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  “Discreet inquiries were made,” Wulfgar answered. He rested his ravaged limb on the arm of his throne again.

  “I have servants still living in Eutracia,” he added. “They sought out only the best. Your name kept appearing at the top of the list.”

  Wulfgar beckoned Bratach forward. The consul reached into his robe and withdrew a parchment tied with black ribbon, which he handed to Satine.

  Accepting the scroll, Satine looked questioningly at Wulfgar. He nodded. She untied the ribbon and regarded the document.

  “Can you kill these persons?” Wulfgar asked.

  A long silence passed. Her mind racing, Satine took a deep breath. Finally, she lifted her eyes and looked Wulfgar squarely in the face.

  “Yes,” she answered. “You realize that these sanctions will present an entire host of unusual complications. My price will be very high.”

  “Of that I have no doubt,” Wulfgar answered calmly.

  More quiet moments passed as Satine tried to think. These would be the commissions of a lifetime, and she must be sure that the monster on the throne understood that.

  “I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of the task,” she said.

  “Whoever does this job must retire from this life and go to ground forever. And that will take money—lots of it. Given the fact that I am still a relatively young woman, the sum will be huge. Despite what you see of me just now, I enjoy living in style.”

  Saying nothing, Wulfgar waited.

  “Three hundred thousand kisa,” she demanded.

  “Done,” Wulfgar answered immediately.

  The air between them filled with an azure glow, which then dissolved to reveal several large canvas cinch bags lying on the floor.

  “This represents half of the agreed-upon sum,” Wulfgar said. “I will order it loaded aboard the Sojourner before she takes you back to Eutracia. Once there, you may hide it in any place you choose. When the sanctions are complete, I will grant you the rest of your fee.”

  Something Satine had once heard about wizards floated up from her memories, and she suddenly understood her mistake. Wizards cared nothing for money because they could literally conjure all they ever needed. She could probably have asked for much more. She just as quickly decided against risking the wrath of the monstrosity sitting before her by trying to amend their bargain. Then she felt something else tug at the back of her mind.

  “Very well,” she answered. “I formally accept the sanctions. Tell me. If you are a wizard, then why don’t you do this yourself?” She paused for a moment.

  “I can see the hate in your eye,” she added slowly, letting her words sink in. “I know what it is to hate as well as anyone in this world. Wouldn’t you prefer to see your enemies die by your own hand?” She watched the brooding darkness overtake his face once more.

  “It has to do with being able to wield the craft,” he answered. “After our first encounter, my enemies will no doubt be extra vigilant in their attempts to search out any unfamiliar, highly endowed blood. Besides, my consuls and I have other matters to attend to, matters that we alone must finish.”

  Wulfgar nodded at Bratach again. Reaching into his robes, the consul retrieved another parchment and handed it to Satine. Not standing on ceremony this time, she unrolled it. It held the likenesses of still more faces.

  “You may have to dispatch these persons first in order to draw the others out,” Wulfgar told her. Then the wicked smile came again.

  “Given the huge nature of your fee, I shall expect these initial deaths to be free of charge.”

  Satine rolled the two scrolls up together and smoothly placed them into her cloak. Their bargain sealed, Wulfgar looked at her with newfound admiration. Leaning back in his throne, he crossed one of his long legs over the other.

  “Tell me,” he finally said. “Is it true what we have been told? That given the right opportunity, you can kill anyone you choose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even a wizard?”

  “Given the right set of circumstances, yes, even a wizard,” Satine answered. “A fact it might do you well to remember, should you decide to cheat me for some reason.”

  Wulfgar’s right eye flashed at the thinly veiled warning. Clearly, this woman was without fear. Good, he thought. She will need to be. He leaned forward in his throne.

  “Succeed, Satine,” he said to her, “and I shall not cheat you. Fail, however, and the price of your shortcomings will be high—much higher than you would choose to pay. No one—not even you—is beyond my grasp.”

