Ophelia Lambert

The high kings won their empire by stripping every surrounding province of grain, sealing their conquest inside the cyclopean silos of Yanzhou. Now the empire has withered, leaving Chief Conservator Tan Fenglan to guard mountains of grain against thousands of starving nomads camped outside. But the true threat burrows from below. Chthonic earth-leeches, bloated on centuries of temple slaughter, are chewing through the mudbrick foundations. When sappers breach the lower cisterns, Fenglan must join forces with enemy infiltrator Xie Yunshan and a disgraced ritual butcher. Together, they must navigate the collapsing tiers of a rotting monument to conquerors, where the cost of ancient greed is paid in blood and falling stone.

When armies butcher each other in the valleys of Jebel-Assani, the sky weeps monsters. Mounir al-Ghabara makes his living scraping them off the rocks. Armed with a cleaver and climbing hooks, he harvests the shimmering plumage and cold-burning fat of lesser gods that crash into the mountain passes. The garrison warlord needs those feathers to shatter the enemy's siege lines, but every celestial carcass brought behind the walls brings an uncanny plague. The dead gods' cries infect the soldiers with waking nightmares, and their rotting marrow breeds parasitic horrors in the drinking water. Mounir must harvest the greatest fallen titan on the peaks before the garrison tears itself apart from the inside out, driven by his stubborn desire to hoard enough god-down to weave a pair of wings and abandon the doomed war entirely.