“You’re what?” cried Esea.

They were in the vulgar Pink Chamber of the citadel, a room so garishly overdecorated that Tallia bel Soon normally avoided it. The cornices were three feet deep and painted in a dozen colours, and each of the six glittering chandeliers would have filled a hay wain. Tallia had chosen it because no one would think to look for her here.

She turned away from the window and the streetscape of old Thurkad, the fabulously wealthy capital of Iagador and the most corrupt city in the world. For most of her time as Magister she had worked well with Yggur, the age-old warlord and mancer who had ruled Iagador for a dozen years.

But his mental breakdown and abrupt withdrawal six months ago had left Iagador leaderless and without an army, and the Magister had neither the authority nor the finances to fill the gap. Since then Tallia had spent all her time trying to hold back the warring barons who wanted to seize Thurkad for themselves, and the scum who just wanted to plunder it. Like the yellowcloaks she could see now on every corner. Who was their overlord? No one knew.

“I’m resigning as Magister and head of the Council of Santhenar,” said Tallia. “Tonight.”

For fifteen hundred years the council of mancers had been a powerful force in the west, but it was just a fractious rump now with little power and even less influence. It felt like her personal failure.

“Why?” said Esea, a small, striking blonde and a reshaper of rare skill, though neither attribute could prove her worth to the sternest critic of all, herself.

“Things are getting worse, not better. The council needs fresh blood and new ideas.”

There was a long silence. Tallia looked from Esea to her seated twin, Hingis, who had been kicked by a mule as a boy. His head and upper body were as ugly and misshapen as she was perfectly formed; the left side of his chest was caved in and his face was a tilt-boned monstrosity. It was not a mirror to the inside.

“The Magister can’t resign,” said Esea. “He or she can only be dismissed by the council or —”

“Die in office,” said Tallia. “Too bad! I’m going. That’s why I invited you two to this meeting.”

“Why?” Esea repeated.

“I’m going home to Crandor.”

“But you’ve lived in Thurkad for as long as I’ve known you. Longer.”

“And I hate the place.” A tremor crept into Tallia’s voice and for once she did not try to conceal it. “My soul aches for my homeland: the tropic heat, the warm torrential rain, the wild and fecund jungle.” She looked away and said softly, “And even more for my family. I can’t bear it any longer.”

“What will you do there?” said Esea.

“I don’t have the faintest idea.” Tallia stared through the grimy window as if she could pierce the distance to Crandor, four hundred leagues north. “Ryarin’s murder tore the heart out of me. We were childhood sweethearts, did you know?”

“I didn’t,” said Esea. “I’m so sorry.”

“We made promises to one another, and I kept putting him off – and he was killed because of what I am. I keep asking myself why I stayed here, and what it’s all been for… and I have no answers.”

“But we need you. In a corrupt world, a strong, decent Magister really matters.”

“Thurkad would be better off if I’d been as ruthless as my predecessor. Anyway, I want children and I’m running out of time.”

“You can have a family and still be Magister.”

A faint drumming sounded in Tallia’s head. She rubbed her tired eyes. She was always tired these days.

“The role of Magister is all-consuming. No one can do both.” She kneaded her forearm. “My mind is made up.”

“But who’s going to replace you?” cried Esea.

Tallia glanced at Hingis, who used words as sparingly as gold tells, as if each syllable came at a cost and had to matter. Despite his ugliness, or perhaps because of it, he was a master illusionist so grounded in reality that he never succumbed to the lure of his art.

She had often heard Esea plead with him to fashion himself a more pleasing likeness. Perhaps she, afflicted by the rarest kind of beauty, truly believed such an illusion would help him, but Hingis always refused. Though hideous and in constant pain, he bore his affliction with a serenity his sister could not hope to echo.

Tallia, now uncertain, weighed their fitness. Hingis’s illusions could make beauty from ugliness, something from nothing, order from disorder. But could a little, sickly man make peace between the warring factions who would rise as soon as she resigned?

