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The Search for the Map---and the secret behind its cryptic code---intensifies in a quest across time, space, and multiple realities. But what if the true treasure isn't the map at all . . . what if the map marks something far greater? Something one world cannot contain?

Kit Livingstone has been bequeathed by his great grandfather, Cosimo, an apparently impossible task: to piece together a 17th-century map whose fragments are scattered not just throughout this universe but other universes too. One piece of the skin map has been found. Now the race to unravel the future of the future turns deadly. Aided by his girlfriend, Mina, from her outpost in seventeenth-century Prague, Kit begins to make progress but realises that opponents, in the shape of the Burley Men, are equally determined to capture the map, and they have a crucial advantage: the ability to manipulate the will of historical figures for their own ends. Across time and space, through manifest and hidden worlds, those who know how to use ley lines to travel through astral planes have left their own world behind in this, the second quest: to unlock the mystery of The Bone House.

Kit Livingstone is stuck in prehistoric times, but has discovered a link from the Bone House to the fabled Spirit Well, a place of profound power. On a cave painting he discovers the same symbols he remembers from the Skin Map. Mina his erstwhile girlfriend is holed up in a mountaintop monastery learning all she can about ley travel from a monk named Brother Lazarus. Meanwhile their evil nemesis, Lord Burleigh, thwarted in his hunt for Kit, discovers a descendant of the Skin Map's creator flogging rare ancient artefacts to get himself out of debt. Cass Clarke enters the quest, transported inadvertently from an archeological dig in Arizona. In 1950's Damascus she encounters the last remaining members of the Zetetic Society, who need her to track down Kit and his ancestor Cosimo, to help them unlock the biggest mystery of all: the purpose of the universe. Through all this the influence of Cosimo lives on, and at the heart of the mystery lies The Spirit Well. This is the third book in the five volume Bright Empires series, a multidimensional, time-bending fantasy from a master storyteller.

Kit and the gang are determined to find a path back to the Spirit Well but when one of their own disappears with the coveted green book, they no longer know who to trust. Meanwhile the expansion of the universe is slowing and soon will begin to reverse, heralding the systematic annihilation of all that exists. . .

Set in 17th century and 21st century London, the Enlightenment-era court of the Hapsburgs, China during the Qing Dynasty and ancient Egypt, Bright Empires is a five-volume fantasy. In The Skin Map, Kit Livingstone and his great- grandfather, Cosimo, are brought together to find a map originally tattooed on the skin of its author, a seventeenth-century explorer who had discovered the secret of access to other worlds and parallel universes. Malign forces are also after the map and, to the surprise of all, the map proves to be not the end of the quest but its beginning. A far greater prize remains, and a much more dangerous search will need to be undertaken.