Milky Way, thirteenth millennium of the stellar age. Human beings have long since left the surface of the Mother Planet, Earth, and so much time has passed they barely remember it. They have established themselves as the predominant form of life among the stars and all the while they expand, colonize and multiply undisturbed. At times they are at peace, other times they quarrel with one another in an endless strife of meaningless skirmishes. But one day the balance is broken. A terrible alien race, relentless and apparently unstoppable, now threatens to upset this delicate order and wash away over twelve millennia of progress and expansion. People in the Milky Way call them Herem, the Anathem… BOOK THREE: TEMPLAR Aiur Space Station, Protos System, Upper Dome: Milla is a Lunar, and she's the bodyguard of Dallàia Hessire, a representative for all Lunar Confederacies within the Regent's Conclave and the Galactic Senate. The charge seem's boring enough when a brutal homicide, both cruel and unexpected, upsets the entire station, and Milla is suddenly burdened with a different and unwanted task: to find the killer. Her discoveries will take her far away from Protos, on the threshold of Human territories and then beyond, well within the boundaries of Herem-controlled space, where she will set foot on the surface of a world long since abandoned, one where she hopes to find an invaluable treasure: the research, once thought lost, of late Professor Emra Arkadiev.