Child of the River — Paul McAuley

WHERE ALL THINGS FLOW TOGETHER, EVERYTHING COMES APART.

Untold millennia ago, the Preservers made the world called Confluence and peopled it with ten thousand extraordinary bloodlines "shaped" from beasts of every sort. Then the Preservers abandoned their creation--leaving behind their law, their bureaucracies...and their trillions of machines, awake or slumbering, in the soil and the water and air. In the Preservers' absence war came--and a dangerous heresy arose that split the world in two.

But a babe swept in on the great river, cradled in the arms of death--the last, and, perhaps, greatest of a remarkable bloodline--and now the end times are at hand. And as Yama grows to young manhood, he will make his way from necropolis to metropolis--and through the labyrinthine country of the mind--in search of a past and a lost destiny. Each hairbreadth escape will make Yama stronger. And every unanticipated adventure will bring him one step closer to the staggering truth about his heritage and his purpose...and about a world that is not what it appears to be.