"I'm sorry, Lead Wizard, but that simply will not do," Shailiha said with mock compassion, placing a card down on top of Wigg's. "Dreng!" she said happily, easing herself back into her chair. Faegan's team had easily taken the hand.

Wigg's first reaction was to turn angrily around and search for Caprice, Shailiha's giant butterfly. The violet-and-yellow flier of the fields was never far from her mistress; sure enough she was perched quietly on a bookcase behind Shailiha, calmly opening and closing her wings. It was obvious that the flier could not have been reading Wigg's cards, silently informing the princess via the mental bond they possessed. Still unable to find evidence of Faegan's cheating, the frustrated lead wizard scowled menacingly.

Tristan was an excellent dreng player, but his interest was quickly waning. Hopefully Shawna the Short would arrive soon, announcing in that no-nonsense way of hers that dinner was served.

"Admit it!" Wigg insisted.

One corner of his mouth coming up, Tristan looked over at the lead wizard's craggy profile. At the back of Wigg's neck, the gray hair was pulled into a short braid. His "wizard's tail" had been sadistically cut away by the first mistress of the Coven during her vicious torture of him, the first time he and Tristan had visited Parthalon. Tristan had long suspected that Wigg would grow it back out of respect for the members of the Directorate, all of whom had perished at the sorceresses' hands, and he had been right.

"How do you know Faegan is cheating, Father?" Celeste asked, interrupting the prince's thoughts. He caught her giving a secret wink across the table to Shailiha. "Just what is it you think he is doing?"

"He is no doubt employing the craft to deal invisibly from the bottom of the deck." Wigg sniffed, narrowing his eyes as Faegan again took up the cards.

Faegan dealt the cards out once more. He then looked briefly at both sides of his cards, arranged them to his liking, and cast his sharp eyes over at Wigg's hand. Then he smiled impishly.

"If I wanted to change the nature of your cards, I wouldn't choose such a banal, pedestrian method of doing it," he said. "Instead, I would probably do something more inventive. Something like this…"

He closed his eyes, and a soft, azure glow began to surround Wigg's cards. In a matter of mere moments, all of the courtly characters displayed upon them, dressed in their customary finery, had been drastically altered.

They were now quite naked, leaving very little to the imagination.

Everyone around the table broke into raucous laughter-except for Wigg.

"This is the last straw!" the lead wizard shouted, tossing his useless cards to the table. "I think it's high time I-"

Then, quite suddenly, Wigg stopped talking. At first Tristan thought it was out of pure frustration. But then the lead wizard stiffened and rose up a bit in his chair. Raising one hand to silence the table, he tilted his head.

The prince glanced over at Faegan, to see a concerned look darkening his face, as well. Faegan looked at Wigg and nodded. Tristan had seen this signal pass between the two wizards before, and it usually meant only one thing: They had sensed the presence of endowed blood-unfamiliar endowed blood.

Reaching down to the floor for his dreggan, Tristan slid the blade from its scabbard.

A glow was forming.

In one of the far corners of the room, where the ceiling formed a joint with two connecting walls, the familiar azure glow of the craft was coalescing. When it took up the entire corner, its outline started to sharpen.

Standing slowly, Tristan raised his sword. Faegan, his back to the glow, turned his chair to see whatever it was. Finally everyone in the room was gazing on the anomaly.

The image continued to form hauntingly. Finally, the azure glow faded away and the shape became clear.

A man hung there like a spider, face to the card players, the fingertips and balls of his feet touching the ceiling and walls behind him.

Suddenly he spread his arms wide and launched himself from the wall, landing upright in the exact center of the table. Playing cards went flying high into the air. Shailiha and Celeste recoiled back into their chairs.

Tristan didn't hesitate. He swung the dreggan for all he was worth, sending its razor-sharp edge whistling through the air in an attempt to cut the intruder's legs off at the knees.

The figure before them only laughed and jumped into the air, easily avoiding Tristan's blade.

Both Wigg and Faegan had raised their arms to employ the craft, but the man standing before them was too fast. Another glow had already begun to form, engulfing the entire table and everyone around it. Tristan tried to lunge at the intruder-only to discover that he was frozen in place. All he could move was his head. He could hear, and he somehow felt sure that he still commanded the power of speech. But he could not move a muscle from his neck down. A glance at the others told him that they, too, were caught in the paralyzing warp. Tristan wondered frantically. He could not fathom how the man had so silently, invisibly breached the security of the palace, evading the hundreds of Minion warriors who were camped outside.

The intruder was tall and gaunt, with a face to match. Straight, stringy locks of pure white hair fell down from the crown of the man's skull. It was somewhat longer than shoulder length, except for the ragged bangs that covered most of his forehead. But despite the white hair, his age did not seem advanced. Studying the face, Tristan guessed the man to be no more than forty-five Seasons of New Life.

His skin was pale, almost gray. Dark brows arched over piercing eyes; the cheekbones were high and elegant. The nose was large, and aquiline. Thin lips formed the straight slash that was his mouth. The cheeks were deeply creased and hollow; the jaw was strong. Taken as a whole the face conveyed tightly controlled intelligence and power.

The man was dressed in a full-length robe of two colors, divided down the center. The left-hand side was gray, the color once worn by the Directorate of Wizards and still worn by Wigg. The right-hand side was the dark blue worn by the Brotherhood of Consuls.

Unexpectedly, the man began to cough.

His hacking began softly, but quickly built in intensity. He finally produced a rag from his robes and covered his mouth briefly. It came away bloody. The sudden sign of illness in the same man who had just executed such clever acrobatics and the lightning-swift construction of a powerful wizard's warp seemed contradictory indeed.

"Forgive me, Wigg," the man said sarcastically once his coughing had subsided. Looking down at the lead wizard, he placed his hands into the opposite sleeves of his robe. "My entrance was unexpected, I know. But given the numbers of Minion warriors camped outside, it seemed the only sensible way. I may be ill, but I have no desire to die sooner than necessary. And what I have come to say will not take long." His voice was controlled and deep.

Wigg gazed at him in amazement. Working his jaw, he found he was being allowed to speak.

"Krassus," he whispered. "So you live." He narrowed his eyes, taking in the man's strange, two-colored robe. "And you still wear the robe of first alternate. Can we therefore assume it is you we now have to thank for so many of our problems?"

Tristan could move his eyes just enough to look over at Faegan. It was clear that the ancient crippled wizard did not know this man.

"That is correct," Krassus said. "But our relationship does not have to be adversarial. I have, in fact, come to offer you a truce. That part of it will depend entirely on you, Lead Wizard. I have come for information, and I intend to have it."

"Who are you?" Faegan broke in. "What do you want?"

Krassus looked toward the voice, and a brief smile of recognition crawled across his face.