Hope and Love -- Pride and Honour. Monsters wander the world of Mikon. Caught in the aftermath of a vicious international war, thousands of refugees have fled the Coastal States, bringing their dangers with them into the wilderness near the untamed Middlelands. Castaways from an imploding civilization -- fighting to find and to understand the most dangerous of treasures . . . Portunista: innovative, ambitious, intemperate; a maga seeking her path to Imperial glory . . . Seifas: dark and lethal, alienating, poetic; a hunter whose words are his tears . . . Gaekwar: lanky, laconic, sardonic; 'only a cowherd', yet wielding exotic weaponry . . . Othon: the Implacable One; a quiet, quick-thinking giant of a man . . . Dagon: arrogant, insecure, buffoonish; a miserable commander with a knack for solving puzzles . . . Pooralay: ruthless and compassionate, loud and brusque- when he wants to be; a thug on a mystical quest . . . Bomas: renegade killer planning a subtle genocide; Artabanus: self-proclaimed Arbiter, drawing every power to himself; Praxiteles: incompetent madman, possessing and possessed by the Roguent Gamin . . . In their increasingly desperate struggles -- for food, for knowledge, for life itself- what will make the difference between brigades and bands of brigands?