The Story So Far

Note: This is a detailed summary of book 1, Shadow of a Dead God. It contains ALL THE SPOILERS. If you don’t want that book spoiled, don’t read this!

Mennik (Nik) Thorn is a jobbing mage-for-hire in the city of Agatos. He is neither particularly talented not particularly powerful, and he gets by with minor jobs like breaking curses, finding lost pets, and spying on cheating spouses. When we meet Nik, he is holed up in a kitchen cupboard in the grand house of Galena Sunstone and her husband, hired to find ghosts that she believes are haunting her home. After three nights, Nik is sure doesn’t exist. But he needs the money, and he needs the work.

Returning home after another fruitless, uncomfortable night, Nik finds his best friend Benny, an inveterate thief, waiting for him. Benny wants Nik to help him steal from the high mage, Carnelian Silkstar. Nik owes his friend a favour, and debts are important to Benny, so Nik reluctantly agrees. Together, they break in to Silkstar’s palace, but in the course of the theft, Nik triggers a magical booby trap, which knocks him unconscious. When he comes to, he and Benny are arrested by the Ash Guard in the person of Captain Meroi Gale. The Ash Guard are the police for mages and supernatural entities, and they wear a magic-deadening Ash on their skin, proof against even the most powerful mages.

But things are only about to get worse for Nik and Benny. At exactly the same time as the booby trap went off, Silkstar’s master servant was brutally murdered in the next room, and Nik has been blamed. Nik soon figures out he has been set up, but the evidence is against him. Although he is released, he remains the prime suspect. Benny, meanwhile, is being held by the City Watch for burglary. Nik knows he must clear their names.

He visits Benny in his City Watch cell, and Benny reveals that he was hired to carry out the burglary at the specific time and place. Worse still, the man who hired him works for the Wren, a second high mage who rules the city’s criminal underworld. They may have been set up as part of an attack by the Wren on his rival high mage. Benny cautions Nik against interfering with the Wren’s plans, but Nik knows it may be the only way to clear their names.

Nik has a few hours before he is due to meet Benny’s contact, but his attempt to snatch some sleep is interrupted when he is attacked by a mage named Enne Lowriver, who is an acolyte of the city’s third high mage, the Countess. She warns Nik off from investigating what happened at Silkstar’s palace. (We will later discover that the Countess is Nik’s estranged mother, and that Nik blames her for the trauma of his upbringing and training.)

Nik goes to meet Benny’s contact, but he is too late, and he finds the man murdered in the same brutal fashion as Silkstar’s servant. Nik believes whoever is behind the original murder is cleaning house.

As he’s still broke, Nik returns to his ghost-hunting job and his increasingly frustrated clients. Believing that the house is not haunted, Nik falls asleep, and when he misses the appearance of the ghosts, he is fired.

Nik is able to trade a future favour for information about the murdered servant from Squint, one of the Wren’s information brokers. He discovers that the servant was in debt to the Wren, and Nik wonders if this compromised position led to her murder, although he doesn’t know if the information points more to Carnelian Silkstar or the Wren as the murderer. An interview with the murdered servant’s family leads Nik to learn that something had been bothering Silkstar recently and that a mage had interrogated the family several days ago while magically disguising her identity. In need of help, Nik goes to the Ash Guard. Captain Gale is sceptical of his theories, but she does let on that Silkstar had recently scored a business coup and had taken over a large part of the Wren’s business. She emphasises that Nik is still the Guard’s prime suspect in the murder.

To find out more about the business coup, Nik turns to a friend, Elosyn, who works at Nuil’s Coffee House, where most of the city’s business deals are done. She promises to look into it but warns that information is hard to come by since the murder.

Nik returns to the Sunstone house, determined to either get his job back. When he gets there, though, he finds that the Sunstones have employed a priest to exorcise the ghosts. Nik is invited to watch to “see what you should have done”. But when the priest attempts to exorcise the ghosts, they transform into a gigantic beast, filled with impossible power, and tear the priest apart. Nik only just manages to fight the beast off. He is shocked by the violence and bloodshed, but he notices that the wounds to the priest are exactly the same as the wounds on the murdered servant and Benny’s dead contact. Somehow, the ghosts in the Sunstones’ house are linked to those other murders.

Determined to find out more, Nik visits Agatos University, where he was briefly a student before being kicked out. The scholar he meets offers to find Nik’s information, but only in exchange for Nik raising the dead body of the founder of Agatos, the Godkiller, Agate Blackspear. Nik refuses. He does not have many lines he won’t cross, but raising the dead is one of them.

With Benny’s trial for burglary due to start and with Nik being his only witness for defence, Nik returns to the city. But on the way, he is attacked by a group of mages led by Enne Lowriver. He is knocked unconscious, and when he awakes, he finds himself in the Countess’s palace. Although Nik and his mother grew up in the Warrens, the poorest part of the city of Agatos, when his mother gained the power of a high mage, she reinvented herself as the Countess and took control of the city’s senate. She has always been frustrated by Nik’s lack of power and ambition. Now she is furious that he ignored her instructions to abandon his investigation. She tells him there is a new power in Agatos that he is not equipped to deal with. Nik refuses her offer to clear his name in exchange for returning to work for her and abandoning Benny to his fate. The meeting ends badly, and now Nik has missed his best friend’s trial.

