Behind the front lines of a crusade to scour the world of magic, the crew of a field hospital confront the horrors of war. A companion novel to Adrian Tchaikovsky's award-winning fantasy novel City of Last Chances.

 City-by-city, kingdom-by-kingdom, the Palleseen have sworn to bring Perfection and Correctness to an imperfect world. As their legions scour the world of superstition with the bright flame of reason, so they deliver a mountain of ragged, holed and scorched flesh to the field hospital tents just behind the front line.

Which is where Yasnic, one-time priest, healer and rebel, finds himself. Reprieved from the gallows and sent to war clutching a box of orphan Gods, he has been sequestered to a particularity unorthodox medical unit. Led by the Butcher , an ogre of a man who s a dab hand with a bone-saw and an alchemical tincture, the unit s motley crew of conscripts, healers and orderlies are no strangers to the horrors of war.

Theirs is an unspeakable trade: elbow-deep in gore they have a first-hand view of the suffering caused by flesh-rending monsters, arcane magical weaponry and embittered enemy soldiers. Entrusted for now with saving lives deemed otherwise un-saveable, the field hospital s crew face a precarious existence. Their work with unapproved magic, necromancy, demonology and Yasnic s thoroughly illicit Gods could lead to the unit being disbanded, arrested or worse.