The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  However, magic used forcefully against another always rebounds. Both Families’ wizards, who call themselves Wolves, expected to strike unprepared targets with their spells, and have readied sacrifices sufficient to buffer that amount of rebound, but their attacks hit each other at the same time, and the magic feeds back on them. It overwhelms their sacrifices, breaks out of the boundaries with which they controlled it, and wipes out the majority of both Families’ Wolves.

  It simultaneously does two other things as well, both seemingly irrelevant but both destined to change the face of the world of Matrin and the lives of everyone in it. First, the magical blast sends a shock wave across the face of the planet—a wave that wakes an artifact called the Mirror of Souls. The Mirror is a beautiful and complex creation designed by the Ancients before the end of the Wizards’ War a thousand years earlier, and it has been waiting for just such a powerful rewhah, or rebound wave, for rewhah demonstrates that the world has returned to the use of magic . . . and more importantly, magic of the right sort. The Mirror awakens the souls it holds within its soulwell, and they reach out to people who might be able to help them.

  Second, the rewhah horribly Scars a young girl named Danya Galweigh, a cousin of Kait’s, who has been held for ransom by the Sabirs and who is used as a sacrifice by the Sabir Wolves when the Galweighs fail to meet the ransom. Danya is changed beyond recognition, and the baby she unknowingly carries, a baby conceived through rape and torture during her capture, is changed, too, but in more subtle ways. The force of the rewhah throws Danya into the icy southern wastes of the Veral Territories, where, were it not for the help of a mysterious spirit who calls himself Luercas, she would die.

  Kait, sensitive to magic, is knocked unconscious by the rewhah blast as she and her uncle Dùghall and her cousin Tippa are escaping from Halles via airible; Kait awakens alone to find that someone has hidden her in the airible’s hold, and that the airible has landed in Galweigh House, but her Family’s House is in Sabir hands and many of her Family have already been executed. She steals the airible and flies it to the nearby island of Goft, where the Galweigh Family has other holdings, hoping to get help. However, the head of this lesser branch of the Galweigh Family sees the demise of the main branch as his chance to advance, and he orders Kait killed. A spirit voice claiming to be her long-dead ancestor warns her of the treachery, and she escapes again, this time after stealing money from the House treasury.

  The spirit tells her another way she can hope to aid her Family, even though it says they are now all dead. Following its advice, she hires a ship from the Goft harbor to take her across the ocean in search of the Mirror of Souls. The spirit tells her that this ancient artifact will allow her to reclaim her murdered Family from the dead. She enlists the aid of the captain by telling him she is going in search of the undiscovered ruins of one of the Ancients’ lost cities. Such a place would make any man’s fortune, so Captain Ian Draclas takes her on as a passenger and sails immediately.

  Onboard the ship she runs into a man named Hasmal rann Dorchan, whom she met briefly on the night of the party celebrating her cousin’s upcoming marriage. Hasmal, a wizard of the sect known as the Falcons, had been trying to escape the doom that an oracle had warned would befall him if he associated with Kait. He is not pleased to see her.

  Hasmal’s oracle mocks him and warns that he must teach Kait magic to protect himself. He does, but grudgingly; she learns, but denies the relevance of the shared destiny he claims will send both of them to their doom if she fails to learn his lessons well.

  Kait is plagued by dreams of the Sabir Karnee she met while escaping the Dokteerak House; she becomes certain that he is following her across the sea. To break her obsession with him, she accepts the advances of the ship’s captain, Ian Draclas, and they become lovers. But her obsession only worsens.

  As the ship nears its destination, it sails into the heart of a Wizards’ Circle, a place where magical residue from the Wizards’ War a thousand years before is still so strong that it can affect and control anyone moving within its reach. Hasmal works magic to free the ship, and Kait, in her skinshifted form, saves the life of the captain. In saving the ship and the captain, though, Kait is revealed as a monster and Hasmal as a wizard, and the crew turns against them. They reach the shore and discover the city, but while Kait, Hasmal, Ian, and two of his men set out to retrieve the Mirror of Souls from its distant hiding place, the crew mutinies against the captain and his loyal supporters and maroons them in the unexplored wilds of North Novtierra.

  In Vengeance of Dragons . . .

  Kait, Ian, and Hasmal escape the brutal dangers of the Novtierran wilderness when Ry Sabir, a Karnee son of her Family’s Sabir enemies, rescues them; Kait discovers that the gods have done more meddling in her life when Ry and Ian reveal that they are half-brothers . . . and bitter enemies. They transport the Mirror of Souls across the Bregian Ocean and get close to their goal, but the Goft Galweighs and Sabir House have formed an alliance to acquire the Mirror. They use airibles and magic to attack the Wind Treasure; they kill or capture most of the crew. Kait, Ry, Ian, Hasmal, and Ry’s surviving lieutenants escape in one of the longboats, hidden by Falcon magic, and would have succeeded in getting the Mirror of Souls to safety, except that the Mirror, acting on its own, breaks through their shields with a beacon, drawing the enemy allies to it. Kait is forced to abandon the Mirror to the sea. She and the rest of the longboat’s occupants find refuge on one of the islands of the Thousand Dancers, where she discovers her uncle Dùghall waiting, as he was instructed to do by his magic.

  Meanwhile, Crispin Sabir, Ry’s cousin and a powerful Sabir Wolf, successfully retrieves the Mirror of Souls from the sea, then kills his Galweigh allies. With his ownership of the Mirror undisputed, he returns to Calimekka, where he follows the instructions of the spirit of a long dead Dragon that has been guiding him, and activates the Mirror before a crowd of prayerful Iberans. He does not become immortal as he was led to expect; instead, his soul is ripped from his body and replaced by the soul of the ancient Dragon Dafril. Throughout the city, the freed Dragons choose other young, strong bodies to steal, and the Mirror rips those bodies’ rightful souls away and inserts the souls of the Dragons.

  Kait, Ry, Dùghall, Ian, and Ry’s men sneak into Calimekka in disguise and attempt to locate and reclaim the Mirror. Even though the Dragons have been freed, they hope that by acquiring the Mirror they can reverse the damage it has done. So, pretending to be traders of ancient artifacts, they manage to discover the identities of several Dragons and acquire an idea of where they might find the Mirror of Souls. But Kait, following up on a lead, falls into the hands of both Dragons and Sabirs. They prepare to torture her to find out who she’s working with and what she knows about the Dragon conspiracy to achieve immortality.

  Dùghall and Ian, meanwhile, have located the Mirror of Souls, and Dùghall has discovered the general principle by which it works. Now, watching what is happening to Kait via magic, he creates a miniature version of the Mirror and draws the soul of the Dragon preparing to torture her out of the body it has stolen and traps it in a ring he’d been wearing. However, the man whose body was previously inhabited by the Dragon’s soul isn’t able to save Kait before she throws herself off of the tower.

  Meanwhile, Kait’s cousin Danya, hiding in a Scarred village in the uncharted wastelands of the Veral Territories, gives birth to a son. The baby bears no physical signs of the Scarring that changed Danya from a beautiful young woman to a hideous monster; he does, however, bear the markings of enormous magical power. Further, his mother, once a Galweigh Wolf, has the training to see and feel the newborn’s magical connections to Falcons across the known world. The Falcons’ magical interference, which has enraged Danya since it began, grows more intense once the baby has drawn his first breaths. Luercas tells Danya that the baby is the Reborn, the long-awaited Falcon hero, and that his mission in life is to create a world of enforced peace . . . a world in which Danya will forever be d
enied her revenge against the Sabirs who destroyed her and the Galweighs who failed to rescue her.

  After terrible internal struggle, she chooses to sacrifice her son to prevent him from carrying out his mission. She decides that she must have her revenge. In his dying, her son first attempts through magic to save his own life; then, when it becomes clear that he cannot, he uses what remaining power he has to revert Danya to human form, excluding only the two talons that she drove into his heart. Even at the moment of his death, he loves her and she can feel his love.

  Once he is dead, Luercas—one of the most powerful of the Dragons—claims the infant body for himself. He revives it and uses its inherent magical talents to force Danya to care for him until his new body is physically mature enough to allow him to care for himself.

