The Aberration Chronicles: Lensgrinder

Every rule keeps itself. Someone has to tend the light.

Tadeus Vell grinds the finest lenses on the coast, and he has a secret his trade has no name for: he can feel a surface come true in the dark, past any measuring, a knack that pays no rent and, in the licensed city of Grayhithe, is best not written down.

Then the scholar who commissioned his masterwork is found hollowed out at his desk, mind gone, and Tadeus discovers the man had walked there, led, question by question, up a ladder of forbidden understanding by a patient, loving hand that leaves no fingerprints, only corpses that look like accidents.

The hand has been killing careful men for forty years. It has an examiner hunting it, a College of survivors hiding from it, and a schedule Tadeus doesn't yet understand. Worst of all, it keeps its ledger inside the very institution that governs the truth, and somewhere in its records is a fifteen-year-old boy it once watched work a slate.

To catch a maker of minds, a lens-grinder will have to become one. The only question is whether he can climb the same ladder without falling off the top.

The book cover is temporary. The book is already halfway through, and updates are one chapter a day. Happy reading.