From Kirkus Reviews
In Volsky's new fantasy (The Gates of Twilight, 1996, etc.), the city of Lis Folaze in Upper Hetzia is slowly recovering from the Sortilegious Wars (though we never find out what these involved). But now the city trembles in fear of Gnaus liGurvohl's White Tribunal, an inquisition that supposedly exists to root out sorcery but actually seeks to condemn rich families and expropriate their wealth--as young Tradain liMarchborg soon understands when his father and brothers, though entirely innocent, are accused, tortured, and ``disinfected.'' Tradain himself is incarcerated in the ghastly Fortress Nul, where he languishes for 13 years before a prison riot enables him to escape. He hides in the ruined mansion of the sorcerer Yurune and decides to sell his soul to the puissant other-dimensional entity Xyleel in return for sorcerous powers enough to destroy his enemies. He also finds his childhood friend Glennian, her family likewise expunged by liGurvohl, clandestinely leading the political resistance to the Tribunal. Tradain eventually triumphs, though he finds the achievement curiously unsatisfying and prepares to surrender to Xyleel. Unexpectedly, Glennian intervenes with Xyleel to plead for Tradain's life. Skimpy backdrop, thin plot, and characters by the numbers, not to mention the dreadfully feeble conclusion: some graphic tortures but otherwise unpersuasive. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Book Description
Magic is entirely forbidden in Upper Hetzia, a town scarred by the Sortilegious Wars. Those who are suspected of practicing magic are executed in the infamous White Tribunal. Tradain liMarchborg lost his father to the White Tribunal, and now seeks vengeance. He pawns his soul to conjure powers that will allow him to avenge his father's death and returns to the capital city of Lis Folaze. There, Tradain falls in love with Glennian liTarngrav, who has a different agenda. Their union could redeem a nation or cost them their lives.

From the Publisher
Praise for Paula Volsky's The Gates of Twilight:"Excellent...tightly woven, exotic, tense, atmospheric...I rarely get to read something this impressive."
--Melanie Rawn"A captivating novel whose appeal should extend well beyond fans of the genre."
"Detailed, exotic...A realistic portrayal of another society; highly recommended."
"No one can create a fantasy world like Paula Volsky. She just keeps getting better and better."
--A.C. Crispin

From the Inside Flap
Magic is entirely forbidden in Upper Hetzia, a town scarred by the Sortilegious Wars.  Those who are suspected of practicing magic are executed in the infamous White Tribunal.  Tradain liMarchborg lost his father to the White Tribunal, and now seeks vengeance.  He pawns his soul to conjure powers that will allow him to avenge his father's death and returns to the capital city of Lis Folaze.  There, Tradain falls in love with Glennian liTarngrav, who has a different agenda.  Their union could redeem a nation or cost them their lives.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The old mansion was haunted, beyond doubt.  The offended ghost of its slaughtered master still loitered upon the premises.  Yurune the Bloodless, sorcerer and deviant that he was, had surely deserved his fate at the hands of an outraged mob.  The ax stroke that parted his head from his body should in all justice have dispatched his soiled spirit straight to the malevolences that he served.  But justice had proved characteristically capricious, and Yurune's essential self lingered yet to guard his domain and secrets against his killers'descendants.  Or so the story ran.

Was it true, was any of it true?  Tradain liMarchborg was determined to find out.

There would be no shrinking and no cowardice--not today.  How many times in the past few years had he approached the gutted building only to retreat, cowed by a shivery shadow, by a whisper or a gleam; by nothing at all?  How many times had he slunk ignominiously away, throat constricted and heart hopping?  Too often--but not this time.  He was thirteen, and far too old for childish terrors.  This time, he was going in.

He lay concealed in the tall yellow grasses that rustled at the crest of a rise overlooking the house.  His caution was redundant, for the place was deserted as always.  Humans wisely shunned the spot, had shunned it since the days of Yurune.  But the pressure of invisible eyes was all but tangible, and instinct clamored a warning.  The gooseflesh rose along his arms, the weedy adolescent figure stiffened, and he glanced back quickly over his shoulder.

No one there, of course.  Pressing himself flat to the ground, he held his breath and listened.  No voices, no footsteps, nothing beyond the ceaseless papery rustle of the wind amidst dead grasses.  Nothing audible or visible to justify the chilly, oddly enjoyable trepidation that now possessed him.

