She adjusted the way her cuirass hung on her shoulders, feeling the flex and bend of the pauldrons, then plucked at the leather shirt at her neck to let some of the humidity out. Her voice whispered in the back of Berenice’s thoughts, quiet but clear: Ĭlaudia picked her teeth with a length of wood.

Claudia moved to stand next to her at the balcony, her eyes hard and sharp under her dark metal helmet. They reminded her faintly of bat wings catching the first rays of dawn. She watched as the little fishing boats trundled up to the piers, their sails pale and luminescent. It wasn’t quite a town as much as a residue of civilization clinging to the battlements, the homes and huts like barnacles spreading across the hull of a ship. Grattiara: a tiny fortress enclave balanced atop a thread of stone stretching into the Durazzo Sea, all ocean-gray walls and cloud-white towers and wheeling gulls. She’d been meditating so deeply it took her a moment to remember - Am I in Old Tevanne? Or somewhere else? - but then her senses fully returned to her, and she saw. The morning sunlight reflected brightly off the ocean, and her vision adjusted slowly, the forms of the city walls and the ramparts and the coastal batteries calcifying in the glimmering light. Sancia and her friends glimpse a last desperate opportunity to stop this unbeatable foe – but to do so, they’ll have to unlock the centuries-old mystery of scriving’s origins and pull off the most daring heist they’ve ever attempted.Īnd as if that weren’t enough, their adversary might just have a spy in their ranks – and a last trick up its sleeve…īerenice opened her eyes. This time, they’re not facing robber-baron elites or an immortal hierophant, but an entity whose intelligence is spread over half the globe: a ghost in the machine using the magic of scriving to possess and control not just objects, but human minds.ĭespite all their efforts their enemy marches on, implacable, unstoppable – and it’s closing in on its true prize: an ancient doorway that leads to the centre of creation itself. With Clef and Berenice, she even saw off an immortal hierophant – but the war they’re fighting now is one they know they can’t win. Then she learned how to use that talent, and beat the great merchant houses of Tevanne at their own game. Once, Sancia Grado was just a thief with a grudge and a rare talent. Published today by Jo Fletcher Books in the UK (who kindly provided the excerpt) and Del Rey in North America, first let’s check out the official synopsis: Today we have an excerpt from Robert Jackson Bennett‘s third novel in his Founders series: Locklands.

Locklands by Robert Jackson Bennett