Spoiler-Free Summary

The Book of Athyra, containing Athyra and Orca, the 6th and 7th books in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series, is the final third and final compilation of books from the series to be released by Ace/Berkeley. (Later books in the series are published by Tor Books, and so further compilations are not expected.) I've already reviewed the first two compilations elsewhere on Ferretbrain, and if you've not read them yet and would prefer it if I didn't give you spoilers, I don't really have much to add. While the first two compilations could stand on their own as a reasonably complete series, books 6 and 7 succeed in redefining Vlad's character in a new context, injecting new life into the saga, and delivering some exicting stories to boot. While it is still within Brust's power to utterly ruin the series, I'm inclined to trust him for now.

For those of you who have read the first two compilations - or don't mind spoilers for books 1-5 - the rest of this article is for you.

Spoiler-Full Review

So, at the end of Phoenix - the last story in The Book of Taltos - our favourite sorcerer-assassin Vlad is on the run from his former masters in House Jhereg's organised crime network, having betrayed them in a spectacularly damaging fashion. The stories in The Book of Athyra follow immediately afterwards in the timeline - Brust eschewing his usual skipping around - and cover two adventures Vlad has while he is in exile. In the hands of a less capable author, this would resemble treading water; at the end of the two novels Vlad is still on the run from the Jhereg, and still hasn't definitively resolved his personal moral crises. In many respects, the overarching plot seems to be on standby.

Brust, however, takes this interval as an opportunity to present Vlad in a strikingly different light, tell us new things about how exile is forcing him to grow and change, and shows us how Vlad discovers a new outlook on his place in the world and the way the Dragaeran Empire is run. Deviating from the pattern set by the first five books - all of which are narrated by Vlad - Brust chooses new and distinctively different narrative voices for these two books.

In Athyra, the story is told entirely in the third person. While the narrative very occasionally focuses on Rocza, mate to Vlad's draconic familiar Loiosh, it mostly stays with Savn, an apprentice physician in a peasant village. In a clever misdirection, Brust almost tricks us into thinking that we are going to be dealing with a parody of the cliched fantasy plotline of a peasant boy being visited by a magician and being told he has a Great Destiny and going off on a magical adventure (only the Great Magician is Vlad). In fact, what we are treated to begins as a murder mystery with occult overtones in Savn's own village, followed by Savn being ostracised by his own people for his associating with Vlad and having the very foundations of his worldview turned upside down. Savn saves the day at the end of the book, Vlad effectively acting as a supporting character, but he pays a terrible price, and must leave his home with Vlad if he is to ever be whole again. Like most of the books in the series, Athyra takes its themes from the Dragaeran noble house it is named after - in this case, the house associated with mysteries, investigation, and mysticism. Rather than leaving home on an epic quest to heal the land, Savn leaves home on a personal quest to heal himself, which is a nice inversion of the cliche.

Athyra does have its downsides, however. The Dragaerans are basically stock fantasy elves, complete with massively extended lifespans, and Savn is no exception. This means that he is eighty years old and yet seems to be about 13 in terms of emotional and physical development. While Brust makes the occasional stab at tackling this - pointing out that Savn is far older than Vlad and will probably not even be an adult by the time that Vlad dies - I found that my mind violently rebelled against the idea of an 80-year-old apprentice. Even if Savn is not emotionally mature - and he isn't - it does not appear that he learns things significantly less quickly than a human being would, and medical knowledge seems to be primitive in Brust's fantasy world. (The ease and pervasiveness of magic seems to have grossly retarded the development of empirical sciences.) In addition, the prose tends towards the pedestrian - Brust here seems to be pastiching more mainstream fantasy authors, albeit competently and readably - and I did miss the Chandler/Hammett/Leiber/Zelazny mix of the earlier books.

That tone returns in Orca, narrated partially by Vlad and partially by the master thief Kiera, a supporting character from the previous books. In this story, Vlad appears to have come across an aged healer woman who seems to be able to help Savn, and who asks in return that he investigate the men who are trying to drive her out of her home. Vlad and Kiera soon realise that the shady land deals they are looking into are part of a financial scandal which could bring the Dragaeran Empire to its knees. Brust manages two clever tricks here - firstly, he makes a financial scandal in an imaginary setting interesting, and secondly he manages to portray two distinctive narrative voices in the novel. In addition, the revelations uncovered during the investigation give us as readers a new understanding of the basis of the Empire, and thus shed new light on the events of the previous novels. The welcome return of the prose style of the previous books makes Orca an excellent addition to the series. I can only hope that the next few books maintain this quality.