The Two Faces of Light

Kriemreich looks like an empire that has already survived its worst century. The mines still sing, the rails still run, the Church still blesses the harvest - and in the forgotten islet cluster called the Schweiglands, behind a wall of bending light, a fortress of smugglers and scientists is quietly deciding what the next age will look like.

There, a man the wanted posters never managed to name - the John Fox, death merchant of the imperial black market - has torn a door in the world with machine-made light. Something answered from the far side. He collared it with a crown that rides the mind like a bridle, and he has been hunting bigger game ever since: the empire's officers, its secrets, and at last Luminberg, the city of magic, whose ancient Wizards' Wall he means to own from the inside.

Standing against him, slowly and without a plan, are people the empire never spared a thought for.

Xenia of House Schild was raised behind cloister walls with no memory of her earliest years - a locked door even she cannot open. When her father, Duke Cecil von Schild, vanishes into the Fox's hands, she trades her habit for a traveler's coat and follows the only trail there is: a trail of burned towns, metal men, and rumors of a black-coated boy.

That boy is Wayne, and he walked out of the Schweiglands fortress carrying more than his coat. Behind his eyes live souls that are not his own - a giant's, a scholar's, a laugher's - and a light that can move a person out of one place and into another. He does not yet know whether he is their ward or their jailer.

Around them gather the rest: Topf, the Steel Rose, a swordswoman who took the Fox's coin and begins asking what it buys; Gerhard, a magician expelled from the Academy he still aches to reenter; Vanessa, an investigator who keeps surviving what should have killed him; Farin, a director who is getting quite good at convincing people. And Douglas - a sellsword with a prince's shoulders, whose patience with Xenia turns, chapter by chapter, into something both of them keep almost saying out loud. The wanting in this book runs hot, but it stays at the threshold; when two people finally reach for each other, the lantern goes out with them, and what happens next belongs to them alone.

Because the Fox is no monster, and that is the trouble. His light heals, feeds, and shields - and strips, harvests, enslaves. The same radiance that gave Xenia her white fire built his machines. Every light casts two faces, and the whole story is the question of which face you feed: the man who would drown a city to buy a world without war, or the healer who insists the light be given back.

A gate, a crown, a trial, and a manor under repair - The Two Faces of Light is a complete epic of political intrigue, monsters assembled out of stolen memory, hard-won forgiveness, and the long cost of putting a broken country back together.