A novella of the Archonate. Earth in its penultimate age: ancient, inbred, bucolic, full of antique secrets and even more archaic intrigues. Under a melancholy orange sun, decaying aristocratic families still wield their feudal powers after thousands of generations; but the Archon is their subtle absolute ruler, and he has placed certain cruel excesses, and certain abandoned country estates, permanently out of bounds... Luff Imbry, corpulent master thief, must penetrate one of those forbidden properties. For millennia ago, a sadistic nobleman built there an underground maze, its walls hung with priceless works of art, its corridors stalked by intelligent torture machines, a secret domain where the corrupt blue-blood would imprison and torment anyone who offended him. Determined to liberate the most precious of the labyrinthÕs treasures, Imbry recruits an unwilling "ghost" — the preserved essence of the mad duke's long-dead granddaughter—as his guide. But in the twisted darkness, the fat man finds that the dead cannot always be trusted. In his latest witty tale of the Archonate, Matthew Hughes sets his most engaging character on a collision course with forces dark and devious. Can even the legendary craftiness of Luff Imbry triumph without aid from higher powers?

In Old Earth’s penultimate age, master criminal Luff Imbry has a good thing going: forging the jewelry of dead aristocrats who thought they were going to be interred wearing their best finery, so that a mortician accomplice can make the switch just before the burial. But things go wrong, and Imbry is squeezed between: an aristocrat who means to use a mindcontrolling mollusc to enslave the corpulent forger; and the notorious Green Circle Gang, who “come in large numbers and heavily armed, with a tendency to be terribly single-minded.” To get out from under, Imbry must travel across the Ten Thousand Worlds and confront a sinister offworlder who is reviving mysterious powers from a long-forgotten aeon when the universe was ruled by magic.

Art forger and corpulent master criminal Luff Imbry travels from Old Earth down The Spray to the skinflint world of New Gargano to trade some of his counterfeit confections for a pouchful of the fabulous gems called noubles. But Imbry is not the only one with duplicity in mind, and soon the fat man finds himself imprisoned on a nameless world where the only question is whether he’ll dwindle to a lifeless husk before or after he goes irretrievably insane.

Meet Luff Imbry, an insidiously clever confidence man . . . He likes good wine, good food, and good stolen goods, and he always maintains the upper hand. When a business rival gets the drop on him, he finds himself abandoned on Fulda—a far-off, isolated world with a history of its own. Unable to blend in and furious for revenge, Imbry has to rely on his infamous criminal wit to survive Fulda’s crusade to extinguish The Other. Hailed as the heir apparent to Jack Vance, Matthew Hughes brings us this speculative, richly imagined exploration of society on the far edges of extreme. A central character in Black Brillion, Luff Imbry is at last front and center in Hughes’s latest rollercoaster adventure through a far-future universe.