When their regiment’s only bellman dies on the no man’s land, Corporal Arlo Wells and his fellow soldiers are plucked from the deadly trenches and sent to the city of Graven to deliver his body to his daughter, Irina, and bring back their new bellman—a rare and powerful wizard that moves supplies and ammunition with the ring of a bell.

As a wealthy and influential socialite, Irina Sokolova is courted by the violent Prussian prince, Aleksander von Hohenzollern, and desperately seeks a way out. When Arlo knocks at her door, she sees an opportunity to change her fate.

Abducted by Irina and labeled a deserter by his regiment, Arlo is roped into the corrupted, decadent world of Graven—a modern Gomorrah made by and for the world’s elites—impersonating Irina’s long-lost brother and visionary physicist, Anton Sokolov.

With Arlo’s help, Irina intends to finish her brother’s research on refined energy to keep her rivals at bay, while Arlo learns to be someone he is not in a world where failure equals death. The mystery of Anton’s disappearance only makes things worse, for the closer Irina gets to him, the more enemies she makes.

As time runs out and foes gather, Arlo and Irina need to outplay their opponents, but are met with the darkest recesses of ambition and the unstoppable march of modernity in a Europe at war. As the elites fight for the control of a technology that could reduce the entire world to cinders, Arlo realizes that, in Graven, the song of secrets is just as deadly as the chant of shells.