The Fiends of Nightmaria

Bauchelain and Korbal Broach arrive in the city of Nightmaria — a place of bureaucratic oppression and civic misery — and promptly become entangled in its politics, its criminal underworld, and its particular brand of institutionalized suffering. Fiends of Nightmaria is the most politically satirical of the later B&KB novellas, its target being the bureaucratic capture of civic life and the way institutional systems perpetuate misery through process rather than malice. Emancipor Reese, as always, is caught in the middle and suffering for it.