Releasing his breath, he lifted his head to peer once more through the fringe of pallid vegetation.  Down below bulked the mansion, at once familiar and immensely alien, silent and sinister even in the harmless daylight of late autumn.  The walls were charred, but whole; shutters cracked but still barred, still defensive, even after all these years.  The four eccentric turrets, twisted and misshapen, presumably reflected the bent nature of the architect/owner.  The house was ringed with ancient trees.  Their branches, dark and elaborate as wrought iron, arched above the spiral towers.  Although those branches were bare, save for the occasional clinging scrap of brown parchment leaf, little light struggled through to touch dead Yurune's dwelling.  The place was a natural home of shadows.

Beyond the house, beyond the iron trees, rippled the leaden waters of Lake Oblivion, an aqueous mass grave embracing countless casualties of the last century's Sortilegious Wars.  The great rock rising from the grey waters at the lake's center, and the ancient fortress crowning that rock, were veiled in fog, as usual--and just as well.  Fortress Nul, that prison reputedly inescapable and purgatorial, was best left hidden from sight and mind.  Likewise best forgotten or ignored--the myriad restless ghosts said to haunt the lake and its environs; ghosts that watched and waited, ghosts that dreamt cold dead dreams of vengeance, ghosts that laid weightless frigid fingers upon the eyes of intruders....

Tradain shivered pleasurably, and his own living fingers sought the medallion that hung at his neck--a small silver disk, stamped with the potently protective image of immortal Autonn.  The talisman seemed meaningless now, its lifeless weight no source of courage.  He let it fall, and his full attention returned to Yurune's mansion.

The shuttered windows disclosed nothing.  His own face was far more revealing--expressive, perilously ingenuous, with clear-cut features and keen eyes too blue and thickly lashed to waste on a boy--a youthful, unfinished face, saved from prettiness by the boldness of straight black brows, the strength of a well-defined jaw, and the carelessness of raven's wing hair.

Belly to the ground, he inched himself a few feet down the slope, then paused.  His precautions were ridiculous.  If ghosts or malevolences guarded this place, his presence was not about to escape their notice.  He might just as well stand up and march straight on.  Rising to his feet, he paused a breathless moment, during which lightning failed to strike.  The sun shone dimly through the perpetual mists, the breeze whispered, the mansion brooded, and that was all.

Nervous tension mounting with every step, he resumed his advance.  The meadow behind him was empty, and the heat of hidden eyes singeing his back was no doubt imaginary.

On he went, to the bottom of the hill where the iron trees grew, through a crackling sea of fallen leaves, and now the house of Yurune rose before him as it had risen so often in the past, but never before so close, and never so unequivocally threatening.

Through the leaves he waded, to the foot of the black basalt stairway--nothing so mundane as marble or sandstone for Yurune.  A quick glance right and left--no sign of life or motion beneath the trees--then up the steps to the great portal, broken and shattered by that long-ago mob.  The oaken remnants swung yet on ruined hinges.  The entrance was unobstructed and apparently unguarded, but the sense of a vigilant, inimical presence was strong enough to freeze him on the threshold.

The hesitation was minimal, for the excesses of imagination were not about to break his resolve at this point.  Taking a deep breath, he stepped over the threshold into dimness.

Muted light sliding in through the chinks in the shutters revealed a scene of devastation.  Yurune's possessions--the heavy, plain furnishings, the scanty ornaments, sconces, and lamps--lay battered, hacked, and scorched.  The hangings had been ripped from the walls, piled in a heap, and ignited.  They had not burned well--a blackened mound remained, and soot grimed the ceiling above the spot.  The cast-iron chandelier had been torn down to shatter upon the stone floor.  Fragments lay strewn across the flags, and a few of the sockets still held the waxen stumps of ancient candles.  It seemed that nothing had been stolen.  The undisturbed dust of a century or more shrouded all.  The invaders had been desperate enough to face Yurune the Bloodless, deadliest of black magicians, and they had destroyed him; but they had not dared to loot his house.

Through the ravaged chambers stole Tradain, encountering neither marvel nor menace.  Presently he found his way to a windowless corridor thrusting darkly into the heart of the house, and there he stopped to draw candle and tinderbox from his pocket.  He lit the candle, and the yellow light quivered upon the blackened stones, the dust and cobwebs, the ruby eyes of the fugitive rats.  A dry puff of air gusted along the hallway.  The flame shook, the light bounded, a quiet footfall echoed softly.  Tradain's vivid glance shifted this way and that.  The house was inhabited and empty, asleep and aware.  He did not know what it expected of him.  What he himself expected and needed was revelation.  So far, he had not found it, but Yurune's mansion would yield its secrets yet.

On along the corridor he prowled, to an antechamber illumined only by a skylight four stories above--the room wherein, as legend had it, Yurune the Bloodless had met his end.  Here, the parents of the countless murdered and violated children had hacked their tyrant to pieces.

