Hero in the Shadows

The story

Assumes you have read Waylander and In the Realm of the Wolf; the opening shows where Waylander's life has ended up since.

Waylander has put the Drenai lands behind him. Many years after In the Realm of the Wolf he lives in Kydor as the Grey Man, a rich and reclusive foreigner whom the local nobility find hard to place. He has land and every comfort money can buy, and none of it has settled him. He is old now, and still looking for some kind of peace and some way to answer for what he has done.

Not far away lie the ruins of Kuan Hador. Thousands of years ago that city's rulers were defeated by an army of mystic warriors and shut away beyond the Gateway between Worlds, and the spells sealing it are now wearing thin. Cold mists gather round the ruins, and creatures that should not exist are seen in the hills. Someone is working to open the way, and the most dangerous of those involved is a sorcerer named Eldicar, whose purpose is at first hard to read.

The people who end up facing this are an odd collection. Kysumu is a Rajnee swordsman from the Chiatze lands, one of the last of an order descended from the warriors who defeated Kuan Hador. Yu Yu Liang is a boastful Chiatze ditch-digger who has come by a Rajnee blade and attaches himself to Kysumu in search of glory. Keeva Taliana is a young woman Waylander rescues, who turns out to learn very quickly. Ustarte, called the Beast-Priestess, has followers and reasons of her own for opposing Kuan Hador. None of them is an obvious hero, and Gemmell makes a point of it.

Waylander also has a problem of his own: an enemy who will not stay dead. Gemmell runs these threads side by side and draws them together in a final battle in which the old war and the new one meet.

Reading notes

Hero in the Shadows closes Waylander's story, fourteen years after he first appeared, and it reads as a deliberate farewell. The assassin is less the engine of the plot than its centre of gravity. Much of the energy comes from the newcomers, especially Yu Yu Liang, whose boasting gives the book its lighter moments, and Kysumu, whose discipline is set against it.

It has a lot in common with Winter Warriors, published three years earlier: a small band, an enemy far stronger than they are, and a mythology of banished demons that the two books share. Some reviewers found it too close to the familiar Drenai pattern, and it is not one of Gemmell's more surprising books. It is a well-paced adventure all the same, and the fights have his usual economy.

This is not the place to meet Waylander. The book assumes you know who he was and what he did, and its ending lands properly only if you have followed him through the first two novels. In the internal chronology it comes before all the Druss books, so it can also be read as the last stop before The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend.