The Blade Crucible

Every ten years, the shifting city of Cavenrock tears itself down and rebuilds around the champion of the Great Ascendancy. To the elite sects, it is a triumph of cultivation and progress. To those living in the outer rings, it means their homes and lives are bulldozed to feed the city's spiritual core. Dane Cutler is a blade-reader, practicing a discarded peasant craft that divines a cultivator’s health from the chips and stress lines in their weapons. Dismissed as a superstitious fraud, Dane barely scrapes by in the slums—until he examines a discarded sword that bears a unique, highly engineered stress pattern. It is the exact same sabotage mark that killed the previous champion ten years ago. Now, drawn into the violent politics of the upcoming tournament, Dane must use his dying craft to trace the conspiracy to the top of the city's hierarchy before the next rebuilding erases his world entirely.