Noetos and his reluctant companion are on the run, as the Recruiters hunger for the powerful artefact that Noetos keeps hidden - and they won't be denied. When the weather turns destructive, Noetos finds it easier to cover his tracks. But, however useful this might be, it's a warning that something is deeply wrong with the world.

A continent away, Lenares leads the Cosmographers following the death of her mistress. Through her uncanny affinity with numbers, Lenares can also sense this wrongness. Trained to detect the presence of the Gods, she can find no evidence of the Father - he is missing, but is it possible that a god could be dead? And if so, could the resulting imbalance be the cause of the worsening cataclysms? But these are only pieces of the puzzle, and the reality is far stranger than they imagine.