  Determined to stand her ground, Satine pointed to Bratach.

  “I work alone,” she stated. “Keep him and the others like him away from me. I don’t trust those of the craft, and I never will. If I see any of your twisted servants following me, I will abort the sanctions and kill them without thinking twice. Do you understand?”

  “Agreed,” Wulfgar answered. “Nonetheless, you will need to see him from time to time, to gather information. And now that our business is concluded, Bratach will see you to your quarters. You sail on the morning tide, but first Serena and I would like you to dine with us tonight. I will send one of the demonslavers to fetch you.” It sounded like a polite invitation, but Satine understood it was a command.

  She looked hard at the deformed man and his beautiful queen. She didn’t like taking orders. But she could find no logical reason to refuse.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  The sooner she was away from this bizarre place and attending to her new sanctions, she thought, the better.

  CHAPTER I

  _____

  “…AND AS EACH OF YOU IS AWARE, THE STONE WE CALL THE Paragon ‘conducts’ its gifts to those of endowed blood by way of its twenty-five facets,” Wigg told the group of keenly interested women. Out of habit, he placed his gnarled hands into the opposite sleeves of his gray robe.

  “These facets allow us control of such arts of the craft as the Kinetic, the Sympathetic, the Formative, and the Causal, to name but a few,” the First Wizard went on. “However, it is the Organic facet of the stone that I wish to discuss today.” He withdrew his right hand and held up a long bony forefinger.

  “It is this facet with which you are the least familiar,” he added, “for unlike all the others, it is available only to those persons of partial blood signatures. As you look to the diagram I am about to conjure, you will notice that…”

  While Wigg droned on, Prince Tristan of the House of Galland sighed deeply. Leaning back, he raised the two front legs of his chair from the floor, ran a hand through his long, dark hair, then crossed his arms over the laces of his black leather vest. His dreggan, the curved sword of the flying warriors known as the Minions of Day and Night, rested on the marble floor beside his chair. The black quiver that held his throwing knives lay alongside it.

  On an impulse, he had decided to attend one of Wigg’s lectures to the Acolytes of the Redoubt. They were the secret sisterhood of the craft, recently called to Tammerland from their various locations about the countryside. Now the red-robed women sat with rapt attention, many of them zealously taking notes in large leather-bound journals.

  A short time into the lecture, the prince realized that he was already familiar with much of the subject matter, due to his recent experiences with the partial adept Abbey. He sighed again. Of all the days to come here, he thought. Unfortunately, walking out on one of Wigg’s lectures was not an option. It would send the wrong message to the acolytes, and besides, Wigg would never let him hear the end of it.

  Taking another deep breath, he looked around the room.

  The Redoubt, the secret underground fortress that lay directly beneath the royal palace in the capital city of Tammerland, housed many such rooms that had once been filled with eager students of the craft—before most of the wizards had been murdered and the consuls, the male c
ounterparts to the acolytes, turned to evil. Now the Acolytes of the Redoubt sat in row after row at long mahogany tables. Before them the First Wizard lectured from a dais. A solid black panel covered the entire wall behind him. When he spoke, his words appeared in glowing azure on its surface, making it easier for the students to keep up as they took their notes. When the panel became full of Wigg’s mental scribbles, he erased them with a wave of one hand, and then new words would appear.

  The rest of the huge classroom was filled with more tables, bookcases, and desks. Beakers burbled and steamed, glass tubing carried colorful liquids of who knew what to who knew where, and scrolls and texts of the craft lay all about. A chart of arcane symbols took up nearly the entire wall to Tristan’s right, their meanings lost upon him. Taken as a whole, Tristan thought, the place looked more like an antiques warehouse than a serious classroom of the craft.

  Glancing back up at Wigg, Tristan realized that the wizard had stopped talking and was staring directly at him. Then Wigg raised his infamous, condescending right eyebrow.

