Courage of Falcons (Paperback)

Also available as an eBook

THE SECRET TEXTS
Holly Lisle, the acclaimed author of the #1 Locus bestsellers Diplomacy of Wolves and Vengeance of Dragons, concludes the fantastic epic of The Secret Texts, as a millennium of blood curses, dark conspiracies, and arcane sorceries engulf a world...

THE FINAL BATTLE
The Falcons, a band of fugitive wizards that includes shapeshifters Kait Galweigh and Ry Sabir, struggle to wield ancient magics in their desperate battle against the immortal, soul-devouring necromancers called the Dragons.

At the same time, a thousand tribes of long-banished Scarred declare war on the civilized lands, with a prophesied messiah uniting them into an unstoppable army. Bent on conquest and revenge, the Scarred don't care that their new leader, Luercas, is a being so evil that even the Dragons fear him...

To defeat the Dragons, Kait and Ry must destroy the source of the sorcerers' power-the Mirror of Souls. But if they succeed, they will lose the only weapon that can stop Luercas from becoming a demonic god who will enslave the entire world...forever.

FIGHTING THE DRAGON
The walls shook, and to the invisible accompaniment of ten thousand tortured screams, a cascade of blue light poured into the Mirror and burst from it, slamming into Kait like a man-sized fist. Her arms flew out to her sides, her legs pushed away from each other so hard that both her hips cracked, her lower jaw snapped open and stretched wider and wider, her fingers pushed away from each other, her hair stood on end, her eyeballs pushed outward as if they world crawl from their sockets and flee. Every joint in her body stretched and pulled, as if her bones could no longer stand each other's company.

She couldn't breath, she couldn't move, she couldn't scream. Thousands of arrow-thin bolts of blue light erupted from her body and shot outward in all directions. Fire burned beneath her skin; screaming deafened her, thunder shook her, dust fell from the ceiling. Pain racked her; her sight dimmed from lack of oxygen; she began to die...

THE MIRROR ATTACKS
The green light changed to hypnotic, brilliant blue. Kait felt the breeze in the room become a rush of wind, and felt the wind pulling against her, tugging her nearer to the twisting column of light that burst upward through the ceiling and down through the floor. The whispering became shouts inside her skull. She felt the building around her begin to tremble, and saw ghostly forms erupt from the walls. The room filled with fog, cold and damp and thick as baled cotton, which swirled around the Mirror of Souls and fed itself into the column of light, and the scent of honeysuckle became a gagging, thick miasma overlaid by the sweet rottenness of decay— the scent of Dragon magic...
Kait heard crackling and rumbling in the distance — thunder and lightning, coming closer with the speed of a cyclone's wind.

THE DEAD OF GALWEIGH HOUSE
The air in Galweigh House grew chill. It seemed to swallow the sounds of fighting. It blew out the torch lit in the moments following the defeat of the Sabirs by the Galweigh loyalists, and threw the grand entry hall into darkness. Then, in the lightless, airless horror it made of the hall, faint lights appeared — blood-red lights that seemed at first to be candles lit within the bodies of the fallen, and then became fires that blazed inside their cores, and at last changed into suns that devoured flesh and bone and hair and blood and left only neat piles of cloth to mark the spots where warriors had given up their lives.
"Ahh," something whispered in Kait's ear, but that whisper was no sound of her world; instead, it echoed of the charnel house, of the funeral pyre, of the burial mound and the cold dark crypt.