Mazarkis Williams

Mazarkis Williams is a fantasy author best known for the Tower and Knife trilogy, a story of a plague-marked emperor and the assassins and courtiers scheming around his throne, spanning The Emperor's Knife, Knife Sworn, and The Tower Broken, later collected in a single omnibus edition. The series is built around themes of hidden identity, bodily corruption, and political conspiracy in a secondary-world empire threatened from within and without, and drew a following for its tightly wound court intrigue and unusual magic system tied to marks that spread across the skin. It remains the author's principal published body of work.