The Hollow City: 3

Hollowmere used to choose who fed the lamps. Now the lamps chooseThe great clock is stopped. The Cathedral's hold is broken. Cal and Fen paid in blood to end the lie that the city's light came from willing souls - and for a breath, Hollowmere was free.But a dead machine is not a safe one. In the violet hush left behind, something older has begun to stir in the wire: a voice that remembers every soul the city ever spent, and wants them back.The Church has a new architect now. Patient. Gentle. Certain. He has studied the old horrors - the lotteries, the tithes, the abductions dressed as devotion - and found them crude. Wasteful. So he has built something better. A system that no longer needs men to choose its victims. The grid selects them itself now, names drawn from the dark by the city's own logic, and the lamps burn brighter than they ever have.His new Chair does not need to break a soul to take it. It needs only a listener deep enough to hold every layer of the dead at once.It needs a child.It needs Soot.Cal keeps the Record - the names no one else will speak aloud. Fen keeps the line, whatever it costs his ruined hands. But the thing in the wire is reaching back now, and the deeper they go beneath the city to stop it, the clearer the choice becomes: there is a way to end Hollowmere's hunger forever, and it runs straight through the boy they would both die to protect.Some debts can only be paid in person.The Hollow City is the breathtaking final volume of the Hollow Clock Saga - a gaslamp gothic fantasy of soul-powered cities, found family, and the quiet, stubborn people who refuse to let a name be erased. For readers who like their fantasy atmospheric, their love stories hard-won, and their endings honest.Some cities are haunted. This one was built that way.

Pages: 436, Paperback, Elias Keane