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Once the great Glacier enclosed the Raumsdalian Empire. Now it’s broken open, and Count Hamnet Thyssen faces a new world. With the wisecracking Ulric Skakki, the neighboring clan leader Trasamund (politely addressed as Your Ferocity), and his lover, the shaman Liv, Hamnet leads an exploration of the new territory in hopes of finding the legendary Golden Shrine.

But dangers abound. A violent and implacable group known as the Rulers has already killed many, and now they attack again. Riding deer and woolly mammoths and using powerful magic, the Rulers triumph and force the Raumsdalians to flee.

In the spring another battle ends even more badly for Hamnet’s side, but the Glacier is also retreating, so they are able to escape. Meeting a tribe whose desperate living conditions have led them to overcome the Raumsdalian taboo against eating fallen foes, they find unexpected allies. Now, returning to the capital city and its intrigues, Hamnet prepares to lead an army against the merciless Rulers. The world, once so bounded and comprehensible, will never be the same…

Count Hamnet Thyssen is a minor noble of the drowsy old Raumsdalian Empire. Its capital city, Nidaros, began as a mammoth hunters’ camp at the edge of the great Glacier. But that was centuries ago, and as everyone knows, it’s the nature of the great Glacier to withdraw a few feet every year. Today Nidaros is an old and many-spired city; and though they still feel the breath of the great Glacier in every winter’s winds, the ice cap itself has retreated beyond the horizon.

Trasamund, a clan chief of the mammoth-herding Bizogots, the next tribe north, has come to town with strange news. A narrow gap has opened in what they’d always thought was an endless and impregnable wall of ice. The great Glacier does not go on forever – and on its other side are new lands, new animals, and possibly new people.

Ancient legend says that on the other side is the Golden Shrine, put there by the gods to guard the people of their world. Now, perhaps, the road to the legendary Golden Shrine is open. Who could resist the urge to go see? Not Hamnet Thyssen or Trasamund. Not Ulric Skakki, Hamnet’s old comrade in arms: a good man to have at your side, although perhaps not at your back. And not, damnably, Eyvind Torfinn – a scholar, a very knowledgeable man but, alas, the husband of Hamnet’s former wife, Gudrid: a troublemaker if there ever was one. She’s decided to come along, too.

For every one of them, the Glacier has always been the boundary of the world. Now they’ll be traveling beyond it into a world that’s bigger than anyone knew. Adventures will surely be had…

Glaciers once covered the world with ice. Now a gap has opened in the ice wall. And through that gap come the men who call themselves “Rulers”.

Their cavalry rides on mammoths. Their bows can shoot faster, harder, farther. Their wizards wield power that neither the shamans of the Bizogots nor the wizards of Raumsdalian Empire can match, a magic that can melt the stone beneath a man’s feet and call down fire from the sky. Scattered Bizogot survivors hide. The Empire is shattered. The feckless Emperor is in hiding.

Against the Rulers stands Count Hamnet Thyssen and a few friends: Jarl Trasamund of the Three Tusk Bizogots, the adventurer Ulric Skakki, and, most important, Marcovefa, the female shaman who has magic that Rulers cannot counter.

Perhaps Hamnet and his allies can save their lands from Rulers. But first they must seek the legendary Golden Shrine – which has not been seen by human eyes since before the glaciers came.