: I'm not all that certain that Mazzarin was really dead.
: He was obviously THE most powerful sorcerer in the
: world (except for the leveller perhaps). Sure he was a
: shade, but he may be just biding his time until he
: decides to come back from the dead to the living. He
: probably knew the "multiple lives" spell,
: the deceiver couldn't have been the only one to posess
: that spell.
I'm pretty sure you have to actually be dead for that one to work. Shades are just avatara who went bad and got punished for it, as far as I can tell--since they don't die, they just get their skin peeled off or something, I'm almost certain they don't fit into the whole reincarnation motif. Mazzarin's story must be pretty interesting, though--there's so little to go on, but what there is is definitely intriguing.
