With the Complex reclaimed and the coup's leaders in chains, they're done with the infighting. Right? Mairid thinks he has everything arranged to his liking by then. Dyafer trusts him unreservedly, both his proteges are devoted to him; Alia hates his guts, but who's going to listen to the Mage-Killer, the monster who touched the hand of mages' god? He isn't prepared to run into a nemesis, a mage who commits the terrible crime of getting him. On the far side of the continent, the mage he meant to hand the title Atsises to continues with his revolution. Marseviks has changed the world forevermore, although his students don't know it yet. They are the heralds of a new age where the Complex no longer holds its two-thousand-year-old monopoly. What power the Complex still boasts makes for the frontlines of the war they should have started fighting a year ago. Alia goes with them, but she isn't sure where she fits; she isn't sure she's still one of them. She isn't even sure she wants to be, since the Complex is under the thumb of a man who does not, so far as she can see, stand for or care about anything, if not the right to keep secrets and manipulate people. Is their shared hatred of the Enemy enough? Sticks and stones may break a mage's bones, but what matters is what they allow to have power over them.