the sky with a certain apprehension.

The city was still talking about the flash that had cut across the sky six hours earlier. To the uninitiated, it would have looked like a flash of lightning, but lightning doesn't turn the clouds that pale blue and doesn't leave the taste of ozone and old ice in the mouth.

Sheanna rubbed her fingers together, aware of the faint sympathetic vibration still running through her veins (the Great Towers of Magi would have picked up that right away). Their atmospheric tethers in the capital would be screaming in warning, and the Magi Dorhan inquisitors would be on the way in short order. She knew she had to find the source herself. Rather than trundling through the merchant quarter, she headed straight for the smoky artisan quarter. A spike of that magnitude, one so clearly marked by the ancient northern curse, had to have left some trace.

She checked the heavy iron clasp of her cloak as she walked into the narrow, mud-slicked alley. Weeks of hard travelling had taken her from the hidden enclaves of her order to Eskarta, following scraps of prophecy and the faintest hint of a change in the tides up north.

She'd seen the flash herself whilst out camping on the desolate plains of Zol. Since then, stories have been flying around: milk going sour, compasses turning the other way, and a brilliant azure light that turned the night into day over Arvel.

Sheanna closed her eyes and took a deep, slow breath to get the noise of the market right outside out of her head. She reached into her pocket and gripped a smooth obsidian stone token. A token of a Remnant God whose name had been scrubbed from the Towers' records. She wasn't just looking for signs; she was feeling for them.

The air in the Arvel artisan district was thick with the usual odour of burning coal and sulphur from the various smithies, the very smell of the city as a place of skilled metalwork. As Sheanna went deeper into the alleyways, the smell changed abruptly. The smoke became sharper, became colder, and the change in the air was absolutely the sort of thing you'd hear the old smiths talk about in the stories, the air going all odd at certain times. All of a sudden there was a faint metallic ring through the alleyway, the sound of a hammer on an anvil. It wasn't the normal, steady rhythm of the smiths in Arvel at all. It was a hesitant, resonant clang which was utterly the sound of something unsettling, and it sent a shiver of cold right up her arm from the old obsidian token in her hand.

She opened her eyes and her gaze was immediately fixed on a soot-stained timber building at the end of the lane. A sign shaped as a very basic iron horseshoe hung over the door. That's where she'd found it.

Magi Dorhan's arrival in Arvel passed without acknowledgment. The citizens, well aware of the consequences for obstructing an agent of the Great Towers, ensured the iron gates were opened at once. Dorhan rode his white horse beneath the old arch, advancing silently into the city. Dense city fog cloaked the district, rendering the streets beyond nearly invisible to the naked eye. Yet Dorhan perceived Arvel through the influence of liquid silver—a rare alchemical infusion reserved for the High Magi—which attuned his senses to the intricate patterns of the Weave. In Arvel, centuries of metalworking and enchantment had saturated the environment with artisan magic and volatile ether, manifesting as shimmering ribbons and eddies across the sky, their activity reflecting recent disturbances within the Weave itself.

A jagged, pale-blue fracture still stained the local ether, pulsing like an open wound over the artisan quarters.

'The resonance is stabilizing,' Dorhan said in a quiet, smooth voice, absolutely devoid of warmth.

Behind him, six inquisitors rode in perfect, silent formation. Featureless iron masks obscured their faces, and their heavy crimson cloaks hung perfectly straight down the sides of their horses.

At Dorhan's right hand, Prefect Vael was on horseback, holding a long staff with a silver-capped end. The multi-faceted siphon crystal at the tip spun gently, giving off a faint, agitated violet glow as it drew in the ambient static.

'That was a most odd case of dry lightning,' said the local magistrates, My Lord.

The local magistrates demonstrated little understanding of the difference between a thunderstorm and a cosmic breach. Dorhan, remaining perfectly composed as one would expect in any court of law, produced a rather substantial silver pocket watch from his vest and snapped it open. The hands had nothing to do with time; three hands spun madly, all pointing at the sooty, smoke-stained skyline of the southern district. Without looking up, Dorhan stated, "The Primal Weave has been disturbed. A seal has been breached, and something has seeped through, taking root in a physical catalyst. Find it, suck it up and get the containment pyre ready."

