Every child in Dawnhollow was told the story of the abyss before they were old enough to understand why it was told. It was told by grandmothers over cooling soup, and by fathers who smelled of woodsmoke and tired labour, and by old men on the market steps who liked to watch a young face go pale. The story always began the same way. Long ago, before the first stone of the first settlement was laid, there had been a great hole in the world, so deep that no lantern could find its floor. Things lived at the bottom of that hole. They had wings the width of barns and teeth the length of a man's arm, and they spoke in voices that made the ground tremble. A seal of old magic had been set across the opening, and the seal held, and so the things below remained only a story. The children always asked whether the story was true. The grown folk always smiled and said that it was only a myth, and that myths were for keeping bad dreams in order. Then they would glance, just briefly, towards the

They reached the northern wall in less than four minutes, and in that time Dorran did not speak a single word. He flew low and fast over the rooftops, cloak whipping behind him, with Lyra at his right shoulder and Kaelen a little to the left. The streets below had begun to fill with startled townsfolk spilling from their houses in nightclothes, children clutched against their mothers' shoulders, old men peering up at the three flying figures with the stunned faces of those who suspect they already know the answer to a question they dare not ask. Dorran paid them no attention. His eyes were fixed on the line of torches burning along the wall, and on the shape that had begun to move beyond them. The wall of Dawnhollow was not a great fortress. It was a timber palisade, twice the height of a tall man, built generations ago against wolves and bandits and the occasional hungry bear. A walkway ran along the inner face of it, where the watchmen stood in pairs, and on the night of the Lant

The first wyvern reached Dawnhollow before the bells had finished ringing. It came out of the red sky like a thrown spear, long and narrow and the colour of wet slate, with leathery wings that cracked like sails in a gale and a barbed tail that trailed behind it like a whip. It was perhaps thirty feet from snout to tail-tip, no larger than a great horse with wings, and yet the sight of it sent a groan of pure terror through the defenders on the wall. Nobody there had ever seen such a thing. Nobody had ever believed it possible. "Archers!" shouted Brenna Voss, her voice cracking. "Hold your aim! Wait for it to close!" The wyvern did not close. It swept overhead in a single wide arc, so low that the torches along the palisade guttered in the wind of its passing, and Kaelen caught a glimpse of its eyes as it went by. They were a deep, burning amber, and they were not the eyes of a mindless beast. They were measuring. Counting. Deciding. Then it wheeled, folded its wings, and dived s

The council of Dawnhollow met at midnight, and for the first time in three generations, it met without certainty. There were nine chairs around the long oak table in the Hall of Rank, each carved with the sigil of a trade or a family. The miller's chair, the smith's, the healer's, the farmers' two, the elders' two, the captain of the watch, and at the head of the table, taller than the rest, the chair of the Awakened, in which Dorran had sat for thirty years. Tonight every chair was filled, and every face around the table looked older than it had at dawn. Lamps burned low. Outside the shuttered windows, the settlement lay uneasily awake, its streets crowded with refugees sleeping on cloaks and cartboards. Somewhere beyond the walls, in the dark fields, something shrieked now and then, and each time the council went quiet and listened until the sound faded. Dorran sat at the head of the table with his right hand resting flat on the wood. He had hidden the sleeve of his left arm ben

The first abomination ever taken alive in Dawnhollow was a child. It was caught on the second night after Veyrath's visit, in a pit trap that Brenna Voss's watchmen had dug beneath the northern gate and baited with a haunch of rotting mutton. They had expected a wolf, or one of the larger grey brutes that had been hurling themselves at the palisade. Instead, when the torches were lowered into the dark, they found a small thin figure curled in the bottom of the hole, hissing and snapping at the light, its long limbs folded like a spider's. It was no taller than a boy of eight. Its skin was the grey of old ash, laced with black veins, and its yellow eyes rolled wildly in a face that was still, horribly, a child's face. "Do not touch it," said Brenna, and her voice was rough. "Gods help us. Bind it. Bind it well." They chained it with iron in the cold cellar beneath the Hall of Rank, where the grain was usually stored, and posted four guards at the door. Then they sent for Kaelen.