Brian Keaney has written many books for Orchard, including BITTER FRUIT and the THE HAUNTING OF NATHANIEL WOLFE. His dark trilogy, THE PROMISES OF DR SIGMUNDUS, has attracted great praise and is a remarkable piece of writing.In this final book, Dante has taken the form of a bird, and now only his friend Bea can help him battle Orobas's evil. Bea must harness the power of the Odyll to fight Orobas. The secret of the Odyll lies in the Mendini Canticle, of which fragments remain. Bea finds one of these fragments in ruins of Gehenna's first civilisation -- a collection of conical stone buildings like giant beehives. As Dante is crowned Sigmundus the Second, a new and terrible phase in the history of Gehenna is about to begin, a phase in which the true meaning of the Mendini Canticle will become horribly clear...