A passing merchant cart rumbled past the vanguard; the driver went completely mad and yanked the reins to get out of the way. Dorhan didn't look down; the siphon-crystal on Vael's staff flared up enormously, and the merchant's draft horse took a painful gasp as the ambient energy was sucked right out of it. The beast dropped to its knees and started shivering.

Dorhan paid the beast absolutely no attention. His eyes were on the pale blue miasma drifting over the artisan district, and that was all that mattered. Every breath of that unnatural vapour was a constant reminder of the precarious state of the Great Towers' position. Their power lay not simply in the power itself, but in the fact that they could keep the truth from the people. As he watched the miasma, the prospect of exposure was as real as the magical fissure. The old curse manifested in the coloured sky made the Towers' authority very much a thing of the moment, a thing that could be ripped away at any time. Their authority rested entirely on their ability to maintain the fiction. In that moment, his unblinking stare at the miasma was an act of control and an act of quiet desperation to hold the line against a threat which could at any moment shatter the very illusion of their power.

"Deploy the vanguard to the edge of the lowlands canal," Dorhan ordered, hand on the pommel of his short sword. "Seal off the drainage channels and the docks. If it tries to make for the provincial line, burn the quarter to ash. Volumir is not going to be returning on my watch."

Sheanna had no idea that, just a moment before, Magi Dorhan had ordered Arvel's canals sealed, effectively cutting off the artisan district. The artisan district was very much alive as she pushed through the smithy's heavy timber door. The city noise was all but gone inside. A sharp chill went through her, sharp with the smell of old ice and ozone. A single figure stood at the forge.

Leinhal was standing over the massive iron anvil, broad shoulders rigid as he brought the heavy hand hammer down in a furious, desperate arc.

Clang.

The sound was deep and didn't ring at all, just a very hollow, glassy echo that traveled right through the stone floorboards, and you could feel it in the soles of your boots.

With a frustrated roar, Leinhal stopped mid-swing, snatched the piece of metal up in the tongs, and flung it across the room. It skidded to a halt just a few inches from Sheanna's feet. It wasn't just dull and fading red like the rest of the iron. It was split down the middle, and the jagged edges were frosted with a brittle crystalline sheen that still shimmered with a faint, dying azure light.

Panting, his face a mess of cold sweat and soot, Leinhal leaned hard against his anvil when he saw the shadow at the entrance. Panic and shame warred within him; the urge to hide the unnatural mark clashed with the sheer terror of being caught. He went absolutely still, yanking the heavy lapels of his leather tool vest right up. His fingers fumbled at his shirt collar, pulling the linen as tight as he could to hide the pale blue glow oozing from his chest, even as he hated the evidence and the exposure it left him with.

He didn't know who the traveler was, but the brand was madness, a curse. If the local magistrates or the town guard had seen it, they'd have locked him in a plague cell.

'The shop is closed,' Leinhal rasped, his voice cracking as he kept his left hand flat over his sternum, trying to muffle the light. The humiliating awareness of his predicament pressed in on him, fueling a mixture of fear and anger that twisted in his chest. His eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with dark circles from lack of sleep, and he was locked onto her, desperate to assert control over the situation. 'I'm not taking commissions. Get out.'

Sheanna didn't budge at all. She kept her hands in plain sight, but her eyes scanned from his defensive stance down to the cold, broken iron bar at her boots. "I'm not here to buy you a sword, smith."

"Then leave," Leinhal barked, tightening his grip on the hammer handle. The instincts of a cornered animal were starting to take over his exhaustion. "I've got nothing for you."

"Blue fire flickers in your forge," she said, her voice quite clear and quiet in the stillness. She stepped forward, her hand sliding into her vest not for a weapon but for a smooth obsidian token that faintly glowed with cold blue light. "Now tell me, smith, does the frost mark under your shirt look anything like that?"

Leinhal's breath caught. He instinctively stepped back, his heel hitting the stone base of his dead forge. "How do you know that? Who the hell are you?"

Sheanna let the hood of her cloak drop back a little, eyes sharp and assessing. "I'm part of an order that listens out for the things the Great Towers would much rather keep under wraps. Three nights ago, the northern sky ripped, and all our relics started to go cold. I've been tracing the resonance down to this city, down to this very quarter. I knew exactly what to look for because..."

