The Red Monk

They murdered a peasant to save an empire. They opened it instead.

Petrograd, December 1916. Grigori Rasputin is shot in a cellar on the Moika, wrapped in a curtain, and pushed through the ice of the Nevka. Two days later Staff Captain Nikolai Ostrov of military intelligence stands over the recovered body on the frozen river and puts two fingers against the dead man's jaw.

It is warm.

An officer who does not believe in anything. A village that cannot stop walking into a lake. Nine days to work out why.

Ostrov's orders come from an address nobody in his section has ever seen used, in the handwriting of a clerk who has been dead for a century. They send him to Vyrma - two hundred and eleven souls, a wooden church, and a stone church that was nailed shut in 1863 and has no cross on it.

Every night, more of the villagers rise from their beds and walk down to the water. Four on the first night. Nine on the second. Seventeen on the third. It doubles, and it does not fail to double, and any staff officer with a pencil can work out the date the arithmetic runs out.

A frightened priest, a Cossack who believes everything, a nurse who has heard the lake since she was four years old, and a German colonel two versts away with eleven men and a month of coal - all of them now know the same thing. The old compact that shut this country in 1613 has come apart. And whatever is under the ice has begun counting.

The Last Link is the first book in The Red Monk, a ten-novel series of historical fantasy running from the murder of Rasputin to the end of the Russian civil war. Meticulously researched, restrained in its horror, and grounded in the real collapse of an empire.

Book One of ten. Begin the chain.