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...