Promise of Blood

Promise of Blood is the explosive opening of Brian McClellan's Powder Mage trilogy, a flintlock fantasy set in a world where magic and gunpowder collide on the brink of an industrial age.

Field Marshal Tamas has done the unthinkable: he has overthrown his corrupt king and butchered the nobility, seizing the nation of Adro in a single bloody night. But a revolution is easier to start than to survive.

Foreign armies gather at the borders, the powerful and secretive priesthood plots his ruin, and the dying words of the executed royal cabal hint at a prophecy no one understands.

As Tamas struggles to hold his fragile new republic together, his estranged son Taniel — a gifted powder mage who draws sorcery from gunpowder — is hunted along the front lines, and a weary police inspector chases a mystery that reaches all the way to the gods.

Fast, gritty, and inventive, it blends muskets and magic, political intrigue and battlefield action, launching one of modern fantasy's most distinctive magic systems.