It is year 145 after Landing Day. The war is a thousand miles of trenches, strewn with barbed wire and repeater rifles. It’s all that protects the empire’s colony from the hordes of gene-twisted humans on the other side… until now.
Near the small city of Tiremsa, the trenches are breached. The enemy floods through and the empire’s servitor soldiers fall back in disarray.
Lady Jephesandra Liu Tawarna is a high peer from an embattled aristocratic family. She is also, unfortunately, a young captain on her first posting when the doomed city is sacked. Amidst the chaos, Jephia uncovers evidence that the enemy breakthrough was enabled—perhaps even engineered—by a rogue faction of empire loyalists. Worse, they have framed her for this defeat to discredit her political father.
Coralaphan Cephas is one of the empire’s expendables, a gene-tailored soldier conditioned from birth to fight and die in the trenches. He’s notorious for his quick temper, but now he has one more reason to hate the overlords he is forced to serve: when the empire retreated, it left his family trapped in the city.
Both Jephia and Cephas need to return to enemy-occupied Tiremsa—Jephia to retrieve evidence about the loyalist plot, and Cephas to find his family. They must cross the trenches and infiltrate the barbaric, cruelty-driven armies of the Moon Kingdoms, but they won’t get far unless they can stop arguing. As overlord and servitor, they are united by need but divided by suspicion, and both of them might simply be too stubborn to survive.
By Mirth Exceeded is Walter Blaire’s epic new novel about leadership, love, doubt, and the collision of cultures upon the vast battlefields of planet Grigory IV.