The Ashen Road

When Arnold Klein wakes up, all he has in his pocket is a seawater-soaked ticket for a ship that was scrapped three years ago. His left eye sees things differently from everyone else's. Gray light wells up from cracks in the ground, flowing like a river through the depths beneath the city. Buried in its riverbed is a dark red heart, beating. Three days later, auditors from the Anvil Council begin hunting for "unregistered observers." He is forced into a set of false accounts, an identity that doesn't exist, and an old city invisible from the surface. The Ashen Church takes him in on one condition: keep watching, keep the books, and keep tracking the river only he can see. But the Ashen Church doesn't know that he can see far more than they think. The Anvil Council doesn't know that the Third Anchor they seek has been buried beneath their feet all along. Even he doesn't know that the dark red heart has already planted a seed in his wrist. The echo-current of Silver Bay City is tightening. The Tide Anchor is breathing. And the question that all the fragments of the Nation Gods point to is one no one has ever dared to ask aloud: If a divine throne is alive, who is sustaining it?