Search Worlds Without End

Eighteen-year-old Janisha Chatterjee, the Cambridge-educated daughter of an Indian government minister, is coming home to visit her father on his death-bed, when her airship is attacked and wrecked. Amid the debris, a stranger--monstrous but kind--saves her life and entrusts her with a mysterious device, which pitches her head-first into the "Greater Game," the ongoing stand-off between British, Chinese and Russian powers in the Indian subcontinent.

Dodging British officers, Russian spies, and the dangerous priest Durga Das, Jani must bring the device to the foothills of the Himalayas; to the home of Annapurnite, the secret power source on which British domination was built. There she will learn the truth about Annapurnite--a truth that will change the world forever...

When Mycroft Holmes is murdered in London, it is up to retired shadow executive Smith to track down his killer - and stumble on the greatest conspiracy of his life. Strange forces are stirring into life around the globe, and in the shadow game of spies nothing is certain. Fresh from liberating a strange alien object in Abyssinia - which might just be the mythical Ark of the Covenant - young Lucy Westerna, Holmes' protégé, must follow her own path to the truth while, on the other side of the world, a young Harry Houdini must face his greatest feat of escape - death itself.

As their paths converge the body count mounts up, the entire world is under threat, and in a foreboding castle in the mountains of Transylvania a mysterious old man weaves a spider's web of secrets and lies.

Airship battles, Frankenstein monsters, alien tripods and death-defying acts: The Great Game is a cranked-up steampunk thriller in which nothing is certain - not even death.

The Great Game of Gods is afoot... In a world on the brink of madness... In the summer of 1914, a young man of reputation beyond reproach awakens under police guard-grievously injured and accused of heinous, impossible murder. And in a strange, distant place... The youngest member of a penniless acting troupe has been taken prisoner by the loyal minions of a corrupt, vengeful goddess. For an ancient prophecy has divided the realm's ruling Deities into warring factions-a prophecy that mentions the crippled captive child...and a youth recovering from inexplicable wounds in a British hospital bed. The game weaves through worlds and through dimensions as it has since time immemorial-a deadly contest of skill and manipulations that ruthlessly creates wizards, destroys human pawns... and transforms ordinary men, women and children into something more.

In the midst of the horror of the First World War, a stranger falls from nowhere into the mud and death of Flanders battlefield--bruised, babbling, and stark naked... with a remarkable story to tell. The Great Game--the timeless diversion of human gods, a ruthless contest of treachery, magic, betrayal, and manipulation, created to relieve the tedium of immortality--goes on.

In a place called Nextdoor-the farthest flung outpost of British imperialism-earthborn mortals possess the power of gods. Young Englishman Edward Exeter has spent five years trying to escape the magnetic and powerfully magical pull of the Great Game, which has designated him as its most important player. But war and bloodthirsty intrigue rage on both sides of magical portals and across worlds, and Exeter can resist his destiny no longer. He accepts the mantle of Liberator that has been thrust upon him, and the decision turns old friends into foes and old enemies into acolytes as he is surrounded by murderous plots and betrayals. But this is not the uninformed Edward Exeter who came naked into this hidden realm years ago. He has lived the Game and learned it well-and he intends to play it boldly to its shocking, worlds-shattering conclusion.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2003. It can also be found in het Year's Best SF 9 (2004) and The Space Opera Renaissance (2006), both edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Resplendent (2006).