Beneath the shadow's silence of an immense mechanical god, secrets abound.

For inscrutable reasons Siqxhe Xh īab, expert physician and novice problem-solver, has been ordered halfway across the world from the seat of civilization in tropical Nolabo to the far backwaters of the Sakaxhy Empire with nobody but Laeo, a poorly trained medical assistant, to help him get there. When he arrives, however, he's quickly swept up into intercultural conflicts both internal to the Empire and not, presented with a puzzle of medicine so thoroughly beyond his knowledge that it may as well be magic, and demanded to solve them both by the order of morality and a rebellious lord respectively.

Yet not even those who cleverly pursue their own ends know that by setting Siqxhe on the path into impossibility he's entering a conflict older than civilization on the world of Kabo, whose consequences have been the game of immortals since time immemorial. A conflict on which those very consequences may well determine the shape of history for the next several millennia, or the shape of the planet itself .

After all, the shattered moon wasn't always shattered.