The Yellow Cabochon

In Old Earth’s penultimate age, master criminal Luff Imbry has a good thing going: forging the jewelry of dead aristocrats who thought they were going to be interred wearing their best finery, so that a mortician accomplice can make the switch just before the burial.

But things go wrong, and Imbry is squeezed between: an aristocrat who means to use a mindcontrolling mollusc to enslave the corpulent forger; and the notorious Green Circle Gang, who “come in large numbers and heavily armed, with a tendency to be terribly single-minded.”

To get out from under, Imbry must travel across the Ten Thousand Worlds and confront a sinister offworlder who is reviving mysterious powers from a long-forgotten aeon when the universe was ruled by magic.