Esea was his antithesis in the Secret Art as well. As a reshaper – a master of transforming matter from one form to another – she refashioned reality as well as he did illusion. Did she work so hard at her art because of the childhood dare that had led to Hingis’s maiming and the guilt she could never escape?

Neither Hingis nor Esea could be Magister on their own. Their true worth lay in their ability to combine their separate arts – the shaping of both illusion and reality – into spells far greater than the sum of their parts. Mancers were rarely able to work together, and the twins’ ability to do so made them invaluable. They were Tallia’s worthy successors – as long as nothing ever came between them.

Hingis remained silent apart from the rasp of each indrawn breath into his good lung. He was hard to read.

“You don’t have anything to say?” said Tallia, meeting his golden-brown eyes.

“You’re impossible to replace.” He spoke deliberately, in a hoarse and breathless voice, for the misshapen jaw and withered left lung made speaking an effort. “You’ve given your all to Santhenar, and we’ll miss you. I wish you joy in your new life.”

“But who will lead us?” Esea repeated.

“That’s up to the council,” said Tallia. “Though if you’re willing to take the Magistership on I’ll argue for you.”

“I can’t do it!” cried Esea. “I don’t deserve it.”

“I meant the two of you.”

“It’d never work. We’re not ready.”

Tallia had not expected this. Esea was the reckless one, constantly trying to prove herself. Why was she being so timid? Had Tallia made a terrible mistake? She had no other candidate; the local councillors were utterly unworthy, and the others were far off and seldom made the long journey to Thurkad. “No one is ever ready to be Magister. I certainly wasn’t when Mendark was slain.”

“But you’d been his assistant for years.”

“You and Hingis have been my assistants for four years,” said Tallia. “May I put your names forward?”

Hingis exchanged glances with his sister and something unsaid passed between them, perhaps each agreeing because they felt the other wished it.

Esea nodded stiffly. “You’ll stay to help us with the transition. A month? Two, even?”

“The new Magister needs a clean start,” said Tallia. “Whether you two are confirmed as joint Magister or someone else is elected, my time is over. When I walk out of the council meeting, I’m leaving Thurkad.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes.”

“For good?” Finally Hingis showed some emotion.

“Crandor is two months away by ship. I don’t expect to come back.” She smoothed down her shoulder-length black hair, now threaded with silver, and took a deep breath. “We’re late. Let’s go in.”

Hingis levered himself from his chair. His curved spine left him no taller than his sister. Tallia, lean and long-legged, towered over them both. She headed down the long hall to the iron-bound double doors of the council chamber, eased the left door open and stopped, looking into the vast room. Another Magister might have thrust the doors wide to crash back against the inner wall, but it was not her way to make entrances.

Seven councillors were seated at the table, a massive construction of ebony wood twenty feet long, six feet wide and weighing half a ton. They were bickering, as usual. Petty fools! There wasn’t a man or woman here she would miss, not even her occasional allies, the triple-chinned glutton Lemmo Avury and squat, sour Cantha Pluvior. How could she have wasted a quarter of her life weaving paths through their small-minded opposition? She hoped she never saw them again.

The drumming sounded again, louder than before. Tallia surveyed the hall behind them, which was empty save for a pair of bent-backed clerks lugging armloads of journals on some pointless errand.

“What’s that noise?” she said.

“Can’t hear anything,” said Esea.

“It’s a thumping sound in my head,” said Hingis, “and I don’t like it.”

Tallia put the niggle out of her mind. “Evening, Lestry,” she said to the guard on the door. There were fresh bruises on his kindly face. “Long day?”

“Too long, Magister, but there’s no help for it.”

“We’ll be quick tonight. You’ll be home with your kids by eight.” And your nigah-addicted shrew of a wife, poor man. Nigah, the narcotic bark of a tropical tree, stained the teeth black, and its addicts were violent and unpredictable.

“Thank you, Magister.”

She passed her knife to him, and her staff. He put them in the Magister’s compartment of the weapons cabinet. She went in and sat at the head of the table, nodding to the councillors. Hingis and Esea took their positions further along. Tallia looked down at her brown hands. Was she doing the right thing? Or selfishly putting her own interests above the welfare of Thurkad and the west?

