The Ghost of the Wastes: Volumes 7 and 8 Bundle (Ebooks)

Two ebooks in one purchase: Volume 7 and Volume 8 of Ghost of the Wastes.

One night out. One kiss on a front porch. And the bill for both comes due in front of eighty-one thousand people.

Volume Six ended with the most dangerous person on Valecis Isle having, for once in his life, a good time in public. Volume Seven is the week after.

Siobhan Morrigan drove home from that date and lost her nerve for five straight days. The heir to the Dire Bear Guild, a woman who put a grown man in a healing ward for a week, is hiding behind pillars from a fourth-year with a nice haircut, and half the World Tree Lattice is watching her do it. Her father has run the boy's name through every registry, guild roll, and genealogy in the Western Bloc. What came back is fifteen years of residency and nothing before it. The Dire Bear does not like nothing.

Across the island, Deryn Cassar lies on a warm stone table with four practitioners working the week out of his meridians and starts counting the days. He has three hundred years of lineage, the finest duelist's record of his generation, and a scholarship nobody who put his hands on the wrong girl. His analyst is frightened of a spike on a graph. Deryn is not. Deryn is going to enjoy this more than anything in years.

Cale Arcanus woke up the morning after his first date with a hangover, a duel he does not remember agreeing to, and a message from Aiden Vanta that he should not have opened. He does not want the Iron Circuit. He does not want the autumn card, the Aether core, the sixty-two accredited lenses, or the four hundred and ten million people who will be watching the tenth and final bout. He wants to teach Foundation kids ring work in a training hall and go home.

The Nexus has other plans. A First Princess walks into that training hall, shakes his hand, and stops dead. A Knight-Captain signs fourteen pages of threat assessment on a sporting event and explains a plan to his King that his King does not like. A woman in travel leathers with salt on her hem comes off a ship and goes straight to the arch. The Ghost of the Wastes has been the most successfully absent thing in the Known Nexus for a hundred and thirty-eight years. He has just been printed on a running order.

Then the gate opens. A boy with no house, no healer, and no entourage walks out onto nine hundred years of sand, and a duke's son brings up a blade his family does not take out of its vault.

Told from twelve points of view, the people who had to stand next to it: a steward who has spent twenty years between a violent man and the rest of the Planes. A grandmother two tiers up who already knows what she is about to watch. A princess trying to make her brain accept what her eyes have already decided. The Scion, who did not sleep on the crossing. And the comic relief, who would like it noted that being the comic relief in a power fantasy sucks.

Cale came to Arclight to disappear. This is the volume where that stops being an option.

Volume Seven of Ghost of the Wastes. Chapters 150 through 169. A progression fantasy of hidden power, academy politics, and the women who have decided the Ghost of the Wastes is theirs.

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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