She stopped dead.

The heavy, unnatural silence that had settled over the artisan district was broken at once. The regular, heavy clatter of iron-shod hooves on the cobbles from the public square a block away rang through the smithy's stone walls. Not the slow, steady clatter of a normal municipal patrol. This was a vanguard, a perfectly synchronized and aggressive advance. Orders were shouted, followed by the sharp ring of steel being drawn.

Leinhal's eyes darted from the door to Sheanna as his heart was hammering and the hidden brand on his ribs was suddenly searing with cold pain.

Sheanna's entire demeanor changed on the spot, from mysterious observer to hunter on the run. She pulled her hood down and flung open a rotten timber door at the back of the forge, leading out into the narrow, foggy alleys.

"We don't have time for explanations," she hissed, her voice sharp with urgency as she pointed down the dark lane. "The lot of them in the square aren't here for answers, and they won't show you any. If they find that mark on you, they'll do anything to get rid of it, no matter who you are. Believe me, smith. You've got to move if you want to live."

The heavy timber front door of the smithy didn't just creak open; it blew inwards, splintering straight into the stone floor under the weight of an iron-shod boot.

Two inquisitors went through the door at once, their blank steel masks reflecting the pale morning light beginning to filter through the dust. They moved with absolutely terrifying precision, short swords drawn and held very low. Vael the Prefect came in behind them, his white robes streaming through the dirt. He raised his silver-capped staff, and the siphon crystal at the top spun with a high, frantic whine. It wasn't humming anymore; it was screaming, and the effect spilt out in a violent purple halo across the sooty walls.

'The resonance is fresh,' Vael said, his voice hollow behind the mask. 'Within minutes.'

Magi Dorhan walked in, his liquid silver eyes scanning the room. He didn't look at the tools smashed to pieces or the stools knocked over. His gaze was fixed on the stone hearth. With Leinhal having escaped, the ghost of the rogue Weave still lingered in the room. A thin film of white frost rimed the edge of the iron anvil, and a faint, pale blue vapour still rose from the blackened ashes of the forge.

Dorhan went over to the anvil and held out a perfect white leather glove. He touched the frosted iron, and a sharp, crackling hiss sounded as the heat of his hand fought the old ice.

"A smith," Dorhan murmured, his silver eyes narrowing as he followed a pair of hurried, soot-stained footprints back towards the back of the shop. "The Primal Weave took root in a shaper of iron. A shame."

He turned towards the open rear door where thick river fog was already pouring into the room.

"They're heading for the drainage channels," Dorhan said, his voice dropping to a cold, flat whisper. "Signal the vanguard of the canal. Don't let them get to the water."

The mud in the alley was nasty and cold as hell on Leinhal's bare feet, but the adrenaline was more than enough to overcome that. He ran with his heavy leather tool vest slung over one shoulder in an awkward way, and his left hand still clutched the front of his shirt as if he could physically squeeze the pale blue light out of the world.

Right in front of him, Sheanna was moving like a shadow through the mist, her travel-worn cloak flapping behind her.

"Keep down!" she hissed over her shoulder, diving behind a stack of rotting cargo crates as the heavy armoured boots rolled down the lane in front of them. "The main road's blocked. We've got to go down the side cuts."

"They're right behind us!" Leinhal panted, his chest heaving. A frozen spike dug into his sternum, throbbing in time with his heartbeat. "I heard the door smash. What the hell are those men?"

'The end of your life if you don't shut your mouth,' Sheanna snapped, her eyes desperately scanning the dead-end alley we'd just turned into.

At the end of the lane, a massive iron-reinforced security grate blocked the way down to the lowlands canal. It was solidly locked with a huge, very rusty padlock the size of a man's fist. Behind them, the splashing in the mud and the clink of inquisitor armor as they turned the corner were getting absolutely deafening.

"We're stuffed," Leinhal rasped, his back against the wet brick wall. He was holding onto his smith's hammer with both hands, knuckles white. "I could go at it and try and break the chain, but it would take a hell of a lot of blows."

