‘...Master Flinch. This is how he marches. First the left foot, then the right. The left, the right and on and on towards his quarry. You would not hear him coming across frozen leaves, you would not see him coming in an empty street...’
Follow the map. Kill the beast. Claim the prize. Isn’t that how the story is supposed to go?
What if it’s the wrong story?
So this is the true account of how I came to leave my scrivener’s life in search of a wider world. Of how I took up company with Artur, the sweetest singer of magic, and with Shiny Bill, that shabby raconteur. And of the terrible trap into which we tumbled, after we fell foul of a velvet-coated Companyman called Longturn, after he set his Master Flinch to hunt us down, the one who slips through the cracks.
Because now the only way we can save our skins is to search out a great treasure for him – if we can find where it lies hidden in the wilderness, with ravenous things in the shadows of the trees and a howling Charnel in wait. And even if we do, what then? For the Company will only take it for themselves, and with it a power too awful to resist.