The Ghost of the Wastes: Volume 8 - Arcane Mercenary (Ebook)

What readers say

"Read all of this plus basically all the rest of the author's stuff, highly recommended." (Keeghan, verified Amazon purchase)

"A gripping story that rushes you ahead at a furious pace. I look forward to the next installments." (Charlie, verified Amazon purchase)

About this volume

A glass ball breaks on nine hundred years of sand. What stands up out of it eats planes.

Volume Seven ended with a gladius saying its own name in front of eighty-one thousand people. Volume Eight begins in the next breath.

Deryn Cassar lost the duel. He did not stop there. The last orb he carried was black, and what came out of it has a name the Known Nexus only says quietly. A Devourer. It banks everything you throw at it. It has taken whole planes. Tonight it is loose in the Altamir Coliseum, with eighty-one thousand people in the bowl and four hundred and ten million endpoints watching live.

Cale Arcanus has spent three months being a quiet scholarship student. He has about four seconds to decide how much of that he can afford to keep.

He is not alone on the sand for long. The Omazan drop out of the stands and lock shields. Thessaly the Scion holds the line beside them. The Dire Bear goes into his second shape. And high over the Coliseum, standing on nothing, a woman in a white skull mask holds the Devourer down with gravity while the eighteen-year-old on the floor works out that somebody is wearing his face.

Then Cale does the single stupidest thing anyone in that building has ever watched. He walks into the thing's mouth on purpose, because inside it there is nobody watching.

Told by the people who had to stand next to it: a grandmother who walks out under the north arch and stops pretending to be old, a Chieftess twelve paces from a mercenary who decides not to kneel, a Saint of the Deep who arrives on the coast within the hour and does not leave, an anchor at the Eight Bell desk with ash on her cuff who refuses to guess at a casualty figure, a King watching from his box with a drink in his hand, and a little sister taken into a room by her grandmother with the door shut behind them.

Cale came to Arclight to disappear. Four hundred and ten million people just watched him fail.

Volume Eight of Ghost of the Wastes. Chapters 170 through 189. A progression fantasy of hidden power, academy politics, and the women who have decided the Ghost of the Wastes is theirs.

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