My editor, Brit Hvide, displayed both great skill and the patience of a saint while I was putting this book together (see the aforementioned chunks thrown away and rewritten) and deserves all the thanks I can give her. Also at Orbit, I’d like to thank Bryn A. McDonald, Ellen Wright, Angela Man, Laura Fitzgerald, Paola Crespo, and Lauren Panepinto. Seth Fishman, my agent, performed his usual miracles in making this book happen. My thanks as well to everyone at the Gernert Company: Jack Gernert, Will Roberts, Rebecca Gardner, and Ellen Goodson. And Rhiannon Held’s beta reading, as ever, provided invaluable insight.

My wife, Casey Blair, is always my most important reader, but she went above and beyond on this one, plowing through several iterations in order to have long late-night conversations about plot and character and assure me everything wasn’t broken. This would have been a much poorer book without her.

Glossary

agathios (pl. agathia)—A young person in training to be a centarch. The Twilight Order searches out children with the ability to touch deiat and trains them as agathia from a young age. Agathia become full centarchs on being granted their cognomen.

alchemy—the process of refining and recombining ghoul arcana. Even broken, rotten remnants of the ghouls’ organic “machines” can be rendered down into useful by-products, from which an alchemist can create quickheal and other medicines, bombs, powerful acids, and a variety of other tools depending on the materials available. The Twilight Order forbids alchemy and considers its products dhak, so its practice is more common in the Splinter Kingdoms than in the Dawn Republic. A few products of alchemy, like quickheal, are so useful that the Order considers them legal, sanctioned arcana, provided they are made by a few carefully controlled suppliers.

arcana—any tool or implement of Elder origin, from rare and powerful weapons like haken or blasters to alchemical creations like quickheal. Common people generally have little understanding of the differences between types of arcana.

Auxiliaries—one of the two major branches of the armed forces of the Dawn Republic, along with the Legions. The Auxiliaries are by far the larger force but, unlike the Legions, carry no arcana weapons and armor, relying on ordinary human-made swords, spears, and bows. They are responsible for policing, keeping order, and local defense against bandits and plaguespawn, under the command of the local dux. Sometimes called by the derogatory nickname “Auxies,” especially by criminals.

bird—ordinary birds are common, but the term often refers to the large, flightless varieties used as beasts of burden. See loadbird, swiftbird, and warbird.