After years spent in the saps under the defences of the apparently impregnable city of Ap' Iscatoy, Bardas Loredan, sometime fencer-at-law and the betrayed defender of the famed Triple City, is suddenly a hero of the Empire. His reward is a boring administrative job in a backwater, watching armour tested to destruction in the Proof House. But the fall of Ap' Iscatoy has opened up unexpected possibilities for the expansion of the Empire into the land of the Plains people, and Bardas Loredan is the one man Temrai the Great, King of the Plains tribes, fears the most…