When at last the Troll-Dwarf appeared, Adian went up to him in a dissembling guise and told him that he knew where Aphrael might be found and that he would reveal her location for a helmet full of fine yellow gold. Ghwerig was deceived and straightaway led Adian to the hidden mouth of his cavern and he took the hero’s helm and went into his treasure chamber and filled it to overflowing with fine gold. Then he emerged again, sealing the entrance to his cavern behind him. And he gave Adian the gold, and Adian deceived him again, saying that Aphrael might be found in the district of Horset on the western coast of Thalesia. Ghwerig hastened to Horset to seek out the Goddess. And once again Adian imperilled his soul and implored the Troll-Gods to break Ghwerig’s enchantments that he might gain entrance to the cavern. The capricious Troll-Gods consented and the enchantments were broken.

As rosy dawn touched the ice fields of the north into flame, Adian emerged from Ghwerig’s cavern with Bhelliom in his grasp. He journeyed straightaway to his capital at Emsat and there he fashioned a crown for himself and surmounted it with Bhelliom.

The chagrin of Ghwerig knew no bounds when he returned empty-handed to his cavern to find that not only had he lost the keys to the power of Bhelliom, but that the flower-gem itself was no longer in his possession. Thereafter he usually lurked by night in the fields and forests about the city of Emsat, seeking to reclaim his treasure, but the descendants of Adian protected it closely and prevented him from approaching it.

Now as it happened, Azash, an Elder God of Styricum, had long yearned in his heart for possession of Bhelliom and of the rings which unlocked its power and he sent forth his hordes out of Zemoch to seize the gems by force of arms. The kings of the west took up arms to join with the Knights of the Church to face the armies of Otha of Zemoch and of his dark Styric God, Azash. And King Sarak of Thalesia took ship with some few of his vassals and sailed south from Emsat, leaving behind the royal command that his earls were to follow when the mobilization of all Thalesia was complete. As it happened, however, King Sarak never reached the great battlefield on the plains of Lamorkand, but fell instead to a Zemoch spear in an unrecorded skirmish near the shores of Lake Venne in Pelosia. A faithful vassal, though mortally wounded, took up his fallen lord’s crown and struggled his way to the marshy eastern shore of the lake. There, hard-pressed and dying, he cast the Thalesian crown into the murky, peat-clouded waters of the lake, even as Ghwerig, who had followed his lost treasure, watched in horror from his place of concealment in a nearby peat bog.

The Zemochs who had slain King Sarak immediately began to probe the brown-stained depths, that they might find the crown and carry it in triumph to Azash, but they were interrupted in their search by a column of Alcione Knights sweeping down out of Deira to join the battle in Lamorkand. The Alciones fell upon the Zemochs and slew them to the last man. The faithful vassal of the Thalesian king was given an honourable burial, and the Alciones rode on, all unaware that the fabled crown of Thalesia lay beneath the turbid waters of Lake Venne.

It is sometimes rumoured in Pelosia, however, that on moonless nights the shadowy form of the immortal Troll-Dwarf haunts the marshy shore. Since, by reason of his malformed limbs, Ghwerig dares not enter the dark waters of the lake to probe its depths, he must creep along the marge, alternately crying out his longing to Bhelliom and dancing in howling frustration that it will not respond to him.

PART ONE

Cimmura

Chapter 1

It was raining. A soft, silvery drizzle sifted down out of the night sky and wreathed around the blocky watchtowers of the city of Cimmura, hissing in the torches on each side of the broad gate and making the stones of the road leading up to the city shiny and black. A lone rider approached the city. He was wrapped in a dark, heavy traveller’s cloak and rode a tall, shaggy roan horse with a long nose and flat, vicious eyes. The traveller was a big man, a bigness of large, heavy bone and ropy tendon rather than of flesh. His hair was coarse and black, and at some time his nose had been broken. He rode easily, but with the peculiar alertness of the trained warrior.

His name was Sparhawk, a man at least ten years older than he looked, who carried the erosion of his years not so much on his battered face as in a half-dozen or so minor infirmities and discomforts and in the several wide purple scars upon his body which always ached in damp weather. Tonight, however, he felt his age, and he wished only for a warm bed in the obscure inn which was his goal. Sparhawk was coming home at last after a decade of being someone else with a different name in a country where it almost never rained, where the sun was a hammer pounding down on a bleached white anvil of sand and rock and hard-baked clay, where the walls of the buildings were thick and white to ward off the blows of the sun, and where graceful women went to the wells in the silvery light of early morning with large clay vessels balanced on their shoulders and black veils across their faces.

The big roan horse shuddered absently, shaking the rain out of his shaggy coat, and approached the city gate, stopping in the ruddy circle of torchlight before the gatehouse.

An unshaven gate guard in a rust-splotched breastplate and helmet, and with a patched green cloak negligently hanging from one shoulder, came unsteadily out of the gatehouse and stood swaying in Sparhawk’s path. ‘I’ll need your name,’ he said in a voice thick with drink.

Sparhawk gave him a long stare, then opened his cloak to show the heavy silver amulet hanging on a chain about his neck.

The half-drunk gate guard’s eyes widened slightly, and he stepped back a pace. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘sorry, my Lord. Go ahead.’

Another guard poked his head out of the gatehouse. ‘Who is he, Raf?’ he demanded.

‘A Pandion Knight,’ the first guard replied nervously.

‘What’s his business in Cimmura?’

‘I don’t question the Pandions, Bral,’ the man named Raf answered. He smiled ingratiatingly up at Sparhawk. ‘New man,’ he said apologetically, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder at his comrade. ‘He’ll learn in time, my Lord. Can we serve you in any way?’

‘No,’ Sparhawk replied, ‘thanks all the same. You’d better get in out of the rain, neighbour. You’ll catch cold out here.’ He handed a small coin to the green-cloaked guard and rode on into the city, passing up the narrow, cobbled street beyond the gate with the slow clatter of the big roan’s steel-shod hooves echoing back from the buildings.

The district near the gate was poor, with shabby, run-down houses standing tightly packed beside each other with their upper floors projecting out over the wet, littered street. Crude signs swung creaking on rusty hooks in the night wind, identifying this or that tightly shuttered shop on the street-level floors. A wet, miserable-looking cur slunk across the street with his ratlike tail between his legs. Otherwise, the street was dark and empty.