The Last Bastion (30 page)

EPILOGUE

T
he Vathen rode slowly through the ruins of the village. There was little left. Burned-out huts, not much else. They stopped at the edge, at what had once been a forge. One of them dismounted and poked through the rubble. Whatever had been done here, it had been a while ago.

‘The forkbeards call themselves men of fate.’ She said it without much feeling one way or the other, as if noting that the clouds had turned a little darker and perhaps more rain was on the way.

‘This is a Marroc village,’ said one of the others, with a voice that was keen to push on.

‘Yes,’ said the first. ‘But a forkbeard lived here once. They called him Gallow. Gallow the Foxbeard.’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

If you’ve read this far, I’m kind of hoping you’ve read
The Crimson Shield
and
Cold Redemption
, because otherwise you probably had a real
who on earth is he
moment somewhere in the battle for the fifth gate. If you have, then I’m sorry for repeating myself. I’ll be brief. Thanks go to Simon Spanton, who commissioned this and to Marcus Gipps, who edited it, and to all the people who put together the wonderful covers these books have had. They go to the copy-editors and proofreaders and booksellers and the marketeers and everyone who makes books possible. They go to you, for reading this.

And thanks, still, to all the crazy people who think the best way to spend a week in February is to strut though York in mail carrying an axe.

As always, if you liked this story, please tell others who might like it too. And if you did like it, there are other stories out there that you might like too, ones that had a touch in shaping these stories or ones that I read afterwards and wished I’d read before, including:

Legend
by David Gemmell (Varyxhun castle has six gates after the six walls of Dros Delnoch);

Wolfsangel
by M. D. Lachlan (I can still smell the blood and the iron); and

The Ten Thousand
by Paul Kearney (The fight scenes – ouch!).