"Stand back," Sheanna said. She didn't produce a blade, and she didn't do the long, flowing incantations of the High Magi. She yanked off her riding glove, revealing a series of complex geometric scars across her palm. She reached into her vest and produced a small piece of polished river stone. With a very smooth, expert movement of her thumb, she dragged the scarred surface of her palm across the stone.

As her skin touched the rock, the etched lines on her hand flared with a dull, earthy amber light. She smacked the stone straight into the heavy iron padlock. A Sylvan Rune.

The effect was instant. No flash, no bang at all. Just a deep resonant hum through the metal. The lock didn't just break; it came apart violently. The iron of the padlock disintegrated; its structural integrity vanished in an instant, leaving brittle orange rust that crumbled to dust in seconds. The heavy chain just clattered down to the mud.

Leinhal's eyes went wide. His entire understanding of iron as a blacksmith was completely and utterly blown to bits by what he'd just seen. "What the hell did you just do to that iron?"

"Borrowed time," she said, pushing her shoulder hard against the grate. It creaked open, revealing the foggy stone banks of the canal beyond. She looked at Leinhal with urgency. "Now move, before they borrow ours."

The heavy iron grate swung shut behind us with a muffled clang, then was swallowed by the thick river fog hanging over the lowlands canal. Sheanna didn't look back to see if the inquisitors had got to the alley. She moved along the damp stone towpath with purpose, her eyes sweeping the dark, murky water where the silhouettes of the moored cargo barges lay like sleeping beasts.

Leinhal followed her, his boots splashing through the shallow puddles. He was completely baffled. His left hand was still pressed hard against his chest where the hidden brand was still throbbing like a lump of frozen iron, but his eyes were locked onto Sheanna's bare right hand.

The amber glow in her scarred palm was gone, leaving only the stark geometric lines in her skin. The little sliver of river stone she'd been using was now just dull and brittle, with a faint crack right down the middle as she slid it back into her vest.

"That wasn't Magi work," Leinhal whispered, struggling to keep up. "The Magi from the capital, when they come to inspect the vaults, will go to all sorts of trouble, will draw their circles and chant for ages. You just broke the lock. You turned iron to dust in an instant."

'The Magi draw circles because they are tying strings to a wild animal,' Sheanna said, not in the least bit daunted. She was now on the gangplank of a flat-bottomed coal barge, the deck piled with rough black canvas sacks. 'Runes don't need a string. They're a direct impression. You focus your intent, the stone takes the form, and the Weave does the rest.'

"But the stone cracked," Leinhal said, his blacksmith's eye immediately assessing the material cost.

'Because the Weave doesn't like to be held,' she said softly, her eyes running over the empty deck of the barge. She was already reaching for the thick hemp mooring lines which were secured to the stone cleats on the dock. 'A rune is a single breath. Once that's gone, the stone is empty until I take hours to carve it and reinstate the focus. If Dorhan's men cut us off before the next sunrise, I'll be down to what's left in my satchel.'

Leinhal looked at his own hands, thick and calloused from years of labour, recalling the countless hours spent shaping unyielding metal through physical strength and concentrated discipline. Confronted by the possibility that a simple stone and focused will could instantly unravel what his craft demanded years to master, he felt a profound sense of disbelief, even existential dread. The absolute erasure of iron's integrity by such effortless magic not only undermined his understanding of the world but also shook the foundations of his identity as a smith. Yet, as a metallic shout rang out from the streets above the canal, he realized that this unsettling force—beyond the limits of his craft—was the very reason he remained alive in this moment.

"We need to cut the lines," he said, moving past her to get at the heavy mooring rope. He untied the knot, his muscles taut from years in the trade, and the thick, wet rope came away from the bollard with ease. "Where does this channel lead?"

"Deep into Tellarane," she said, heaving her weight against a long wooden steering oar at the stern as the barge drifted away from the stone bank. "Out of the high towers of Zol. If we can get into the main arterial channels before the Inquisitors seal the regional locks, we've got a chance."

Dark water spread between the barge and the city as the fog came in thick and fast, swallowing Arvel's soot-stained skyline. Leinhal dropped onto a sack of coal, gasping as the adrenaline wore off and the cold, sharp pain of the brand under his shirt returned.

