In a kingdom on the verge of a grand renaissance, where
natural science has supplanted failing sorcery, someone aims
to revive a savage rivalry...
For Portier de
Savin-Duplais, failed student of magic, sorcery's decline
into ambiguity and cheap illusion is but a culmination of
life's bitter disappointments. Reduced to tending the
library at Sabria's last collegia magica, he fights off
despair with scholarship. But when the king of Sabria
charges him to investigate an attempted murder that has
disturbing magical resonances, Portier believes his dreams
of a greater destiny might at last be fulfilled.
As the
king's new agente confide, Portier - much to his
dismay - is partnered with the popinjay Ilario de Sylvae,
the laughingstock of Sabria's court. Then the need to
infiltrate a magical cabal leads Portier to Dante, a
brooding, brilliant young sorcerer whose heretical ideas and
penchant for violence threaten to expose the investigation
before it's begun. But in an ever-shifting landscape of
murders, betrayals, old secrets, and unholy sorcery, the
three agentes will be forced to test the boundaries
of magic, nature, and the divine...