The Heretic Kings

PROLOGUE

Always, men move west. Is it something to do with the path of the sun? They are drawn to it like moths to the flame of a taper.

Many long turning years have slipped by, and still I remain: the last of the founders, my body scarcely my own at the end. I have seen four centuries of the waking world trickle past, their passage scarcely marked by any change in the land I have made my home. Men change, and they like to think that the world changes with them. It does not; it merely tolerates them, and continues to follow its own, arcane revolutions.

And yet there is something in the air, like a whisper of winter in this country which knows no seasons. I feel a change coming.

They came treading the saffron and scarlet course of the sinking sun, as we had always known they would, with their tall ships trailing streamers of weed from worm-eaten hulls.

We watched them from the jungle. Men in salt-encrusted armour with scurvy-swollen faces bearing swords and pikes, and, later, reeking arquebuses, the slow-match glowing and hissing in the wind. Gaunt men of Hebrion, or Astarac, or Gabrion; the sea-rovers of the Old World. Hard-handed buccaneers with the greed dazzling their eyes.

We had come here fleeing something; they had come seeking. We gave them fear to fill their bellies and night-dark terror to plump out their purses. We made of them the hunted, and took from them whatever we desired.

Their ships rotted slowly at their moorings, untenanted and filled with ghosts. A few, a very few, we let live, to take the tale of us back east to the Monarchies of God. In this way, the myth was created. We hid our country behind a curtain of tall tales and dark rumours. We laced the truth with the hyperbole of madness; we beat out a legend as though it were the blade of a sword on a smith’s anvil. And we quenched it in blood.

But the change is coming. Four centuries have we lingered here, and our people have slowly filtered back to the east in accordance with the plan. They are everywhere now in Normannia. They command soldiers, they preach to multitudes, they watch over cradles. Some of them have the ear of kings.

The time is come for our keels to recross the Western Ocean, and claim what is ours. The beast will out, in the end. Every wolf will have its day.