The Iron Frontier
A dying emperor. A lawless border. A truth too dangerous to tell.
In the fading light of his reign, Emperor Otto the Great summons Lukas Von Mainz for one final, desperate mission. Disturbing reports are leaking from the eastern mission territories along the Elbe River—a brutal frontier where the empire meets the ancient forest.
Sent to investigate a rogue margrave’s unsanctioned war and the violent methods of the Church’s conversion machine, Lukas discovers a calculating network of power far more lethal than simple rebellion. The border is a wound that refuses to heal, concealing a darkness that threatens to consume the succession.
Alone in the Terra Slavorum, far from the diplomacy of Rome and Constantinople, Lukas must decipher the truth from the lies before the silence of the iron frontier becomes his grave.
Read the Opening
The cathedral bells at Magdeburg rang for terce, and the emperor’s court smelled of beeswax and dying.
Lukas assessed the guards first, a habit carved into bone. Twelve in the great hall, four at the doors, two flanking the raised dais where Otto sat. Eighteen men in mail and leather, their spears at rest, their eyes elsewhere. Seven heartbeats from the nearest door to the outer corridor. Forty paces from the dais to the western stair.
He controlled his breath.
Nine years of service had carved the habit into bone. Rome. Constantinople. A hundred corridors and courtyards and dim chambers where the calculus of survival was the only prayer that mattered. He no longer chose to count. The counting chose him.
The court at Magdeburg occupied a stone hall adjoining the cathedral, built on Otto’s orders when he had made this city the heart of his eastern ambitions. Tapestries hung from the walls in panels of dyed wool, their burgundy and gold catching the candlelight.
Otto sat his carved throne the way a rider sits a horse he knows is failing. Still upright. Still commanding. But smaller than the throne required, as though the wood had been cut for a larger man, or the man had been whittled by years of conquest and coronation until what remained was bone and will and the last embers of authority.
He was sixty years old. He did not look it. He looked older.
His beard, once red-gold, had gone the color of ash. His hands rested on the chair-arms with a deliberation that Lukas recognized from the sick: the careful placement of limbs that no longer obeyed without effort. The right hand trembled. The hand that had held the sword at Lechfeld, that had signed the charters of empire, that had baptized Saxon ambition with holy oil and called it God’s will.
It trembled over a cup of watered wine.
The courtiers noticed. They pretended not to. This was the machinery of a dying court: everyone watching, no one seeing, the succession calculations running behind every lowered gaze.
