Book Two: The Second Journey, has 22 more tales, headed by the same sequence of Tarot cards. This is the middle stage of the Magus’ life and encompasses what he became famed for. He is more of a sage, has crystallized some of his thinking about the nature of existence but is faced by the likelihood of a terrible war which will lay waste to the populations of east and west. His journey to resolve this awful, impending conflict is again broken into separate adventures, linked and then fused as the book reaches its tense conclusion. All the while the Tarot cards display more and more influence on events both within the tales and outside them. And Kamilâ’s readings of the tales help to influence Sabiya’s desperate fight to save her prospective empire.

As in Book One, Kamil’s life and power within the court slowly grows. Princess Sabiya is now a young woman. She is to become empress one day and is much sought after. There arrives in the court a strange, malevolent Rasputin of a creature called The Red Man who seems bent on the court’s destruction, as well as sullying Sabiya’s physical and emotional world. Kamil may be her only defence against the man’s hypnotic, rapacious powers. All the while, Kamil’s own life undergoes change, much of it orchestrated by Sabiya, herself, who has taken an interest in changing him from a dry old historian into a social, attractive man of the court.