Gunnar Schmidt is a Ranger with an unfortunate reputation for brash behavior and blatant insubordination. He is also an accomplished lawman and fond of postings where few officers in the Enforcement Bureau will willingly go. A fact that has saved his career on more than one occasion. That happy balance is disrupted forever when a summons arrives from the Enforcement Bureau's cryptic and vindictive Secretary Jasmine Weston. Gunnar is a man of his times, but his times are coming to an end. The future belongs to Jasmine Weston and the other fanatics of the new Manifestian Church. An organization determined to obliterate any sign of the old ways and the people who practiced them. Weston tasks Gunnar with a pointless and suicidal mission in the Terran Interstellar Republic's far Fringe. A place where even Gunnar fears to go. A place where the Republic's grasp is so tenuous that the locals can live as they choose despite the Church's objections. A place patrolled as best as it can be by the Bureau's notorious Fringemen. It is on the Fringe's world of Drache where Gunnar finds himself going undercover. He soon disappears into a primitive world where ancient ways have been reborn and given new life, and mutually hostile societies clash with one another. It is a world lit by fire and built of stone, where men slay each other in the arenas for the amusement of the masses. Where men and women are bought and sold for labor and for pleasure.