IT is over half a millennium since the birth of the Blessed Saint Ramusio, the man who brought the light of true belief into the western world. The empire of the Fimbrians, which once spanned the wide continent of Normannia, is only a dim memory. Their empire has been transformed into a series of powerful kingdoms, and the Fimbrian Electorates have remained isolated within their borders for over four centuries, indifferent to events beyond them.
But now things are taking place which cannot be ignored. Aekir, the Holy City on the eastern frontier and seat of the High Pontiff Macrobius, head of the Church, has fallen to the teeming armies of the heathen Merduks, who have been pressing on the eastern frontier of the Ramusian kingdoms for decades.
Caught up in the fury of its fall, Corfe Cear-Inaf flees westwards, one of the few of its defenders who has survived. On the refugee-choked road he befriends an old man the Merduks have blinded, and finds out that he is none other than Macrobius himself, who escaped unrecognized by the troops of Shahr Baraz, the Merduk general. Corfe is nursing his own private grief: he left his wife in Aekir, and believes her dead. Unknown to him, however, she survived the assault and was captured and sent to the court of the Sultan as spoils of war to join his harem. Corfe and Macrobius trek westwards along with thousands of others, seeking sanctuary in the impregnable fortress of Ormann Dyke, the west’s last line of defence after Aekir.
