Rindell Jorren, the son of a powerful and heartless governor, is caught between two deadly worlds. He travels across Dabion on the death circuit—documenting the progress of a terrible and incurable plague, and the sickness is growing only more virulent. And his father has made him a pawn in an inscrutable political game, by arranging his marriage to the mad daughter of a foreign chieftain.

Cal Serinason is a refugee from another world, the survivor of an era before the rise of the government of Dabion. Bound by memories of lost opulence, haunted by the travails of a life that has spanned the changing of history, he finds himself called on a strange quest by a magic worker, the Sage Amipal. As Cal journeys across the land at Amipal’s direction, he finds that he and Rindell have been brought together at an epicenter of the plague—but why? And why is Amipal trying to find Rindell’s mad wife?

In the land of the magic workers, Elzith wakes to find that a gate has been opened, and the powerful Magi have gone out into the human world. Her dreams tell her that lives hang in the balance—she is possessed by visions of a burning city, and also by the voice of Amipal, who has gone in search of the cure for the plague. Now she must find him before the Magi do, before the plague spreads further, and before human history is lost in fire.

Read an excerpt

Special features

Find the book

cover by John Jude Palencar