PROLOGUE
It was when the bishop found a dead child talking to him, just before a funeral service in the House of Auros in the city of Dzu that he knew he could not escape.
At night the eyes bore into him, like lancing points of fire from the dark. His allegiance was demanded. His beliefs made a mockery of. A voice whispered in his dreams.
And it was true, and he knew it. His faith was gone. There was no Auros, no benevolent center of the world. Even the House of Auros in tumbledown Dzu was a fraud. It was, in fact, the ancient Temple of the serpent god, Sephis. It had been turned over to the priests of Auros a few centuries before, when Sephis lost his hold upon Ourdh and the tyrant rule of Dzu was thrown down.
But the bishop of Auros in Dzu had dabbled in the Dark Arts. He had delved in the black books of the Masters. He had begun experiments. To escape censure from a disastrous situation involving a monkey, a highborn young woman, and an attempt to exchange their consciousnesses, he had taken a terrible oath to the mystery man who had saved him from disaster.
Now they had come to him for their payment.
The dead child refused to be buried. It lingered in the bishop's chambers.
"They are waiting for you," it announced. It led him to the front door of the Temple.
The skull-faced man who called himself the high priest, Odirak, was waiting, accompanied by a man hidden in a voluminous black cloak. Behind this figure came a girl of perhaps seventeen years, wearing nothing but a cotton shift. She was slack-mouthed, benumbed by an enchantment.
The bishop let them into the House of Auros and then opened the heavy gate that shut away the basement. They went down into the great chamber of the pit, and the man in the cloak pulled back his hood. The bishop quailed. The man's face ended at the nose, all below was a glistening expanse of horn. The pale, naked scalp rose above eyes that were like windows onto a place of fire.
The dead child giggled, and the bishop's skin crawled.
The bishop knew that this was a Mesomaster, most powerful of all the acolytes of the Masters themselves. Never had the bishop dreamed that he might come to this pass.
With harsh phrases of power, the thing summoned a Black Mirror out of nothingness. It hung there in the air, a gleaming circle in which the grey shining backwash of chaos surged. At the Mesomaster's command, the mirror floated downward and arranged itself at knee height. The girl lay down, her eyes, mercifully, were quite blank. The dead child held a razor in its hand.
The bishop thought back to his disastrous experiment. What a fool he had been! Once again he wondered if he had been guided to the black arts, whether the enemy had known of some weakness in him that could be worked on to finally trap him.
The dead child slit the girl's throat, and tilted her head to spread her blood across the non-surface of the Black Mirror. It smoked and ...

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