unlaid ghosts and hidden pain. The following spring, still here as part
ofTempus’s cohort of Stepsons, he’d lost his second partner, Janni. He’d lost
Janni to the Nisibisi witch. Death’s Queen, and left then, quit Sanctuary for
cleaner wars, he’d thought, up north.
In the north he’d found the wars no cleaner-he’d fought Datan, lord archmage of
Wizardwall, and Roxane on Tyse’s slopes and up on the high peaks where he’d
spent his youth as one of the fierce guerrillas called Successors, led now by
his boyhood friend, Bashir. Then Niko had fought beside Bashir and Tempus, his
commander, against the Mygdonians, venturing beyond Wizardwall to see what no
man should see-Mygdonian might allied with renegade magic so that all the
defenders Tempus arrayed against them were, by default, pawns in a war of magic
against the gods.
After that campaign, he’d taken part in the change of emperors that occurred
during the Festival of Man and then, tired to his bones of war and restless in
his spirit and his heart, he’d taken a youth-a refugee child half Mygdonian and
half a wizard-far west to the Bandaran isles of mist and mysticism where Niko
himself was raised, where he’d learned to revere the elder gods and the elder
wisdoms of the secular adepts, who saw gods in men and men in gods and had no
truck with such young and warring deities as Ilsigi and Rankan alike brought
alive with prayers and sacrifice.
Yet all the blood he’d spilled and honors he’d won and tears he’d shed, far from
Sanctuary, fell away from him as soon as he’d saddled his sable stallion in the