THE BONE AND THE ANVIL

The frost here doesn’t glisten. It sits on the black shale like a skin of salt, sour and grey under a sky the colour of a bruised knee. Kian runs. He does not run with the clean, swinging stride of a hunter; he runs like a dog that has slipped its chain — desperate, and aware that it will be caught.

He is carrying something everyone wants, and there is nowhere left to take it.

The Bone and the Anvil is a gritty dark fantasy epic of iron, blood, and the Sun-Drowned East. The anvil is a place. The bone is a price. Neither is a metaphor, and by the middle of the book Kian has paid both.

The road runs from a blood-trail in Frost-Gorge to a crimson tavern where a sovereign’s coin buys more trouble than safety, through the mud-pits of selection, the marching season, and the racks of shattered steel. There is a circle of iron where form and folly are separated publicly. There is a white-robed ghost with better intelligence than the watchtower. There is an opera house bribe, blood on velvet ropes, an unbroken knee that matters more than it should, and ten shards of shatter-glass that nobody wants to be holding when the fusion happens.

The world is morally unlit: the people who help Kian have reasons, the reasons are not good, and he takes the help anyway because the alternative is the frost. What he is carrying turns out to be worth more than his life and considerably less than his loyalty, and the book spends forty-five chapters working out which of those he can afford to lose.

For readers who like their fantasy brutal, atmospheric, and unflinching, with a protagonist who keeps going for reasons that have nothing to do with heroism.