When the local airfield is destroyed, Taziri Ohana is the only airship pilot left to chase the killers across the skies of Marrakesh. Along the way she meets a brooding marshal, a wild young pilot, and a grim detective who isn't afraid to get her hands dirty, but can they stop the richest and most powerful women in the world? And when Taziri learns that her enemies have turned her own inventions into strange and deadly weapons, her family's survival may hang in the balance!
Meanwhile, exiled Incan princess Qhora and her swashbuckling lover Lorenzo face a gauntlet of assassins, cruel aristocrats, and wealthy industrialists conspiring against the very Queen that Taziri is trying to save, and their only hope for peace may be a lone airship falling out of the sky over a palace erupting into civil war!
Welcome to the world of AETHERIUM, where wondrous machines sail the seas and the skies, enormous beasts roam the earth, and the restless dead whisper to the living. Similar to our own world in the sixteenth century, AETHERIUM explores a reality in which many of the megafauna did not die out, including terror birds and saber-toothed cats, and where a devastating Ice Age continues to ravage Europe while African queens rule over the most advanced nations in the world. But strangest of all may be the science of controlling the souls of the dead using a golden metal with many names: sunsteel, orichalcum, and... AETHERIUM!