Dark Moon

The story

The world once held three other races besides humans. The Eldarin were peaceful and skilled in magic. The Oltor were healers and poets. The Daroth were cruel and hive-like, and they destroyed the Oltor before vanishing, cities and armies with them, in a single night a thousand years ago. All they left behind was the Great Northern Desert.

Now the four Duchies are seven years into the War of the Pearl, fought over an Eldarin relic. Duke Sirano of Romark holds the Pearl and is set on unlocking its secrets, and he succeeds too well. A dark moon rises over the desert, a black wave rolls across it, and where there was sand there are suddenly fields, forests and a gleaming city. The Daroth have returned, almost impossible to kill and intent on clearing humankind from the land.

The defence depends on a few people. Tarantio, who fights for Corduin, is thought to be the deadliest swordsman alive; when we first meet him he is hiding in a cave with two fellow mercenaries, Forin and Kiriel, after a rout. The real killer, though, is Dace, a second self who shares Tarantio's body and enjoys the work. Karis, once a prostitute and now a mercenary commander, is the best strategist the Duchies have. Duvodas, raised among the Eldarin, is a healer committed to peace, and the war will test what that commitment is worth. In Corduin, Duke Albreck is trying to keep his city solvent and at peace while it arms for a war of survival.

The humans are slow to stop fighting one another, and the Daroth are not interested in terms. Nor is it clear, at first, that anything in the human armoury can hurt them.

Reading notes

Dark Moon appeared in the same year as The Legend of Deathwalker and belongs to no series. Its best idea is Tarantio and Dace. Gemmell often wrote violent men arguing with their better selves, and here the argument is split between two voices in one head. Dace is the more memorable of the pair, an unsettling presence who likes to play with his opponents. Karis is one of his stronger female leads, a commander who came up the hard way and handles people far worse than she handles battles.

It is also a serious book about war. Duvodas's pacifism is given real weight, and the Duchies' long conflict is examined from the treasury as well as the battlefield. The weakness is the ending. After a long, careful build-up, the final struggle is brief and wraps up more neatly than the book's own arguments allow.

The fan-compiled timeline that was talked through with Gemmell names Dark Moon as a book that might fit into the Drenai world but could not be placed with confidence. Read it as a standalone. It makes a sound first Gemmell.