For if Maskelle cannot unearth the cause of the Wheel's accelerating disintegration-if she cannot free herself from ghosts of the past and focus on the catastrophe to come-the world will plunge headlong into the terrifying abyss toward which it is recklessly hurting. Now, in the company of Rian-a skilled and dangerously alluring swordsman-she must confront dread enemies old and new and a cold, stalking malevolence unlike any she has ever encountered. Once she was the most revered of the Voices, until cursed by her own actions. A murderer and traitor-an exile disgraced, hated, and feared, and haunted by her own guilty conscience-Maskelle has been summoned back to help put the world right. With chaos in the wind, a woman with a shadowy past has returned to Duvalpore. Each morning the storm reappears, bigger and darker than before, unraveling the beautiful and orderly patterns. Every night the Voices of the Ancestors-the Wheel's constructors and caretakers-brush the darkness away and repair the damage with brightly colored sands and potent magic.

Should the holy image be marred, the world will suffer a similar injury.īut a black storm is spreading across the Wheel.

Linked by the mystic energies of the Infinite, the Wheel and world are one.

For it is then that the very fabric of the world must be rewoven. Every hundred years the sacred rite takes on added significance. Few writers can match her ability to imbue fantastic realms with such startling immediacy and reality-a feat she accomplishes more impressively than ever before in this powerful tale of the beginnings and endings and beginnings again in an unending cycle of malignity and good.Įvery year in the great Temple City of Duvalpore, the image of the Wheel of the Infinite must be painstakingly remade to ensure another year of peace and harmony for the Celestial Empire. Over the course of three extraordinary novels, Martha Wells has established herself as a master builder of alternate worlds peopled with souls as rich and complex as any that have ever known life within book pages.

Wheel of the infinite by martha wells