Thieves of Fate

Black market courier Rowena Downshire is just trying to pay her mother's freedom from debtor's prison when an urgent and unexpected delivery leads her face to face with a creature out of nightmares. Rowena escapes with her life, but the strange book she was ordered to deliver is stolen. The Alchemist knows things few men have lived to tell about, and when Rowena shows up on his doorstep, frightened and empty-handed, he knows better than to turn her away. What he discovers leads him to ask for help from the last man he wants to see—the former mercenary, Anselm Meteron.

In a world where theology is a science, three sentient species live in an uneasy truce, and the fate of humanity rests on the shoulders of nine unsuspecting individuals. Reverend Phillip Chalmers awakes in a cell, bloodied and bruised, facing a creature twice his size. Translating a stolen book that writes itself may be his only hope for survival; however, he soon learns the text may have been written by the Creator himself, tracking the nine human subjects of his Grand Experiment. In the wrong hands, it could mean the end of humanity.

Eight months ago, Rowena Downshire was a half-starved black market courier darting through the shadows of Corma's underside. Today, she's a (mostly) respectable clerk in the Alchemist's infamous apothecary shop, the Stone Scales, and certainly the last girl one would think qualified to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders a second time. Looks can be deceiving. When Anselm Meteron and the Alchemist receive an invitation to an old acquaintance's ball, they're expecting blackmail, graft, or veiled threats related to the plot to steal the secrets of the Creator's Grand Experiment.

An apothecary clerk and her ex-mercenary allies travel across the world to discover a computing engine that leads to secrets she wasn't meant to know - secrets that could destroy humanity.