Quest for Lost Heroes

The story

Its opening reveals what became of the Drenai after The King Beyond the Gate.

Dros Delnoch has fallen, and the Nadir empire founded by Tenaka Khan now rules what used to be the Drenai lands. Only the Gothir held out, and their proudest memory is Bel-Azar, where a small garrison stood against the Nadir army until it withdrew, and four survivors came home as heroes. That was years ago, and although the ballads are still sung, the men they describe have drifted into obscurity and mostly prefer it that way.

When slavers raid Kiall's village and carry off its young women, among them Ravenna, the girl he believes he loves, the local earl declines to do anything and has Kiall flogged for insolence. Kiall resolves to go after her himself. He is a villager with his head full of songs, so he turns to the men in them. Chareos the Blademaster, who is teaching swordsmanship in the earl's town, is drawn in first. Then come Beltzer, the axeman of the ballads, who has fallen on hard times, and the bowmen Finn and Maggrig, who live by hunting and tracking in the mountains.

Ravenna has been sold on into the Nadir empire, so the rescue means crossing the steppes and, before the end, going somewhere a good deal stranger than the steppes. Along the way the party gathers other people and other problems, and a small private errand grows into something with consequences for Nadir and Drenai alike. One of the old heroes is also keeping a secret with a direct bearing on the future of the Drenai. Much of the pleasure lies in watching tired, damaged men decide whether the songs about them were ever true, while a young man who knows only the songs finds out what the real thing costs.

Reading notes

The fourth Drenai novel is closer to an adventure story than a war novel. It is lighter on ideas than Legend and takes a few chapters to find its stride, but once the party is out on the steppes it gathers momentum steadily, with scattered threads pulling together into a single climax. Its real subject is the gap between reputation and the people who earned it. Chareos, Beltzer, Finn and Maggrig have each paid something for Bel-Azar, and Kiall's hero-worship has to survive meeting them.

Chareos is the centre of the book, a swordsman whose fame has brought him very little, and his weariness is well drawn. The Nadir are shown as an empire with its own politics and its own decent people rather than as a faceless horde, which continues what The King Beyond the Gate began. The weaknesses are the slow opening and a tendency, in the later chapters, to let incident crowd out the reflection that makes Legend linger. It stands up without the earlier books, but its opening situation gives away what became of the Drenai after The King Beyond the Gate, so read that one first if you mind.