After the flaming final days of the Ages of Chaos, when the Keeper known as Varzil the Good struggled to bring peace to the warring Hundred Kingdoms through a law called the Compact, there were still those who fought against him for their own ends. And Bard Di Asturian, the outlaw known as The Wolf of the Kilghard Hills, would go to any extreme to bring all those near him under his brutal sway. When matrix magic enables him to bring his double—an Earthman named Paul Harrell—through the vast reaches of space to Darkover, he feels he will now be invulnerable. But will his equally brutal doppelganger be the man to finally teach him the cost of violence?