  Back in Calimekka, Kait, falling from the top of the tower, Shifts frantically, and for the first time in her life she develops wings. Expecting to die, she instead soars to safety; when she returns to the inn where she and the rest of her comrades are hiding, her brush with death has made her realize that she cannot spend whatever time she has hiding from her life. She and Ry become lovers. When Ian discovers this, he leaves the group in secret and offers to sell his knowledge to the Dragons in exchange for power.

  At the same time that Ian is making his deal with the Dragons, the Falcons are shattered by the death of Solander, whose rebirth has been prophesied for a thousand years, and who was supposed to lead the world to a new age of peace and enlightenment. A thousand years of prophecy and an entire magic-based religion have just been destroyed, and many of the faithful take the paths of despair and even suicide. Dùghall gets Ry, Kait, Hasmal, and the surviving lieutenants out of Calimekka when he discovers proof of Ian’s betrayal, but he is certain that the Dragons have won the world—he sinks into despondency. Hasmal and Alarista, the Gyru-nalle Falcon who once saved Hasmal’s life and later became his lover, debate the merits of fleeing east to the unexplored lands of Novtierra, since they, too, are certain that everything is lost. Even Ry, who converted to Falconry after contact with Solander’s love, withdraws.

  Kait Shifts to the Karnee; in beast form she avoids thought and loss. But when she reverts to human form, she is forced to face the fact that Solander’s death has made one thousand years of hope and prophecy a lie. After long thought, she finds hope from this truth instead of despair, for nowhere in the prophecies was Solander’s death ever mentioned as a possibility. Therefore, all prophecies in the Secret Texts become invalid—any guarantees of either Falcon defeat or Dragon ascension to immortality and godhood are equally false. The Falcons have no guarantee that they will win, but neither are they guaranteed defeat because Solander is no longer with them.

  Kait rallies the surviving Falcons and develops a plan—she and Ry will go back to Calimekka and magically mark any Dragons they can find. The Falcons, from the relative safety of their camp in the mountains of southern Ibera, will draw out the Dragons’ souls and trap them in rings, the way Dùghall trapped the first soul when trying to rescue Kait. They will find a way to recapture the Mirror of Souls, too, and as soon as they do, they will reverse the spell the Dragons had cast. They hope doing so will recapture all the Dragons’ souls within the Mirror.

  The first part of their plan goes well: Both Ry and Kait find work within the Dragons’ city-within-a-city in Calimekka, and both mark a number of Dragons. They have no luck finding the new hiding place of the Mirror of Souls, but are patient, trusting that sooner or later they will succeed. However, the Dragons become aware of their presence and take them prisoner.

  Dùghall and Hasmal attempt to rescue Kait and Ry via magic, but the magic backfires—Dùghall is left weak and nearly helpless, while Dafril, the Dragon who wears Crispin Sabir’s body, has the luck to connect with Hasmal. Dafril rips Hasmal’s body and soul from the Falcon camp and deposits him in an interrogation room in the center of the Dragon compound. There Dafril tortures Hasmal; Hasmal manages to mark Dafril with the magic that will allow a Falcon to capture his soul in a ring, but there are no Falcons capable of controlling a soul as powerful as Dafril’s left in the camp.

  While this is going on, Ian replaces the guards watching Kait and Ry, and they are certain that he plans to kill them. Instead, he tells them how he joined the Dragons in order to find the Mirror; he still loves Kait and though he knows he cannot have her, he decided when she chose Ry to do what he could to assist her. He releases both Kait and Ry and the three of them retrieve the Mirror from its hiding place. They haul it to a carriage that Ian has waiting, and the three of them take off for Galweigh House, which had been abandoned once the Dragons created their new city.

  Book One

  Nothing tears at the thoughts like a house abandoned. Its empty rooms whisper of tender memories forgotten, of the ghosts of joy and pain left to wander unheeded, of dreams dead of neglect. Here, where once people lived and loved, brought forth life and faced death, I run my fingers along crumbling masonry and shiver at the unimaginable loss of the unknowable dead, and I flee in dread lest the soul of this forgotten place waken and cling to me and claim me . . . and refuse to let me leave.

  VINCALIS THE AGITATOR,

  FROM THE LAND BEYOND LOSS

  Chapter 1

  A late-season blast of cold wind set the walls of the tent snapping and blew icy mountain air through tied-down flaps. Alarista crouched inside, looking from viewing glass to viewing glass, fighting down panic.

