BERNARD CORNWELL
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2012
Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2012
Maps © John Gilkes 2012
Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.
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Source ISBN: 9780007331864
Ebook Edition © 2013 ISBN: 9780007510900
Version: 2018-04-20
‘The English are riding, no-one knows where.’
Warning sent in fourteenth-century France, quoted in
A Fool and His Money by Ann Wroe
Contents
The Sharpe Series (in chronological order)
PROLOGUE
Carcassonne
He was late.
Now it was dark and he had no lantern, but the city’s flames gave a lurid glow that reached deep into the church and gave just enough light to show the stone slabs in the deep crypt where the man struck at the floor with an iron crow.
He was attacking a stone incised with a crest that showed a goblet wreathed by a buckled belt on which was written Calix Meus Inebrians. Sun rays carved into the granite gave the impression of light radiating from the cup. The carving and inscription were worn smooth by time, and the man had taken little notice of them, though he did notice the cries from the alleyways around the small church. It was a night of fire and suffering, so much screaming that it smothered the noise as he struck the stone flags at the edge of the slab to chip a small space into which he could thrust the long crow. He rammed the iron bar down, then froze as he heard laughter and footsteps in the church above. He shrank behind an archway just before