Synopsis: Amazandra

ALL CHANGE!

It began as a day the same as all the rest in Lucia's life; breakfast with her family, friends for lunch, duties for her parents. But the evening brought the Ball, and the events at the Ball changed her life forever. The city was attacked and thousands were murdered, but a few fought through and managed to escape; the city was left burning and infected, the enemy only ever half-glimpsed in the deep darkness.

Five years later, on the day the news of his father's death is brought to his home, a child is stolen; his mother, Della, fights off the attackers but when she cannot save her son she turns to the one person her husband told her she could trust - the Duke of Amazandra, the city destroyed five years before, in his Exile Court. Instead of the Duke's court she finds a haven for disparate youths and criminals, united by a love of leisure and the foggy, heady haze of nostalgia. Despairing of ever finding her child, she takes matters into her own hands; the farmer's wife becomes the she-wolf.

Rafaril, king of a dead land, has long since abdicated his title to his younger brother, and instead lived a life of petty villany. Discovering his brother's sudden death and the absence of his nephew, the heir, he finds himself walking a knife-edge; on one side the care-free life he's lived for almost twenty years, or the mantle of responsibility that should always have been his. At the centre of it all lies the mystery of the dead land that should be his; what killed it, and what is the link between his country, the missing child and the abandoned island city of Amazandra?

Far to the west, Kathal fights in a war his mother, the Mad Queen of Telidor, sent him into to die. Against odds that mount against his men and himself day by day, he is managing, and more than that, it looks as if he can win - until a new enemy enters the battlefield, clanking and powerful, machines powered by an Engine Kathal has seen used somewhere before - to save his crippled sister.

Meanwhile Toby, the Wanderer, has let his feet walk him back down to the coast, back to the place where he committed his greatest act of horror, only to find that the last vestiges of his one great, terrible act are still being played out - and that the new enemy rising is far, far stronger than any yet faced.