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Tor Books
August 2025
On Sale: August 12, 2025
432 pages
ISBN: 1250625440
EAN: 9781250625441
Trade Paperback
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Fiction Adventure | Fantasy Epic | Action
Sabriel meets Witch King in Kerstin Hall's beguiling new Nebula and Locus Award finalist novel. Reactor Reviewer's Choice Best Book of 2024, and a New York Public Library Best-Of Pick We choose our own gods here. Karys Eska is a deathspeaker, locked into an irrevocable compact with Sabaster, a terrifying eldritch being—three-faced, hundred-winged, unforgiving—who has granted her the ability to communicate with the newly departed. She pays the rent by using her abilities to investigate suspicious deaths around the troubled city she calls home. When a job goes sideways and connects her to a dying stranger with some very dangerous secrets, her entire world is upended. Ferain is willing to pay a ludicrous sum of money for her help. To save him, Karys inadvertently binds him to her shadow, an act that may doom them both. If they want to survive, they will need to learn to trust one another. Together, they must journey to the heart of a faded empire, all the while haunted by arcane horrors, and the unquiet ghosts of their pasts. And all too soon, Karys knows her debts will come due.
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