London, 1888. Alfred Victor, a bankrupt printer's son scraping by as a dockworker, discovers a manuscript hidden in a crate of scrap paper. It teaches "Ink-Binding" - the art of writing contracts that, when signed, bind the soul. The ink itself becomes a weapon. The written word can kill.
Disgraced and demoted, a Roman tribune is exiled to a restless frontier town on the slopes of Etna, where a volcanic eruption, a mutiny of soldiers, and a secret of the volcano god's temple pull him toward one last impossible campaign.
A young man born into the crew of a raiding long-ship is pulled from the coast of Norway into a war over a drowned god's shrine, where oath, blood-debt, and a king's betrayal decide whether he sails home as a thrall or a jarl.
When an earl dies intestate, a London barrister discovers the true heir was raised in a traveling circus—and the false heir will kill to keep the title.
In 1916, ambulance driver Millicent Passmore carries the wounded down from the Somme and writes every name she transports into a private notebook. When a dead man's name walks into her clearing station alive, she must trace a trade in stolen identities before it buries the truth, and her.
A water-clock keeper in Tang Chang'an finds the palace's seven jars dripping to a false hour, and traces the error to a recast spout, a forged almanac, and a poisoned secretary. To prove the clock was moved, she must risk the only work she has ever been allowed to hold.
A widowed illuminator finds the charter that keeps her fenland priory's land and mill has been scraped and rewritten. When she tries to prove it, lord and bishop dismiss a woman's testimony and name her the forger, and the price of being believed may be her writing hand.