The False Sky: Book One of Broken Vault: 1

Iane measures the world for a living, and she is never wrong. This time, being right is going to get her killed. Iane is a surveyor. On one job her measurements say something impossible: the sea does not end. It curves back on itself, and no matter how many times she checks, the answer is the same. The whole world is closed in. The sky is not really a sky. It is a lid over everything, and every person alive is sealed underneath it. The lid is held shut by magic, and the magic has a price. To keep it strong, names are carved into human bone, and each one costs a real person a finger, a leg, or years off their life. The order that collects this payment takes it from the poor, over and over, and calls it mercy. They have done it for ten thousand years. Now Iane knows the secret the order kills to keep. And they have already sent their best inquisitor to burn her. His name is Castor, the order's finest inquisitor. He has burned wiser souls than Iane for knowing far less, and he has never once failed. He is already on the road. The seal is failing now on its own, and it cannot be mended. Soon the whole world will face the choice Iane already has: keep paying in flesh to hold the dark shut, or let it open, and meet what has waited ten thousand years to get out. THE FALSE SKY is Book One of THE BROKEN VAULT, a grimdark epic for readers of Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence, and Anna Smith Spark.