He was sent to observe a bishop. He found a bishop’s mass grave.
It is 973 AD. Emperor Otto the Great is dying, and the empire’s eastern frontier is fraying at the edges. German imperial agent Lukas Von Mainz is dispatched east on two assignments: contain a rogue margrave whose unauthorized war against a Christian ally threatens to unravel a decade of frontier diplomacy, and investigate reports of conversion methods in the Slavic mission territories — methods Rome has described, with diplomatic precision, as producing dead peasants rather than living Christians.
The margrave is the simpler problem. The bishop is not.
In the forests east of the Elbe, Lukas finds what the official reports cannot name: a campaign of conquest dressed in the language of salvation, conducted under church authority, funded by the empire, and buried in the ground of a sacred grove that no one was supposed to find. The bones are there. The bishop’s seal is on the orders. The succession that Otto is dying to protect depends on no one asking what the frontier was built on.
The emperor asked for the truth. He did not ask for this.
For readers of C.J. Sansom and Bernard Cornwell.
Tropes: lone operative, double mission, ecclesiastical conspiracy, empire’s dark work, witness
Lukas Von Mainz Thrillers, Book 4. The complete series — Books 1 through 4 — is available now.
