W.R. Brask

Adrift on a storm-lashed glacial sea, the eighty surviving members of the Sun-Hoof tribe cling to life aboard the Mor-Kahn—an eighty-pace coracle sewn from fifty mammoth hides. In the belly of the vessel, lashed to the main mast, stands the weeping White Stag, the last spirit of the inland forest. His breath lulls the predatory sea-beasts and keeps the leather hull from dissolving in the brine, but you cannot eat breath. Hidecombe, a blunt, middle-aged sinew-sewer whose hands are cracked from pulling frozen gut-thread, alone understands the boat's fragile anatomy. When the hunters' hunger turns into a mutinous frenzy for the stag's flesh, Hidecombe must keep her people from butchering the only thing preventing the ocean from eating them whole.

In the cyclopean canyon fortress of Raunalt-Vesi, survival is forged in toxic arsenic and molten bronze. The citadel's basalt ramparts hold the line against an unyielding mountain blockade only because four great foundry bastions cast gravity-inverting war-bronze, capable of snapping siege towers and hurling boulders into the clouds. But the mountain mines have fallen silent, and the fortress is suffocating behind sealed gates as the last stocks of arsenic ore run out. When emerald smelting smoke blankets the canyon streets, four commanders from warring foundry castes collide in an escalating bloodbath for the final crucible ingots. Pike-Marshal Joukalt fights to stop his own starving garrison from butchering the populace for scrap metal; Vappuinen, an outcast gutter scavenger, scours the boiling slag flues for forgotten wealth; the foundry matriarch Annukalt barricades her bastion to starve out her rivals; and Terhenen, a ruthless foreign mercenary captain, leads mutinous auxiliaries to seize the inversion armories by force. Whoever controls the arsenic dictates who breathes and who burns; whoever fails will be cast down into the scalding slag pits below.