“Very shrewd, my lord,” Lyanus said. “If, indeed, it comes out as you predict.”
“Rest assured, it will,” said Ankhor. “These recent outbreaks of violence in Altaruk have steadily been growing worse, and everyone is greatly concerned. The Alliance has always maintained a strong presence here, because the defilers have never had much influence.
“However, defiler numbers have been growing, and the Alliance is stepping up efforts to eliminate them. Each faction tries to spy out the other, and Altaruk has become a hotbed of intrigue. If things keep up at this rate, we shall soon be caught squarely in a full-scale mage war. And that would be very bad for business.”
“And you have a plan to prevent this conflict?” asked Lyanus.
“Oh, I always have a plan, Lyanus. Kieran is only the first part of that plan. The public part, for there is also another, very private part. The first part is the fire I light under the House of Jhamri, and the second is the ice.”
“The ice, my lord?” Lyanus asked, puzzled.
“Yes, an ice that will freeze the very soul, Lyanus,” Ankhor said with a smile so warm and pleasant that it sent a chill through the old minister of accounts.
Lyanus had learned to watch his young master’s eyes when he smiled. This time, they were terrifying—dead and flat, devoid of emotion. In that moment, Lyanus wondered if Ankhor had a soul. “I… I do not understand, my lord.”
“All in good time, Lyanus,” Lord Ankhor replied as he turned back to the window to watch the merchant plaza burn. “All in good time.”
Chapter One
It was almost dawn on the Great Ivory Plain, and the twin moons cast a ghostly light on the seemingly endless expanse of sparkling, hard-packed crystal. As the night wind shifted, blowing from the east, Sorak seemed to hear the tormented cries of the lost souls wandering the streets of Bodach, whose crumbling spires rose in the distance, barely visible in the bright, silvery moonlight.
Perhaps it was his imagination. Surely not even an elfling could hear across fifty miles of desert. And yet, tricks of the wind could sometimes carry sound far out in the trackless wastes of Athas, especially here where nothing grew, here on the shimmering crystal plain. As the desert breeze blew across the silt basins to the east, rustling through the palm fronds of the oasis, Sorak was almost certain he could hear the faint sounds of a tortured wailing, a chorus of ululating voices that chilled him to the bone. It was a sound he had hoped never to hear again.
Soon, the sun would rise and the living dead of Bodach would slink back to their hiding places in the ruins. The wind would cease to bear their fearsome wails across the desert, and the city of undead would fall silent as the sands swirled through its deserted streets and plazas. A deceptive stillness would once again descend upon the Great Ivory Plain as the dark sun baked its crystal surface with temperatures high enough to boil blood.
During the day, Bodach seemed merely an abandoned city on a narrow spit of land jutting into the great silt sea—the isolated, crumbling ruins of a once great civilization that had flourished upon Athas in an age when the world was green and the sea filled with water, not with brown and swirling silt. But at night, horror stalked Bodach, and those who fell victim to the city’s undead rose again to join their ranks, doomed by an age-old curse to spend eternity protecting the lost treasure of the ancients.
What Sorak had found in the city of undead was of greater value than any material treasure. He had found a gateway into Sanctuary, the refuge of the Sage, and it was there that he had learned the answers to the questions that had plagued him all his life. It was there that he had found himself, and in the process, came close to losing everything, even his life.
As he stood upon the low and rocky ridge that sheltered the oasis at the edge of the great salt plain, Sorak glanced back toward Ryana, sleeping in her bedroll by their campfire. Together, they had survived the city of undead, and their journey to find the Sage had taken them from their home in the forests of the Ringing Mountains all the way across the harsh and foreboding desert Tablelands. Along the way, they had fought marauders and mercenaries, half-giants and defilers, corrupt aristocrats and paid assassins, and a host of undead warriors. They had even defied the wrath of the Shadow King, Nibenay, himself. They had come a long way from the beginning of their quest and had both sacrificed a great deal to follow the Path of the Preserver. Their lives had changed immeasurably since they had set out on their journey, and as Sorak stood there, the cool night breeze ruffling his long, dark hair, he thought back to how it all had begun.
* * *
From childhood, he had been a tribe of one—a half-breed with a dozen personalities, some male, some female, each with distinctive attributes. A wandering pyreen had found him half dead, alone out in the desert. When the shapechanger realized that his ordeal had fragmented his young mind, she had brought him to the villichi convent, nestied high in an isolated valley of the Ringing Mountains.
The villichi were a sisterhood of warrior priestesses who had vowed to follow the Way of the Druid and the Path of the Preserver. They were women born with fully developed psionic powers, mutants ostracized from their communities. They were taller than most women, broad shouldered and long limbed, and most were marked with albino features—snow-white hair, eyes ranging from palest green or gray to pink, and pale, almost translucent skin that burned easily in the hot Athasian sun. Each year, robed villichi priestesses went out on pilgrimages
