After the Fall: Shades of Gold

Long ago, the crew of the foundation ship ‘Good Hope’ was sent to establish base colonies on a distant planet in preparation for an expected fleet of colony ships. Most of the colonists and their equipment were dropped to the planet’s surface in cheap and simple ‘one-shot’ craft, in an operation nicknamed ‘The Fall’.
Those first colonists never expected to be deprived of all technology for a millennium - nor did they doubt that all the established laws of Earth science would hold true on Nuome. Their scientifically trained minds could never have grasped the significance of the subtle differences which the planet was concealing, holding in store for their descendants....
Some might possibly have called the results ‘magic’.
But they wouldn’t have called it heresy.

A thousand years ‘After The Fall’, Adrell, a young warrior and thief, assembles an unlikely gang in an attempt to steal a shipment of gold being transported through Singlehill. His gang includes Dorrak, an intellectually challenged strongman; Vordan, a wandering assassin plagued by a conscience; ‘Thales’ an unconfident and inexperienced journeyman Thaumaturge - a ‘magician’ who is determined that his art is really science; and Attria, an orphaned printer’s daughter and childhood friend of Adrell’s.
The story of their adventures is told through the eyes of the feisty young Attria, who records them as a series of six chronicles. Attria is an intelligent but naive girl who describes the world, their journey through it and the events that befall them in her own particular style, combining a mixture of curiosity, wonder, wit, pathos and horror. Something of the nature of society and the so called ‘magic’ of Nuome is gradually revealed as she does so. At the same time Attria begins to be troubled by the first clues that all in their company is not as it appears to be.
Their inept and bungled attempt to steal the gold leads the gang into a series of increasingly dark and bizarre adventures in which they are chased across the length of the inhabited world, while desperately attempting to dispose of the ‘tainted’ gold, (which due to a thaumaturgical accident now smells very much like a particular girl’s urine), on the way. They attempt to rescue a kidnapped goldsmith’s daughter, to operate a ‘sting’ upon the fearsome Riverlord Jakyde, to rescue a merchant from an unjust assassins’ contract, and to recover some stolen coin dies from a gang of river pirates in a haunted cave. Finally, at the city of Firstfall, they embark upon the ultimate crime - and suffer the ultimate consequences. The first book ends with a surprising - and horrific - twist.