The mensch have all died out, and the only remaining people — all of them Sartan — are far reduced in power; most of their innate magic is consumed with simply keeping them alive.

Haplo and Alfred meet Prince Edmund, who is leading his ragged band of people to the "greener" pastures around Abarrach's capital city (Necropolis), and his chief necromancer, Baltazar.

In the realm of Kairn Necros, they meet minor nobles and necromancers Jonathan and Jera, just married and very clearly in love with each other.

Jera now becomes a lazar, a revived dead who still retains her intelligence and personality because her soul is so closely bound to the body... and whose existence is endless torment, caught between life and death.

Haplo, Alfred, and Jonathan flee with the dead Edmund and Jera from Kleitus and his dead soldiers, and end up in a curious chamber: heavily warded, full of the skeletal remains of people who apparently killed each other or even themselves, with seven sealed doors spaced evenly around its perimeter and a white wooden table in the middle.

The chamber is entirely peaceful and seems to resist violence, and Alfred (and Haplo too, though he will not admit it) feels for a moment as if in the presence of a Higher Power.

Baltazar gathers his remaining people on the outskirts of the city, in for the long haul, though the new army of lazar will make life difficult.