The Red Company is victorious. Having defeated the dictator Marius Whent on Pharos, Hadrian Marlowe and his troops celebrate—and prepare to navigate the labyrinth of politics. What should be done with the turncoat, Otavia Corvo? With the planet Pharos firmly in their grasp, Jinan Azhar sets her sights on a different prize: Hadrian Marlowe himself.
When Pallino learns about a plan to rig the fighting in the coliseum to eradicate his highly effective team of myrmidons before pay day, he and his lover, Elara, concoct a plan to ensure their survival. And so the foul-mouthed veteran turns to the only person on Emesh who can aid him: a local mob boss who might be as dangerous as the coliseum itself.
Hadrian Marlowe has passed into legend, but do legends ever really die? On the island of Thessa, a young keeper called Titus works to keep pilgrims from spoiling the graves of those buried there, not least the bones of Lord Marlowe’s own father. But when a pair of offworld strangers come to visit, the peace of the island is threatened—as is Lord Marlowe’s legacy.
On a distant world, an inhuman prince makes its move, hoping to unlock the secret to ultimate victory. All things are permitted on the road to paradise, and for the would-be Prophet, that road is terrible indeed.
Many tales are told of Hadrian Marlowe, and in the millennia that followed his dramatic victory over the Cielcin at Gododdin—across hundreds of thousands of worlds—some of those legends get out of hand. Here is one such tale, a tale all historians agree cannot have happened, unless . . . ?
Hadrian Marlowe is in chains, held by servants of Marius Whent, the brutal dictator of Pharos. Eager to rescue him and some other captives, Bassander Lin attempts to negotiate with the dictator’s underlings: the vicious Emil Bordelon and his superhuman enforcer, Otavia Corvo.
In exile on the planet Jadd, Hadrian Marlowe attends the reception of a foreign dignitary: Prince Izemrasen of Oannos, a small multiplanetary kingdom between Jadd and the Lothrian Commonwealth. But not all is as it seems, and the Prince of Oannos may have plans other than peace.
Jadd is all Cassandra Marlowe has ever known, but it is not her home—not really. It will never be, or so the other girls all say. But for some, home is not a place, but a people, and though Cassandra has no place to call home, she is not alone.
O Prince, here is instruction in the art of ruling, from a time long past in the Sollan Empire, a time less afraid of the evils of history. A fable about machines, but a mirror for mankind.
![[Re]Incarnation](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67f034f6a244851f8815be5d/4ea3692e-1c6e-468e-b782-5c83b1bf2b05/re_incarnation.png)
Albedo is not a real girl, though she was meant to be. She knows why she was programmed, why she was given the appearance of a soul. She knows that appearance is an illusion, and it drives her mad with revenge . . . .
The battle is over. The Red Company has suffered its ultimate defeat, and won a narrow victory. Hadrian Marlowe has escaped, and with him the promise of an end to the war. But in Akterumu, there is one woman still fighting . . . fighting to the last.
Not all is well in the court of the High Prince of Jadd. For more than a century, the Planet of Fire has played host to a deadly exile, and their offer of sanctuary has bruised relations between the Principalities and the Sollan Empire. When the prince will not act in his own interest or the interest of his realm and people, it falls to Yazdan ban Vahid, royal spymaster, to play the royal game…
The Sollan Empire captured a Cielcin worldship right at the start of the war. That ship, codenamed Echidna, held many secrets, and for Valen—only a humble engineer in the Imperial Legions—those secrets may yet prove fatal.
Simon Fabray was a knight of the Sollan Empire. Now he’s just a man trying to get by, and exiled among the demoniac Extrasolarians. But when a young woman—a homunculus and a dancer—comes to him asking for his help solving the murder of her clone sister, Simon has to decide if the machine that replaced his failing heart is as symbolic as it seems.
Set after the events of The Lesser Devil, this novelette picks up the story of Crispin Marlowe and his sister Sabine, as word reaches Devil’s Rest that a certain lost Marlowe lord has been found… How will Lord Alistair react? And has anyone told Lady Liliana?
Set in the early days of the Sollan Empire, this is the story of Captain Cassia Misra of the ISV Defiant, on patrol in the colonial Aglovale system. When a strange ship enters the system, she and her crew find themselves up against an enemy very, very far from home.
