CONSIDER PHLEBASThe war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random.The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist.Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender. Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade.Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind.Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it, and with it their own destruction. USE OF WEAPONSThe man known as Cheradenine Zakalwe was one of Special Circumstances' foremost agents, changing the destiny of planets to suit the Culture through intrigue, dirty tricks or military action. The woman known as Diziet Sma had plucked him from obscurity and pushed him towards his present eminence, but despite all their dealings she did not know him as well as she thought.The drone known as Skaffen-Amtiskaw knew both of these people.It had once saved the woman's life by massacring her attackers in a particularly bloody manner.It believed the man to be a burnt-out case. But not even its machine intelligence could see the horrors in his past. THE PLAYER OF GAMESThe Culture - a human/machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh.Jernau Morat Gurgeh. The Player of Games. Master of every board, computer and strategy. Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game ... a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor.Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game, and with it the challenge of his life - and very possibly his death.