Last Sword of Power

The story

Assumes you have read Ghost King, including who Thuro becomes.

Roughly a generation after Ghost King, the realm Thuro fought for belongs to Uther Pendragon, and it is in grave danger. The Goths have found a new leader in Wotan, an undead god out of prehistory whose power rests on human sacrifice and sorcery and whom no sword can touch. He rides the winds on a leather-winged mount while his armies cut through the northern kingdoms, and Britain is next.

Britain's defence rests, as it did in the first book, on Cunobelin's blade, the Sword of Power. This time the sword is lost in the swirling Chaos and Uther's soul is chained in hell, so the realm has neither its king nor the weapon he would need to save it.

Into this comes a warrior known as Revelation. He is looking for three things: a child born of a demon, the legendary Lord of the Lance, and the sword. His search brings him to Cormac, a young man who carries the name Daemonsson and knows nothing of his parentage. Revelation takes him in hand, and the training that follows closely echoes Thuro's in Ghost King. Anduine, a blind girl with arcane powers, is the third of the unlikely allies on whom everything depends, and the Sipstrassi stones are openly part of the struggle.

Many of the first novel's survivors return, older now, among them the soldiers Victorinus and Gwalchmai, while a new cast takes up much of the story. The action moves between the war in Britain and the stranger places the dead go to, because in this book dying is not always the end of a character's part. Gemmell's recurring concerns are all here, above all the loyalty of fighting men and what a young man inherits from parents he has never known.

Reading notes

Last Sword of Power followed Ghost King within the same year, appearing under the Legend imprint in October 1988. It completes the Arthurian pair and closes the story that began with Thuro, though its focus shifts to a new generation.

The book's strengths are Gemmell's usual ones. Wotan makes a formidable enemy, and the dialogue and the emotional notes of the ending are handled with real skill. Its problems come from trying to do a great deal in a short space. Readers often complain that it is too brief for its cast: most of the first book's characters come back, a large new set are introduced, and plot lines that needed room are hurried. The device by which the dead carry on in a netherworld also takes some weight out of the battle scenes, since a death here does not always mean what it seems to. And Cormac's arc repeats Thuro's closely enough that some readers feel they have read it before.

It is not a starting point. Readers who enjoyed Ghost King will want it for the ending of the story, and it has moments as good as anything in the first book, but it is the weaker and more crowded of the two.