  In two glasses, she had twin views of the inside of a carriage cruising through Calimekka’s narrow back streets—Kait and Ry escaping from the Dragons with the Mirror of Souls. Over the steady clatter of the horses’ hooves she could hear Kait, Ry, and Ian recounting what had happened to each of them since last they’d seen one another.

  In another glass, she could see the remains of some delicate contrivance of crystal spires and silver gears lying in ruins on a worktable. The two voices whispering from that viewing glass were shrill with fear.

  “. . . I just found it this way. Shamenar was in here working on it, and now he’s gone, too. It will be a month’s work at least to restore it, if we can even find Shamenar—”

  “You think they got him?”

  “I don’t want to think. . . .”

  Another glass, another view. Through the eyes of someone running, a long, dark corridor illuminated by the runner’s coldlamp—shadows dancing back, then leaping forward, fantastic shapes crawling up the walls and resolving into mundane objects. The only sound at the moment was the runner’s harsh breathing. Whoever he was, he’d been down four branches of the corridor already, asking the first guard he came to if anyone carrying anything had passed that way.

  A dozen more glasses showed groups of people standing or sitting and talking, or revealed fountains, or gardens, or books or papers being slowly perused. Several glasses were temporarily dark—their sources asleep, or possibly dead. A hundred more glasses were lined to one side, these never activated. With Kait and Ry gone, they probably never would be, but Alarista kept them nearby because doing so was the procedure that Dùghall and Hasmal had worked out. More than once in the past several days a glass had come suddenly to life, and Dùghall or Hasmal had learned something valuable. Until all hope was gone, she would cling to that procedure.

  Hasmal had been gone, she estimated, half a station—snatched bodily from the tent by some unimagined Dragon magic and taken . . . somewhere. So far, not one of the viewing glasses had revealed the view she sought—a glimpse of Hasmal. She whispered an unending prayer to Vodor Imrish, asking that if he still listened and he still loved her he would give Hasmal back. If she could see him, just for an instant, just to know that he was still alive, she would be able to breathe again.

  Hands pulled apart the tent flaps and Yanth slipped between them. He dropped to the tent floor beside Jaim, who had been sitting quietly behind Alarista, offering support simply with his presence. “The healer is on the way,” Yanth told Jaim. “Any sign of Hasmal?”


  Jaim’s voice was soft. “She hasn’t moved, so I don’t think so.”

  Alarista summoned the energy to answer them, just to let them know she could hear them and that she was still aware of the world around her, if only marginally. “No sign yet.”

  “I’m sorry. Is there something I can do to help?”

  “Stay close,” she said. “If anything changes, I might need both of you.”

  The healer came through the flaps a moment later, dragging her kit. She knelt beside Dùghall and unrolled it. The woman was one of Dùghall’s people—part of the army he’d built months earlier. She was a Falcon, older and well trained in the healing magics, and calm enough, considering the circumstances. If he had any chance of getting better, the healer would make the most of it.

  Guards knelt quietly along the tent walls, swords in hand; they hadn’t laughed or joked since Hasmal vanished in a scream and a flash of light. They watched, tense and scared. It had been their responsibility to kill Dùghall or Hasmal if a Dragon soul, drawn through but not successfully locked into one of the miniature soul-mirrors, possessed either of them. Now Dùghall lay unresponsive on one of the mats, and Hasmal was gone, and Alarista had already told them she didn’t have either the strength or the magical skills that had let Dùghall and Hasmal successfully capture so many Dragon souls. They knew that if she took on a Dragon, they were likely to have to kill her.

  A hand gripped her shoulder, and she jumped. “Look!” Yanth whispered, and pointed at one of the viewing glasses that had until that instant been dark.

  She turned to the sudden light, to the quickly resolving image, and she gasped. Hasmal’s face was suddenly very close to her own; it had been cut across both cheeks and over both eyelids, and blood caked the wounds. Always pale, his skin had taken on the color of bleached bone. She could count the beads of sweat that rolled across his forehead and marked his upper lip. “We found a way to make our own Mirror of Souls,” he whispered.