A Parable in Iron
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.
After the Feast
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.
The Royal Game
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…
Mother of Monsters
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.
Gutter Ballet
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.
The Four Devils
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?
The Archaenaut
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.
The Dragonslayers
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.
Fire in the Sky
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.
Good Intentions
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.
The Night Captain
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.
Victim of Changes
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.
Kill the King
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 . . . .