Were there stains on the floor to confute the sorcerer's appellation?  Tradain saw none.  The porous stone was clear.  Despite the gruesome celebrity of the place, he hardly paused to wonder, for the tapestry at the far end of the room, that would have thoroughly covered the wall in Yurune's time, was now hanging in rotten shreds, behind which he descried the outline of a door.  Crossing the room, he thrust the woolen tatters aside and opened the door, to behold a stairway plunging into darkness.

He set his foot upon the first tread, and thought he felt the house peering over his shoulder, and breathing silent threats in his ear.

Silent?

Behind him, clear and unmistakable, a footstep crunched upon broken glass.  In the haunted stillness of Yurune's mansion, that faint pop was startling as the bang of a firecracker.  Heart contracting, he spun in time to catch sight of a small, dark form diving for cover behind a mound of broken furniture.  He carried no weapon, and if he had stopped to think, he would have retreated.  Instead, three long strides took him around the pile, where he stooped, grabbed, and dragged forth a wriggling figure by one ankle.  When he saw who it was, he released her at once.

"Glennian." He couldn't decide between annoyance and amusement.

"Herself," the child answered with characteristic impertinence.  Sitting up, she tossed back her long mane of chestnut hair.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In Upper Hetzia, pockmarked with grim relics of long-ago Sortilegious Wars, lives a people consumed with a fear of magic. Those suspected of forbidden practices die in the bloody cleansings of its infamous White Tribunal - among them the father of young Tradain LiMarchborg. Now the vengeful Tradain, in a demonic pact, pawns his soul to borrow powers whose inexorable dwindling is measured in the luminous sands of a magical hourglass. Subtly disguised as a foreigner, Tradain embarks on the ruination of his father's false accusers. But in the capital city of Lis Folaze, studded with the blanched banners and stark symbols of the White Tribunal's encroaching power, his path soon crosses that of beautiful Glennian LiTarngrav. Glennian's mission, so opposite to his own, will lock them inextricably together in a vortex of love and retribution, death and enchantment that could redeem a nation ... or thrust them both - as Tradain's hourglass sands run out - into eternal torment.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The White Tribunal, the all-powerful witch-hunting body headed by self-righteous Premier Jurist Gnaus liGurvohl, tortures and executes young Tradain liMarchborg's father and brothers on trumped-up charges, then throws the boy into prison. Thirteen years later, Tradain escapes. Through an illegal alliance with supramundane presence Xyleel, he wreaks vengeance on the false informers and on the Tribunal itself. The alliance must end in Tradain's damnation, however. Volsky (The Gates of Twilight) creates a world in which magic is very realand greatly feared by the ruling theocracy. Her treatment of the supramundane realm is generally impressive, reminiscent of the work of Colin Wilson in its able handling of ineffable alien mindscapes. Although the repressive rightist political context is melodramatically sketched with stock situations, and the prison scenes beg comparison to the many actual accounts of such imprisonments (and suffer by the comparison), the novel still is wonderfully enjoyable. The main themethat vengeance fails to satisfy because of the intractable mindset of the evildoeris provocative and thoughtfully enlarged upon through confrontations and dialogue that ring startlingly true. The last few pages seem hurriedly written, neither conclusive nor poetic, but otherwise the book is nicely plotted, with fine, intelligent symmetries. (Aug.)

Kirkus Reviews

In Volsky's new fantasy (The Gates of Twilight, 1996, etc.), the city of Lis Folaze in Upper Hetzia is slowly recovering from the Sortilegious Wars (though we never find out what these involved). But now the city trembles in fear of Gnaus liGurvohl's White Tribunal, an inquisition that supposedly exists to root out sorcery but actually seeks to condemn rich families and expropriate their wealth—as young Tradain liMarchborg soon understands when his father and brothers, though entirely innocent, are accused, tortured, and "disinfected." Tradain himself is incarcerated in the ghastly Fortress Nul, where he languishes for 13 years before a prison riot enables him to escape. He hides in the ruined mansion of the sorcerer Yurune and decides to sell his soul to the puissant other-dimensional entity Xyleel in return for sorcerous powers enough to destroy his enemies. He also finds his childhood friend Glennian, her family likewise expunged by liGurvohl, clandestinely leading the political resistance to the Tribunal. Tradain eventually triumphs, though he finds the achievement curiously unsatisfying and prepares to surrender to Xyleel. Unexpectedly, Glennian intervenes with Xyleel to plead for Tradain's life.

Skimpy backdrop, thin plot, and characters by the numbers, not to mention the dreadfully feeble conclusion: some graphic tortures but otherwise unpersuasive.