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What terrors lurk in the ruins of the Well-Built City?
Where manufactured order once reigned, now there is peace. In this second volume of the Well-Built City Trilogy, the dominion has fallen, and its vicious ruler, Drachton Below, has been defeated. Cley has renounced the title of physiognomist, striking out on his own to establish the idyllic village of Wenau, where he lives as a healer and the inhabitants’ protector. But when the villagers suddenly start to succumb to a lethal sleeping sickness, Cley is pulled back into the struggle he thought he had left behind.
In order to cure his community of this horrible malady, Cley journeys back to the Well-Built City, braving dangerous ruins teeming with mechanical birds and werewolves. Amid the wreckage, he finds the deposed ruler, Drachton Below, comatose from the same sickness that has overtaken Cley’s village. Below created this disease, and he is the only one with the knowledge to cure it. In order to create an antidote, Cley must venture into Drachton Below’s mind to gather the information he needs from the source before the disease ravages the village—and Below’s mind—forever.
Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, the Edgar Award–winning The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, The Shadow Year, and The Twilight Pariah, and his collections include The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell. He lives near Columbus, Ohio, and teaches writing at Ohio Wesleyan University.
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