BOOK ONE
A thousand years ago, the sea began to change, and the change spread. Now the boiling, toxic, lightning-wreathed Atomic Sea has encompassed every ocean on the planet, and the creatures that live in it have become mutated and unnatural. The sea's taint can infect any human who comes in contact with it or with unprocessed seafood, killing them . . . or altering them. No one knows why the sea has become this way or what it portends, only that it's irrevocably changed the world.
Meanwhile, world war has erupted, and the small country of Ghenisa, like many others, is tottering on the brink of collapse under the onslaught of the Empire of Octung. Middle-aged widower Dr. Francis Avery is aboard a military whaling ship far out on the Atomic Sea when a series of murders occurs onboard. There is a spy on the ship; the killer is an Octunggen agent.
Things get stranger when a beautiful naked woman is pulled from the Atomic Sea out of the mouth of a great whale. She shows no sign of infection, which makes no sense, and no one can tell where she’s from. She’s in a coma and it falls to Avery to bring her back to consciousness and solve her mysteries.
Meanwhile he’s carrying out a loveless affair with Jessryl Sheridan, a tough, determined woman and the captain of the whaling vessel.
The beautiful woman in the coma, whom he takes to calling Patient X, comes to, briefly, and he’s horrified to hear her speak Octunggen. He’s the only one around. She tells him that she’s not Octunggen, never mind the language she uses, and that she wants to stop Octung. She warns him against telling anyone of this because, she claims, there are Octunggen spies peppered throughout the Ghenisan military. If he tells anyone, they’ll kill her. Then she lapses back into a coma.
After an attack by an Octunggen submarine, Avery is working on the Executive Officer, Commander Hambry, in the medical bay, when he comes across scars that could only have been inflicted by the last person to be murdered onboard, Avery’s best friend Paul. Hambry is the killer. Avery knows this but has no way to truly prove it, so he follows Hambry when the X.O. goes outside in a storm and finds the X.O. about to toss a canister containing a message to Octung into the waters, to be retrieved by an Octunggen submarine.
Avery confronts him, they fight, and Avery manages to kill Hambry. Afterward, knowing no one will believe him, he pretends Hambry committed suicide by throwing himself overboard. Hambry’s dying words, however, had indicated that there was a second spy on board.
Enlisting the help of the grizzled whaler Janx, Avery breaks into Hambry’s cabin and searches it, looking for evidence of the second agent. He finds it, too. The other spy is his lover, Captain Sheridan. Shocked, Avery plans to go to the authorities as soon as they reach the mainland, but when they do the evidence is gone.
Again, Avery brings Janx into things, asking the big man to use his criminal connections to have Sheridan followed so that her network can be uncovered and some real evidence found. Meanwhile Avery pretends to have Octunggen sympathies in an effort to convince Sheridan to reveal her plans to him. He’s trying to out-spy a spy.
He is also, during this time, working with doctors and scientists at the ominous Fort Brunt, where Patient X is being studied and treated. One night when all the other doctors are gone, she reveals to Avery that she’s been awake for some time, waiting to get him alone. Since he didn’t betray her last time, she trusts him, as much as she can, and needs his help. Her name is Layanna and she wants to stop Octung—stop the entire war—and possibly save the world. She won’t tell him anything else, though, but wants him to get her out of Fort Brunt, a military hospital, where she is essentially a prisoner. He thinks about it. Can he trust her?
While spying on Sheridan, he uncovers a critical piece of information when she meets with her spymaster Gaescruhd. Gaescruhd tells her that one of the Black Sect is near and to be on the lookout. The Black Sect are rebel members of the Collossum, the gods worshipped by Octung. He describes this member of the Black Sect, and Avery realizes that it’s Layanna. She’s a god of Octung! Suddenly he realizes she might just be telling the truth when she said she could stop Octung. She’s powerful, if nothing else, and not human. What’s more, as a member of the Black Sect, she truly is an enemy of Octung.
Gaescruhd orders Sheridan to kill Layanna. Panicked—the only hope of stopping Octung is about to be murdered--Avery enlists Janx’s help and breaks Layanna out. The whaler’s underworld cronies help, among them Hildra, a young woman with a hook for a hand and a pet monkey. Sheridan, an admiral now, heads up the hunt for them and leads an assault on them at Janx’s apartment.
Layanna, awake and with her powers gathered to her once more, repels the troops, at the same time showing Avery and the others in the band just what she really is—inhuman and terrifying. In her other-self, she possesses tentacles and pseudopods and is altogether a horror from another dimension.
After they escape, she tells them that her plan is to rendezvous with others in the Black Sect in the mountains. Once together, they will journey to Lusterqal, the capital of Octung, and assemble the “Device” they went so far to learn how to build. Once assembled, this so-called Device will render Octung’s extradimensional weapons impotent and will allow the enemies of Octung to rise up against them, halt the march of war and throw the Octunggen back. If they can complete and activate the Device, they can stop the war.
All Avery and the others have to do is get Layanna to her friends in the Black Sect and they can do the rest. Thus they journey into the mountains, Sheridan and an entire army on their heels.
BOOK TWO
They reach the place where the other Black Secters are supposed to meet, but it’s a trap orchestrated by the vile Uthua, a Collossum who had pretended to break away from the others in the Great Temple but who really still serves the Great Elders. He kills one of the members of Janx’s crew. Avery manages to critically wound Uthua, but Uthua then captures Muirblaag, a great fish-man and Janx’s best friend. Muirblaag stays behind while Avery, Janx, Hildra and Layanna flee in a dirigible.
Their only hope is to reach Cuithril, an all-but-mythical city underground. There will be a functioning altar there through which Layanna can send the plans for the Device to her cohorts in Lusterqal. Unfortunately Cuithril lies on the other city of a war zone. Octung is invading and defeating the mountainous country of Ungraessot, land of the God-Emperor, and Cuithril is deep inside Ungraessot.
Along their journey, Layanna reveals more about her people, including that they are responsible for the Atomic Sea. Known as the R’loth (those of the R’loth who have taken human form are called the Collossum), they dwell beneath the sea and hail from another set of dimensions, which they fled after the rise of the dreaded Muug. The R’loth want to transform the world into a reflection of their own reality and turn all humans into slaves and food. They’ve been using Octung as their puppets to this end.
