Stones of Power · 1994
Bloodstone
Twenty years on, a harsh church has made the vanished Jerusalem Man its saint. Then he rides back, wounded and half-remembering, to hunt its killers.
- Series
- Stones of Power · Jon Shannow 3 of 3
- First published
- 1994, Legend
- Setting
- Two decades after the earlier Shannow books, in lands ruled by the Deacon from the city of Unity, with a threat pressing in from another universe.
- Main characters
- Jon Shannow, The Deacon, Beth McAdam, Amaziga Archer, Sarento
- Read first
- Wolf in Shadow, The Last Guardian
The story
Assumes you have read Wolf in Shadow and The Last Guardian.
Twenty years have gone by, and for all of them Jon Shannow has been missing. In his absence he has become a saint. The Deacon, ruling from the city of Unity, has built a new promised land in his own image, and his Jerusalem Riders keep order by massacring unbelievers and those they call mutants, all in the name of God and peace. The Jerusalem Man is honoured as a figure of the new faith, and to speak ill of his memory is heresy.
Then the church at Pilgrim's Valley is burned to the ground and its congregation slaughtered. A rider appears and hunts down the killers, and word spreads that the Jerusalem Man has come back. The man himself is wounded and his memory is in pieces. He has to put together who he is and what has been done in his name while the Deacon's forces hunt him, and he goes about it the only way he knows, head-on.
The church is not Shannow's only enemy. He must also face Sarento, lord of the Hellborn whom he fought in the first book and the living embodiment of the stone of power known as the Bloodstone, and a threat from another universe that feeds on the souls of whole worlds. Gemmell also brings back faces from the earlier novels, Beth McAdam and Amaziga Archer among them, and the returning characters give the book a sense of a long life catching up with its hero.
What gives the book its force is its subject. A man who killed for what he believed has been turned, in his absence, into the figurehead of a church that kills for what it believes, and Shannow has to confront the uses others have made of his legend as well as the men with guns.
Reading notes
Bloodstone appeared in 1994, five years after The Last Guardian, and closes the Shannow trilogy. By then Gemmell had written the Macedon pair and several more Drenai books, and it shows in the confidence of the storytelling. The novel reads as his fullest reply to a critic of Wolf in Shadow who had written that he dreaded to think of people looking up to men like Shannow. What happens when people do look up to him, and build a church on him, is the Deacon's order, and that is not a comfortable answer for the hero.
Readers who have followed Shannow from the start often call it a fitting and moving farewell, and the handling of an older, damaged Shannow is some of Gemmell's best character work in the series. The cost is complexity. Parallel universes, time gates and a large returning cast make the book busy, and anyone who enjoyed Wolf in Shadow mainly as a lean western may find the machinery heavy. Some of the returning characters also need the earlier books to carry their full weight.
This is emphatically not the place to start. Read the trilogy in order; the three novels were collected in 1995 as The Complete Chronicles of the Jerusalem Man.