With most loose ends tidied up, Provine Sael leads her little band into direct service to the Empire. The Third North War is in its second campaign season, and both sides are determined to find victory; Grog and Burk are equally determined to take part in a major battle. Service to the Imperial forces is not as good as a large battle, but it promises more than a little violence and hard living for the small, disparate group. On a side note, the question of Rose possibly being the Seed of Destiny has not been forgotten.. Grog and Burk must face continuing change in their lives as they enter ...

Grog is a brute (half Human, half Ukar) slave raised from birth to fight in the pits for the entertainment of the crowds. He is content with his role in the city, proud of his barracks, and in awe of his owner, the sour Master Horne. Life, by Grog's reckoning, is good. Then an enigmatic churchwoman enters his life, and Grog finds himself swept from the city which has been his entire world, to travel and learn amid as strange a group as he has ever seen. He knows nothing of the group's mission, just that his skills are necessary and the quest is "a good thing."

Provine Sael and her weary band have put the great northern plains behind them, and are heading south into the Empire, winter quarters beckoning to them after a long, hard summer. But crossing the raid-torn northern frontier holds new problems and challenges as the little group re-enters an empire burdened by war and war's demands. The Sagrit have not forgotten the Dellian, and Grog must face new threats to his mistress, along with new issues and ideas which must be pondered. It is not easy being a brute in a improper world, but Grog and Burk struggle onward, fortified by Master Horne's ...

The Dusmen are invading, and nothing will stop Provine Sael from leading an investigation into the many questions about the northerner’s late start, and so Grog and Burk must march north as well. With the onset of the war, both sides have stripped the border of troops, and it may well be safe for the small band to slip into enemy territory and poke into odd corners in search of the truth. The north is a little-known land, home to rumors about rivers of unmelting ice, dragons, dead cities from the dawn of time, and countless other stories which may be legend, myth, fact, or a combination ...

“A serious novel with a strange series name, Payload is a fast-moving, quick-reading story of a band of unlikely heroes brought together by chance in the face of a terrorist-bred Zombie outbreak. It’s the Walking Dead with satellite phones.” In a United States beset by terrorists and a biowar virus a small group thrown together by chance find themselves in possession of what well may be a key to the zombie plague. Their desperate struggle across the landscape of a nation facing the first savage blows of a terror campaign and a zombie outbreak requires everything they can muster, and ...