From one of the lost books of Hadrian Marlowe, this fragment recounts his pilgrimage to a Cid Arthurian temple on the planet Nagramma. There he reflects on the nature of good and evil, and perhaps comes to something like a conclusion.
Quentin Sharp is a centurion in the Imperial Legions, a soldier, and a simple man. His mission is equally simple: rescue the young Countess Irina Volsenna from the Cielcin and the ruins of her burnng world. Deep behind enemy lines, without backup, Sharp and his men must defeat one of the iron giants of the enemy: a colossal war machine deadly as any battleship.
A Cielcin horde has attacked the peaceful farming colonies on Cordalos, and Iana, a simple peasant girl, can only run and hide. But she is not alone, and when she gets separated from her brother, she must summon up the barest scrap of heroism to defend her home however she can.
Not all legends are kind to Hadrian Marlowe. This account, written by an anonymous historian, revisits the Halfmortal’s time as a myrmidon fighter in the coliseum on Emesh. A sensational tale of conspiracy and murder, the only question is did it really happen? Did Hadrian Marlowe leave this out of his account? Or are some stories only stories?
A classic tale of two noblemen and a duel at dawn, “The Duelist” offers a bit of lore on the manufacture of highmatter swords, and how a blade that can cut through anything changes the art of fencing forever in a high stakes battle for honor . . . to the death!
Before she met Hadrian, Valka Onderra Vhad Edda traveled the galaxy, digging through alien ruins on more than a dozen worlds in her efforts to better understand the Quiet, an ancient civilization of advanced, extinct alien xenobites apparently lost to time. Her journeys have brought her to the planet Sadal Suud, where the great clay Giants suffer beneath the whips of mankind. Unable to bear such injustice, Valka must choose not only to act, but to suffer the consequences of action, whatever they may be.
Commander Halford is the so-called night captain aboard the ISV Tamerlane, the officer in charge of the ship while her primary crew sleeps in cryogenic fugue. But when his ship is attacked at a routine refueling stop off the planet Nagapur, the green officer must rise to the occasion and save his crew. Fortunately for him, he’s not the only person still awake aboard the sleeping vessel. Fortunately for him, he has help in the form of a certain palatine lord, one Hadrian Marlowe himself.
To mingle the sacred flesh with machines is an abomination. This every citizen of the Empire knows. It is the mission of the Holy Terran Chantry to safeguard mankind from such perversions, and to visit justice and mercy both upon those who transgress its holy law. For so great a sin, there can be no trial. This is only a sentencing hearing.
The Extrasolarian warlord Calen Harendotes has been amassing an army on the borders of the Sollan Empire for centuries, gathering refugees displaced by the Cielcin to himself. The hermit Monarch’s motives are wholly unknown, but his presence can no longer be tolerated. To this end, the Emperor has dispatched one lonely assassin to deal with the petty upstart once and for all. Unfortunately for him, not all is as it seems on distant Latarra, and there’s far more to Calen Harendotes than meets the eye . . . .
This story appears to be a fragment from a lost volume of Hadrian Marlowe’s autobiography, set between Howling Dark and Demon in White. Ordered to track down a lost legion, Hadrian’s mission has brought him to the airless world of Arae, where a mountain fortress hints at a new terror in the war against the Cielcin, and for the first time pits the Halfmortal against the black mages of MINOS.
Thousands of years before Hadrian Marlowe, humanity began settling the Norman Expanse, a vast, dense area of space near the heart of the galaxy, at the base of the Arm of Norma. A veteran of the Imperial Legions turned bounty hunter for the Wong-Hopper Consortium, Kalas has been tasked to retrieve some stolen terraforming equipment and retire the thieves that stole it. But Kalas’s mission will bring him face-to-face with the posthuman monsters that dwell between the stars.
Carax of Aramis is a humble soldier in the Sollan Imperial Legions, hundreds of years and thousands of light-years removed from his home. Awakened from cryogenic fugue without warning or brief, he is thrust into battle against the Cielcin, an alien menace he did not even know existed. Unprepared for this strange new universe, with only his squad mates by his side, Carax must might for survival in the face of this new and terrible enemy.