Sinner

41 A Town Gained, a Sceptre Lost (#litres_trial_promo)

42 ForestFlight’s Betrayal (#litres_trial_promo)

43 Faraday’s Lie (#litres_trial_promo)

44 … And Sixty-Nine Fat Pigs (#litres_trial_promo)

45 The Enemy (#litres_trial_promo)

46 The TimeKeepers (#litres_trial_promo)

47 Niah’s Grove (#litres_trial_promo)

48 Carlon’s Welcome (#litres_trial_promo)

49 Caelum Amid the Ruins (#litres_trial_promo)

50 The Shadow-Lands (#litres_trial_promo)

51 The King of Achar (#litres_trial_promo)

52 Voices in the Night (#litres_trial_promo)

53 An Army for the Asking (#litres_trial_promo)

54 Journeying through the Night (#litres_trial_promo)

55 The Blighted Beacon (#litres_trial_promo)

56 Discussing Salvation (#litres_trial_promo)

57 While WolfStar Lay Sleeping (#litres_trial_promo)

58 As Clear as a Temple Bell (#litres_trial_promo)

59 Zenith (#litres_trial_promo)

60 Old Friends (#litres_trial_promo)

61 An Army of Norsmen (#litres_trial_promo)

62 The Warding of the Star Gate (#litres_trial_promo)

63 Leagh’s Loyalties Divided (#litres_trial_promo)

64 A Dagger from Behind (#litres_trial_promo)

65 A Brother to Die For (#litres_trial_promo)

66 In Caelum’s Camp (#litres_trial_promo)

67 Caelum’s Judgment (#litres_trial_promo)

68 Towards the Star Gate (#litres_trial_promo)

69 The Fading of the Dance (#litres_trial_promo)

70 Leap to the Edge (#litres_trial_promo)

71 The Sack (2) (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue: The Wasteland (#litres_trial_promo)

Glossary (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

By Sara Douglass (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

If poisonous minerals, and if that tree

Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,

If lecherous goats, if serpents envious

Cannot be damned, alas, why should I be?

Why should intent or reason, born in me,

Make sins, else equal, in me more heinous?

John Donne, Holy Sonnet no. V

Fire-Night (#ulink_8e391bf2-391f-539d-b328-bf12c1d1308f)

The four craft crashed through the barriers between the outer universe and the planet, exploding in raging flames, creating the portal that later races would call the Star Gate.

The creatures inside fought for control of the craft, fought even knowing it was a lost cause – the craft had ceased to listen to them hundreds of years previously. But even when death was only moments away, their hands clung to navigation mechanisms, hoping to somehow save their cargo … and maybe even save the world to which they plummeted from their cargo.

It was useless. Most of them were drifting ashes by the time their flaming craft smashed deep into the surface of the planet.

Most of them. One, like the four craft, survived.

Within days the craft had shifted comfortably into the pits created by their violent arrival, accepting the waters that closed over their surface. For three thousand years they dreamed. Then they woke and began to grow, spreading their tentacles deep beneath the land, reaching out, each to the other. Their metalled surfaces andwalkways and panels and compartments hummed with the music they had learned in the millennia they’d travelled the universe. But this music the craft kept to themselves, not letting it mix with the sound of the Star Dance that filtered through the Star Gate.