What if there were gods? A pantheon of powerful, unevenly distributed, and breathtakingly interventionist gods? Imagine divine intervention so frequent that miracles serve as a magic system and the chosen people, who have no idea why they were selected but are oh so proud anyway, rule over the not favored by means of holy expansionist might. Then suppose those gods could be killed. City of Stairs deals with a world where the gods are (probably) dead, the power their follower nation enjoyed has crumbled to the former victims, and the cultural and political biases have very much not gotten over it yet. Following an intelligence officer protagonist and brilliant yet flawed supporting cast, the novel deals with the political and personal fallout from this system of theology.