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The war with the Mageworlds is over. Now it's time for the real struggle to begin.

Freebooter at heart, spacer by trade, Beka Rosselin-Metadi doesn't want to hear about her father whose rugged generalship held back the Mageworlds--or her highborn mother whose leadership has held the galaxy together ever since. Beka pilots spacecraft--as far from her famous family as possible, thanks very much.

Then Beka's mother is assassinated on the Senate floor, and her father offers her Warhammer, prize ship from his own freebooting youth--if she'll use it to deliver the assassins to him "off the books."

Looking for assassins has a tendency to make assassins look for you. In short order Beka's arranged her own very public death and adopted a new identity; now all she has to do is leave a trail of kidnappings and corpses across five star systems, and blow the roof off the strongest private fortress in the Galaxy. If her own family can just get off her case long enough...!

Blockaded, Restricted, And Forgotten--The Mageworlds would never threaten the Republic again.

A broken and drifting ship, it's long-dead captain still strapped in the command seat: that's what free-spacers call a starpilot's grave. When one of these derelict craft appears in the net, the artificial barrier zone separating the Republic from the Mageworlds, the discovery is no accident. It's a sign, a warning that the Mageworlds have not forgotten the Republic--and the Magelords make long plans.

But the Magelords weren't planning on Beka Rosselin-Metadi.

Beka has unfinished business to take care of, and his name is Ebenra D'Caer: the man who arranged her mother's murder. D'Caer is safe--he thinks--hidden amoung the Mages on the far side of the Net. Flying under a false name and false colors, beka penetrates the Magezone and finds more than anyone expected: the Magelords have discovered a fatal weakness in the Republic's defenses, and are poised to wreak their vengeance on the hated enemy.

The Mages are too strong. They must prevail.

Unless one woman in one ship can do the impossible.

Galcen has fallen. The Space Force is broken and scattered. the planets of the former Republic are rushing to make peace with the victorious Mages.

All that remains is mopping up. Minor details. A privateer or two, a few Adepts who remain alive and on the run, and the hereditary ruler of a lifeless planet.

Beka Rosselin-Metadi, the last Domina of Lost Entibor, possesses little more than a famous name and a famous ship. With them she must salvage what she can from the wreckage of the Republic. Her enemies are too many to count, her friends too few to make a difference. She can trust no one except herself, her crew--and the family she ran away from years before.

Beka has resources few suspect: a hidden base, a long forgotten oath, and a dead man's legacy. But she has problems as well; for in a universe gone mad, neither friends nor enemies are all that they may seem.

A play that began in treachery and blood five hundred years before has reached its final act. A broken galaxy will be sundered forever, or else made whole.

The Magelords are plundering the civilized galaxy one planet at a time. First their scoutships appeared above the outplanets. Raiding parties followed, then whole armadas bent on loot and conquest. The Mages break the warfleets that oppose them. They take entire planets. Who can stop them? Now, the Mages have attacked Entibor--that was their first mistake.

It's a generation after the Second Magewar, and again power struggles threaten the Mageworlds and the Republic alike. Now, on decadent Kheset, the crisis has broken, and all eyes are turned to Jens Metadi-Jessan D'Rosselin, scion of the Galaxy's most rambunctious family and unwilling heir to the throne of Khesat. But Jens is off on his own Grand Tour of the Galaxy, getting the adventure he's looking for--and more.

The star systems of the Mageworlds are linked by magic. Only when trained Mages have found a Way to a new world can the great colonizing and trading ships follow. But beyond the furthest worlds is a great gap, beyond which, hint the legends, lie vast, rich human worlds long lost to the Mages' trade.

Now the most powerful Mage-circle ever is determined to walk to those worlds, to reunite humanity's sundered branches and make a fortune in the process. And young Arekhon sus-Khalgath, scion of the most powerful of the clans of starship builders, has left his inheritance to join them.

But immense forces are arrayed against them. Blood will be spilled, and dynasties thrown down, before the worlds of mankind are again united. For the first time in living memory, the Mages will go to war--with themselves.

The new novel in the sweeping Mageworlds series.

On the planet Entibor, Arekhon sus-Khalgath sus Peledaen has found shelter and domestic tranquility with his old love, Elaeli Inadi, at the price of what he had left behind: a dispersed and shattered Mage-Circle, an estranged brother who had tried to kill him, and a homeworld on the cusp of massive cultural upheaval.

Arekhon finds himself impelled homeward by strange dreams and prophetic visions. The Great Working--the effort to do the unthinkable and reunite a galaxy long sundered by the Gap Between--remains incomplete, left unfinished in the aftermath of the dissolution of Arehkon's Mage-Circle. But too much energy and too many lives have been poured into the Working already; and it cannot end so long as any of the Circle members remain alive and bound into it.

Home, unfortunately, isn't a safe place for Arehkon to be at the moment. For Eraasi has changed--and the great fleet families at the center of the Eraasian culture are girding for war.