Beneath the shadow's silence of an immense mechanical god, secrets abound. For inscrutable reasons Siqxhe Xhīab, 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.