Could Hingis, crippled as he was, and Esea, whose reckless streak seemed to grow worse each day, take her place? Or would one of the other councillors seize control and undo what little good she’d done in her decade as Magister? Tallia’s resolve faltered. No, she had to stop finding excuses to cling to the past. No one was irreplaceable. It was long past time to go.

The drumming grew louder. Hingis clapped his hands over his ears; his broken face was twisted in pain. Esea stared at him, uncomprehending.

An argument broke out between Cantha and Rebnell, a red-faced little man with a big black mole on his chin. He slammed a fist down on the ebony table and cursed her, using the foullest oaths Tallia had ever heard. Cantha punched him in the face, squashing his tiny nose flat.

“Stop it!” yelled Tallia. “What’s the matter with everyone today?”

A heavy thump on the locked door at the far end of the chamber. Boom! The door went skidding across the granite flagstones, its iron hinges squealing and leaving a trail of sparks in its wake. Splinters peppered the window drapes, the table and the councillors.

A band of armed men surged in, followed by a rail-thin mancer wearing a purple mask and one of those parchment-yellow cloaks she kept seeing on the street. Purple and yellow – what did that remind her of? Tallia leaped up, cursing her rule that weapons be left outside. She was a master of both armed and unarmed combat but there were far too many of them.

She kicked her chair aside, extended her right arm and cast a block on the running troops, who piled up as though they had run into a wall. The masked mancer directed his staff at her. Zzztt! Tallia’s knees buckled and her block failed.

“Cut her down!” he roared. His voice was vaguely familiar.

Rebnell, who was at the far end of the table closest to the intruders, fell out of his chair, struggled to his feet, stumbled a few steps and was killed by so violent a blow that his little head struck the floor fifteen feet away, spinning like a top and spraying blood in all directions. Cantha was quicker but it did not avail her – a barrel-chested brute of a soldier thrust his sword through her chest and out her back. It made a ghastly crunching sound. He jerked the blade out, shouldered the falling body aside and ran at Hingis.

Esea let out a scream of fury and extended her hands towards the soldier. His bloody sword glowed red and smoked as the blood burned away, then went blue-white and turned to molten steel in his hand. He howled, clutched his charred hand, and began to scream and dance as the boiling metal ate through his boots. The reek of burning leather caught in Tallia’s nostrils.

Though only half his size, Esea ran at him in a reckless fury. “No one touches my brother!”

She slammed a chair into his face and he went down, kicking and screaming, his boots and feet ablaze.

“Kill Tallia, the monstrosity and the blonde bitch first,” bellowed the mancer. “Then all the others. Make damn sure they’re dead. Then secure the library, the council’s spell vault and the secret archives.”

Three ruffians advanced on Tallia in a coordinated attack, one from the front and one from either side. She blasted the first man off his feet, kicked the second in the belly and the third in the throat. But as more troops stormed through the door she realised it was hopeless.

“Out!” she panted, shoving the surviving council members towards the main doors. “Run, you damned fools!”

As she turned back to face their attackers a muscle-bound fellow with protruding ears shot out from underneath the table. He propelled himself to his feet and thrust up at her with a yellow-clotted blade. Tallia twisted away but not in time. Icy pain speared through her shoulder as the point struck her right collarbone, slid through the flesh beneath and jammed against her shoulder blade.

She kicked him in the kneecap. He hopped back, grimacing, but did not fall. Blood poured from her wound, then a stinging numbness spread across her shoulder and her right arm flopped by her side, useless.

In the past Tallia had taken worse injuries, but numbness was spreading down her right side and up her neck. It did not feel like any spell she had encountered before. The yellow muck on the blade must have been poison.

Behind her she heard screams and the explosive gush of someone vomiting. Were the rest of the councillors being butchered? She did not have the strength to turn her head. She felt an immense sense of failure. How had her network of spies and informers, supposedly the best in the land, not warned her of this plot?

The muscle-bound thug swung his sword back and Tallia knew she was going to die.