Grave Empire

Grave Empire opens the Great Silence trilogy, set two hundred years after Richard Swan's Empire of the Wolf books. The Sovan Empire stands on the brink of an industrial revolution. Sorcery and the arcane arts are outlawed, money has replaced blood as the force that turns the wheels of empire, and glory seems within reach. Then the trouble starts. A mysterious plague spreads through the pagan kingdoms to the north, and the empire's proxy war in the south is weeks from collapse.

Worse news reaches the Empress from two heretic monks, who say they have lost contact with the spirits of the afterlife. They believe this is the start of an ancient prophecy, the Great Silence, that heralds the end of days.

The story follows three points of view. Renata Rainer, a low-ranking diplomat in the Imperial Office, is sent to the Stygion, an enigmatic and vicious race of mermen, to seek answers from those who still practise the arcane. Peter Kleist, a noble-born army lieutenant, is posted to a frontier fort where something supernatural is killing soldiers.

Count Lamprecht von Oldenburg, a nobleman drawn to forbidden knowledge, studies a plague that drives people mad. With war on the roads and the empire close to supernatural catastrophe, there may soon be no world left to save.

It is a gunpowder-age epic fantasy with a strong streak of dark fantasy and gothic horror, and it is the first of three books.