The People's Covenant and God's Hammer have raged a Cold War that has lasted for over twenty years. A war without armies, where battles are fought in the dark and information is the most dangerous weapon. In this world -which sometimes seems the Middle Ages, sometimes the Renaissance and sometimes the Nineteenth Century- lives Yaxtor Brandan, empirical adept at the service of the Queen of Albone. A relentless, amoral and unscrupulous character, Yaxtor fights to recover his own past as he tries to prevent a new player in the espionage game to end the world, as he knows it."