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SUMMARY: In a world without strict good and evil, everything becomes a moral greyscale. The Assassin who began the Succession Wars has his agenda, those who seek to stop him have their own, and nothing is quite as simple as it seems. Daniel, however, a survivor of

Chapter 1

The worm exited stage left as Daniel dug deeper. Deeper and deeper into the sun-scorched soil, he plunged, unaware of the fact, and ignorant of another failure in his endless hunt. Just like yesterday, and the day before. The day before that, he could not remember finding anything either. Every worm's escape brought him one step closer to Kibosh. Four days ago, he sucked the salt from a rock and gnawed on the rotted husk of a log that left him retching for half a day. This far along, he considered the dry-heaves a worthwhile payment for the sensation – temporary as it was – of having something in his belly.
The ground stained his fingers black. The rains of the previous fortnight tamped down the crust of grey ash that covered the Province of Cadous, ash that had fallen a decade ago, by Daniel's reckoning, and ruled the Province with tarry tenacity. It got everywhere: walking on a dry day, it tattooed his legs with wind-swirled patterns of sooty grey; at night he could collect it into a soft pillow to rest his head; as he dug, it climbed up his arms and into his face. Ghastly, filthy, so covered in ashen grime that his coarse tunic and was the color of dirt, Daniel might have seen a monster in his reflection.
As a child, a neighboring smith had once shown Daniel a thin strip of metal that he had polished to the point where looking into it was like staring into a clear brook. In that reflection, Daniel had seen a wide-eyed boy with a smile that expressed his excitement at being so close to the wizardry that the smith hammered out of dull black metals. The magic ruled the world back then. Everybody had a story of the gods to share, some they had heard through a friend of a friend, some they had experienced themselves. There were legends of his Cadoun ancestors and their victories during the Red Wars, where they drove out the Visun – the monsters that had once tried to exterminate the people of Cadous – and celebrated their sinew, their tropical harvests and skills with darts. That was back when the land had trees that he could climb and the streams were so pure that he did not have spit out water from two of every three bodies he found for fear of illness. Back then, he ate meat and gravy, and berries, and meat, and drank the occasional buttermilk, and had fresh vegetables, and ate meat! Twice in the past three moons, he had the luxury of real meat; not worms or cockroaches or the shelled ponteki – the ranking delicacy of all insects, as far as Daniel was concerned – which did not count. The first, a three-legged rabbit, blind and starved, drove back the heaviest hunger pangs from Daniel's swollen gut for a day. The second, a bird that he had shot down from the sky using a bow and arrows he had scavenged from the basement of a razed fortress, the memory of that bony feast gave him a shelter of flavor that opened his imagination into a world of wealth and decadence.
His mouth watered at the thought. Somewhere down there, he would find the worm. Uprooting stone and an ancient bone, ash-caked roots, as indistinguishable in the dark ground as anything else in this gods-abandoned land, he pressed on, deeper and deeper into Laon's body.