  With another sigh, the prince pushed his tongue against the inside of one cheek, gently lowered the two legs of his chair back down to the floor, and sat upright again. Apparently satisfied, Wigg continued with his lecture, leaving Tristan to reflect on the wizard’s remarkable ability to make him feel like a callow youth rather than an adult and a prince experienced in war and the horrors of incredible evil.

  Scarcely a month had passed since Wulfgar—Tristan and Shailiha’s half brother—had been killed and his plan to destroy the Orb of the Vigors defeated. The Acolytes of the Redoubt had been called home to Tammerland to receive further training in the craft so that they might once more be sent forth into the countryside to perform the anonymous, charitable deeds for the citizenry that had previously been the sole purview of the consuls of the Redoubt. Many of the consuls had perished in the war against Wulfgar, their new master. Any survivors, Tristan presumed, no doubt remained at the Citadel, the island fortress in the Sea of Whispers that Wulfgar had called home.

  Tristan’s expression hardened. He and his friends had been successful in defeating Wulfgar and the demonslavers, but the fates of the two Scrolls of the Ancients were still in limbo. The Scrolls held the formulas for the Forestallments—the spells that could be laid into the blood signature of an endowed person, giving him or her power in the craft of magic without years of training. The Scrolls’ importance was immeasurable.

  The Scroll of the Vigors was now safely ensconced in the Redoubt, but in the final battle with Wulfgar it had been damaged, many of its secrets lost to the world forever. Wigg, Faegan, and Abbey continued to attempt to unravel its secrets, but the work went slowly and with frustratingly little success.

  The Scroll of the Vagaries was still missing, presumably hidden somewhere at the Citadel. It had no doubt provided the formulas with which Wulfgar had attempted to destroy the Orb of the Vigors. He had very nearly succeeded. Until the Scroll of the Vagaries came into Faegan and Wigg’s possession, it remained a great danger.

  Tristan’s mood lightened as his thoughts turned to the Conclave of the Vigors. He had ordered the formation of the Conclave just after Wulfgar’s death as a replacement for the Directorate of Wizards, the previous governing body of Eutracia. Nine of his closest friends and allies now served on the Conclave with him. Wigg and Faegan, of course, as well as Tristan’s twin sister, the Princess Shailiha, and his beloved Celeste. They were joined by the partial adept Abbey—Wigg’s longtime love; Tyranny, the female privateer who now patrolled Eutracia’s oceans with her fleet; and Adrian, the young acolyte whom the wizards had selected to represent the women of her fledgling sisterhood. The warrior Traax, commander of the Minions of Day and Night, and the hunchbacked dwarf Geldon, both of unendowed blood but great loyalty, completed the nine.

  But though the Conclave was in place, and the task of rebuilding the war-torn lands of Eutracia and Parthalon had begun, Tristan had other concerns, ones that lay much closer to his heart.

  His azure blood, for one. Due to the supreme quality of his endowed blood, Tristan was the only person in the world ever to employ the craft without having first been trained, or having one of his many Forestallments activated. But when he had performed that unparalleled feat—when he had employed the craft to destroy the Sorceresses of the Coven—his blood had turned a bright, glowing azure—the color always associated with any significant use of the craft. This transformation had created a host of new problems, all of which now seemed too vast and complex to overcome.

  First of all, the wizards refused to train him in the arts of magic as long as his blood was blue. They also prohibited him from wearing the Paragon. Only the wearing of the Paragon would enable him to read the Tome, the great treatise of the craft. The prophecies written in the Tome stated that he must decipher the entire treatise in order to fulfill his destiny. Then, as the proclaimed Jin’Sai, or “Combiner of the Arts,” he was to join the two sides of the craft for the good of the world. Should he fail or die in his attempt, it was written that his twin sister Shailiha, otherwise known as the Jin’Saiou, would take up the task. If he could, he would spare her that burden.

  But the concern that bothered him most—the one that was never far from his heart and mind—was his love for Celeste.

  She was the love of his life—a sentiment she returned with an equal if not greater ardor. They had been overjoyed when her father, Wigg, had given the prince his blessing to pursue his daughter’s heart.

