The King of the Crags
Table of Contents
Also by Stephen Deas from Gollancz:
The Adamantine Palace
The King of the Crags
STEPHEN DEAS
Orion
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Stephen Deas 2010
All rights reserved.
The right of Stephen Deas to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2010 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
eISBN : 978 0 5750 8885 6
This eBook produced by Jouve, France
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
In Memory of the Slayer of Strings
and the Bringer of Death to Small Furry Things
and the Bringer of Death to Small Furry Things
Rebel and Rasmus
The Kings and Queens of Sand and Stone and Salt
The Kings of the Endless Sea
Kings and Queens of the Plains
The King of the Worldspine
Prologue
The Dead
The Worldspine surrounded them. Mountains like immense teeth, jagged and huge and white, reared up all around their little valley. Monsters overshadowing the dense dark greens and blacks of the pine forest surrounding a lake of glacier water, the brightest purest blue that Kemir had ever seen.
Very slowly, they were dying. Nadira couldn’t see it yet and Kemir didn’t have the heart to tell her, but it was true. He’d kept them alive for five days now, since Snow had vanished beneath the frozen waters of the lake, but it couldn’t last. The weather had been kind to them, but wind and rain were always fickle in the Worldspine. One day he’d run out of arrows, or his bowstring would break. Or one of them would get hurt or fall ill. He wasn’t catching enough food, and they didn’t have the clothes or the shelter to stay properly warm. A hundred things could go wrong, and sooner or later one of them would.
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