The Etched City

The Etched City follows two survivors of a lost civil war, Raule and Gwynn, as they flee the winning side across a hostile land. Raule is a battlefield healer who has abandoned her old ideals; Gwynn is an exiled gunslinger, a dandy and an atheist with a mercenary's past and a scrap of honor left. They reach Ashamoil, a corrupt river city built on the slave trade, where the impossible keeps intruding: artists turn into sphinxes, flowers bloom from corpses, and deformed babies fill a slum hospital ward. Raule takes work among the nuns trying to understand the births, while Gwynn falls in with a slave-trading syndicate and pursues an otherworldly woman who used him as the subject of her art. K. J. Bishop writes a new-weird fantasy of exile, magic, and moral compromise in a world with a vaguely Victorian technology level.