When he returns home, he finds Sereh, Benny’s terrifying and deadly eleven-year-old daughter waiting for him. She tells him that, under pressure from Silkstar, Benny has been sentenced to death for his part in the burglary. Sereh blames Nik. Nik knows he will have to spring Benny from gaol, and he comes up with a dangerous plan to do so.

With the help of his half-sister, Mica, who he has scarcely seen for the last five years, Nik creates a spell to hide himself from the City Watch’s view. Mica is a far more powerful mage than Nik, but she still works for the Countess, and she too tries to persuade Nik to return to the Countess’s service for his safety.

Once Benny is freed, he will need to hide from Silkstar’s magic. With Sereh’s help, Nik steals Ash from Captain Gale – a crime that will lead to his own death if he is caught. Meanwhile, Squint calls in Nik’s earlier debt: he will have to steal information from his mother to pass on to the Wren. Nik is reluctant. He never wants to see his mother again, and he can’t bear the thought of re-joining her household in order to get that information.

Nik breaks Benny out of the City Watch cells, and Benny goes into hiding. Nik returns to the Sunstone house in order to deal with the ghosts permanently.

Nik waits in the cellar for the ghosts, and when they appear, he traps them. But when he attempts to dispose of them, they once again transform into a gigantic, ghostly beast, which begins to break through his defences. Nik manages to destroy the artifacts maintaining the ghosts, and the creature disappears.

Having completed his job and been paid, Nik returns home only to find he has been evicted on the orders of the Wren, who is angry that Nik has not yet repaid his debt. Nik is forced to move into Benny’s home, having nowhere else to go. Nik’s contact, Elosyn, finally brings him information about Carnelian Silkstar’s business dealings, and he discovers that one merchant lost almost everything to Silkstar: Sunstone, the man whose ghosts he has just exorcised. Nik finally has a link between the murder of Silkstar’s servant, the ghost-beast in Sunstone’s house, and his own involvement. He is sure Sunstone set him up to take the fall.

Nik and Sereh follow Sunstone to a poorer part of town known as the Stacks and see him meet with the mage Enne Lowriver, leading Nik to wonder if his mother is behind the whole thing.

Nik visits Mica to find out more information on Lowriver, but while he is there, the Ash Guard turn up to arrest Nik. There has been another magical murder, using the same method as the previous ones, and this time the victim is Sunstone. Nik realises that, despite what he believed, he has not got rid of the ghost-beast after all. He manages to persuade Captain Gale to give him one last chance to find out who is behind the murders.

Leaving Sereh in Mica’s care, Nik returns to the Stacks and searches the house he had seen Lowriver enter. It is mostly empty, but in a magically guarded safe, Nik finds evidence of some powerful magical artifact. There is a symbol marked there that Nik knows he recognises, but he can’t recall from where. He is interrupted in his search by the return of Lowriver. He flees, but Lowriver summons ghosts from the streets, and each in turn is possessed by the ghost-beast. Nik eventually manages to escape and goes looking for Benny. Nik is now sure Lowriver is behind the murders, but he still doesn’t know why or how she is doing it. Nik finally recalls where he saw the symbol before: on a book in Sunstone’s house.

Benny and Nik return to Sunstone’s house where they find the book. Galena Sunstone widow tells them that her husband Lowriver were part of a secret cult worshipping an ancient, now-dead beast god. Sunstone had been involved in the plot against Silkstar in revenge for his lost business.

Nik and Benny go to Mica for help in tracking down Lowriver, but when they get there, they find Mica has been drawn away on a fake errand and the house has been attacked by mages in service to Lowriver. Sereh has been kidnapped, and Lowriver has left a message that Nik and Benny should come to find her at Silkstar’s palace, alone and without Ash to help them. They are outclassed, but they have no choice. Nik sends the stolen Ash back to Captain Gale, and together he and Benny obey.

When they reach the palace, they find that Silkstar and all his mages have been killed in a battle with ghost of the dead god. While Sunstone only wanted revenge for his lost business, Lowriver wants to replace Silkstar as high mage.

Faced with Lowriver’s overwhelming power, there is little Nik or Benny can do, but they do manage to distract the mage long enough for Sereh to knife her and escape. Lowriver sends the beast god after Nik. He can’t fight it, so he flees through the palace, pursued by it. Meanwhile, Benny allows himself to be captured by Lowriver, and while she is focused on sending her tame god to attack Nik, Benny steals the artifact used to summon the god. He swallows the artifact, breaking the link, and god disappears. Injured by Sereh’s knife and without the god to back her up, Lowriver flees, but she is too late. Captain Gale has tracked Nik down, and the Ash Guard captain kills Lowriver.

Nik and Benny have cleared their names, but as penance for stealing the Ash, Captain Gale tasks Nik with reporting to her any other magical threats that occur in the city and finding a replacement high mage now that Silkstar is dead. We leave the story with Nik receiving a threat from the Wren: repay the debt now or suffer the consequences.