  But soon after the physical consummation of their love, the wizards had come to them bearing devastating news. Information only then gleaned from the newly acquired Scroll of the Vigors dictated that the two of them must never be intimate again—at least until the riddle of Tristan’s azure blood could be unraveled and his blood returned to red. If Celeste—or any other woman, for that matter—were to become pregnant with Tristan’s seed, the resulting child would be deformed beyond description, and would also constitute a grave threat to the well-being of the craft of magic.

  They had only been together once, but Tristan feared that Celeste might already be pregnant with his child. He had seen the familiar glow of the craft build around her and then vanish just after their wondrous interlude that morning beneath the great oak tree.

  Since that fateful day, Tristan and Celeste’s love had grown, but now they courted each other chastely, much the same way the Orb of the Vigors and the Orb of the Vagaries constantly whirled about each other but could never touch. As it was with Tristan and Celeste, so it was with the Orbs: union would be devastating. While he considered the painful irony, Tristan looked sadly down at his hands.

  “And because of these facets of the craft, partial adepts can also sometimes be herbmistresses or herbmasters.” Wigg’s voice broke in upon Tristan’s thoughts. The prince looked back up at the First Wizard of the Conclave.

  “Among their other varied skills, partial adepts may also practice the fine art of blaze-gazing, but this expertise is rare,” Wigg went on, his words continuing to materialize on the black panel behind him. Soon he would wave his hand once more, and the writing would disappear. “Given these proclivities for such talents,” he continued, “it should also become abundantly clear that—”

  The classroom’s double doors blew open with a deafening crash, and Faegan soared through as though his life depended on it.

  It was rare to see the ancient levitate his wheeled chair, much less use it to go flying about. Something lay across his lap—something dark and charred-looking. As Faegan lowered his chair to the ground, the prince felt his stomach turn over. Lying across the old man’s useless legs was the horribly burned body of a child.

  “Wigg!” Faegan shouted, as he levitated the badly injured child onto a clear section of tabletop. “Come here! I need you!”

  Wigg dashed from the dais. In a flash Tristan was by their sides as the two wizards called on the craft in a desp
erate attempt to heal the child.

  The young boy looked dead, yet his chest stubbornly rose and fell in staggered, wheezing lurches. The entire top half of his torso was charred; most of his hair had been burned away. Much of his face was unrecognizable. The sickening stench of burnt flesh began to fill the room.

  Sobbing openly, Faegan looked up at the prince and struggled to get the words out.

  “So many…” he said, his body shaking. “There are so many more…”

  Reaching up, the old wizard took hold of Tristan’s hand. His grip was cold and clammy, as if some of the life had gone out of him.

  “The courtyard…” he whispered. His hand tightened urgently around Tristan’s. “You must get to the palace courtyard…”

  His mind awash with worry for Shailiha and Celeste, Tristan ran to gather up his weapons and tore from the room.

  CHAPTER II

  _____

  STANDING NEAR THE BABBLING BROOK, REZNIK HEARD THE familiar cry of his hungry cat. Turning, he walked over to where the beast crouched menacingly. Long ago Reznik had dug a deep circle in the ground, marking the cat’s farthest range of travel. When his feet came to the edge of the ditch, Reznik stopped. Human bones, both old and new, littered the area within the circle.

  A wide iron collar encircled the cat’s spotted neck. A chain secured the collar to the trunk of a hinteroot tree. Reznik would never violate the confines of the cat’s reach, but if she did attack him, he was confident that he could heal himself, provided the wound was not too serious. For Reznik was not only a partial adept and an accomplished herbmaster, but also an expert cutter-healer and potion-master.

  Looking at the cat, he smiled. She had been with him for more than a dozen years now. She had been continually chained to the same tree ever since she was a kitten. The generous length of chain allowed her to drink from the nearby brook whenever she chose and the weather never seemed to bother her.