The barge was drifting blind through the suffocating gloom of the lowlands drainage channel. The stink of wet coal gave way to the acrid, choking stench of the tannery pits, and they were well into the city's guts. Leinhal was at the bow with his hands white-knuckled on the wooden steering pole, letting the sluggish current take them.

Sheanna dropped low onto the canvas sacks, her fingers sinking into the rough fabric. She reached back, grabbed the hem of Leinhal's tool vest and yanked him down beside her.

"Listen," she breathed. Through the thick, sticky mist, voices were echoing off the wet stone walls of the canal. They were muffled, distorted by the water and the stone arches all around.

"Check the lower slips!" a voice came from up the towpath. "They couldn't have got on to the main road; look in the cargo crates!"

"We don't even know who we're looking for!" another voice bellowed, the sound of splashing boots adding to the frustration.

The white-robes just called it a rogue anomaly. Is it a man? Is it a beast? Give us something to track!

Leinhal held his breath, his left hand pressed flat against his chest. The branded circle under his palm throbbed with a cold, steady venom, and he squeezed it as hard as he could, terrified the pale blue light would work its way through his shirt and make him a target in the fog. Sheanna was sitting perfectly still beside him, her hand just above her vest where her other stones were.

The searchers' footsteps grew louder, then stopped right above the stone archway the barge was passing under. A torchlight, very dim and flickering, swept across the water, casting thin, weak amber lines through the grey mist. For three heartbeats, the only sound was water against the hull. "Nothing here but coal barges", said the first voice, the sound finally fading away. "Come on, if we miss the sweep in the artisan district, the Prefect's going to have our heads."The shouts die down, and the water under the hull is starting to move. The barge is listing a bit, picking up on its own as it works free of the stone arches and into the flooded bypass culvert Leinhal had promised. The air stops dead, and the city stink is gone, replaced by the sharp, clean rush of water in the channel. The dark current grips the barge and the heavy timber boat and pulls them forward into the black, unpatrolled exit to the fertile lowlands of Tellarane.

While Leinhal and Sheanna drifted down the canal toward Tellarane’s lowlands, the artisan district of Arvel remained unchanged by their escape. As the morning sun finally pierced the lingering fog, its rays fell across the soot-stained square outside the smithy, offering no warmth, only stark illumination to the scene left behind.

Magi Dorhan was standing by the broken entrance to the forge, his liquid silver eyes fixed on the empty streets. Silent, blank-masked inquisitors surrounded him, maintaining a wide perimeter, their crimson cloaks flapping in the morning wind.

Prefect Vael came up with the Captain of the Arvel City Watch (whose leather armor was quite literally dripping with sweat in the morning air). The captain bowed very low, his hands trembling as he produced a sheepskin ledger.

"My Lord Magi," the Captain stammered, looking fixedly at the cobbles. "We've got the owner of the forge. He's Leinhal, a registered trade smith of the Eastern Province. Nothing to his name, no prior offenses. No magical affinity, no bloodline to the capital."

"A common laborer," Vael murmured, the multi-faceted siphon crystal on his staff spinning slowly as the light increased. He turned the blank metal mask towards Dorhan. "The anomaly has no purchase in the established circles of the Weave. If he's got a Remnant signature, then he's a very unstable vessel."

My Lord, the echo down the alleyway disappeared at the canal locks. They're probably long since left the city.

"No one leaves Arvel without my permission," Dorhan said coolly, his own calmness a complete contrast to the watch captain's panic. He turned to the watch captain. "If that smith turns up at any gate, any outpost or any tavern within ten leagues of here, what is your procedure?"

'The guards have his description, My Lord,' the captain insisted rather quickly, swallowing. 'If he or anyone with him makes any attempt to get to the surface, the guards will report straight to your inquisitors. If they're still there, we'll find them. I swear it on the crown.'

Dorhan didn't answer immediately. He fiddled with the iron filigree on the sleeves of his white robes, his silver eyes fixed on the horizon to the south, where the lowlands began.

"Make sure you do, Captain," Dorhan murmured. "For if the northern ice takes hold in your city, then a cage would be the most merciful thing that could happen to you."