Stones of Power · 1989
The Last Guardian
Shannow rides south towards a sword that hangs in the sky, while a gate into drowned Atlantis lets something old and ruthless into his world.
- Series
- Stones of Power · Jon Shannow 2 of 3
- First published
- 1989, Legend
- Setting
- The frontier town of Pilgrim's Valley and the wild lands beyond its great wall, centuries after the Fall, with a gate open to ancient Atlantis.
- Main characters
- Jon Shannow, Beth McAdam, Nu-Khasisatra, Josiah Broome, Clem Steiner, Sharazad
- Read first
- Wolf in Shadow
The story
Assumes you have read Wolf in Shadow.
The Last Guardian finds Jon Shannow badly wounded in the mountains and follows him south, still looking for Jerusalem and now middle-aged, conscious that he is slowing down. His road leads to Pilgrim's Valley, a raw settlement near the edge of the known lands. Outlaws run the gambling halls, a local strongman has ambitions that reach beyond the town, and past a great wall lies wild country where beasts walk upright and a woman known as the Dark Lady holds sway. Above that country, people say, a Sword of God floats in the clouds.
Two newcomers give the frontier story its human stakes. Beth McAdam is a recently widowed mother of two, crossing brigand country by wagon and entirely capable of defending herself. Josiah Broome keeps the eating house in Pilgrim's Valley and believes that violence is an evil in itself, which makes the Jerusalem Man a problem rather than a solution in his eyes. There is also Clem Steiner, a young gunfighter who wants Shannow's reputation and can see only one way to get it.
A second strand begins in Atlantis, long before the Fall. Nu-Khasisatra, a shipbuilder and outlawed prophet, defies the god-king of his city and escapes through a stone circle with the help of a Sipstrassi stone, expecting to arrive in another Atlantean city. He arrives instead in Shannow's time. He is not the only traveller. A gate has opened between the two ages, and an Atlantean commander, Sharazad, is using it to send lizard-soldiers into Shannow's world and to carry its pistols back. Earth tremors shake the valley and, for moments at a time, two suns hang in the sky.
The gate must be closed, and the Sword of God is somehow the key. The novel moves between frontier-town gunplay and time-travel fantasy, and it folds the Atlantis myth and the Bible's flood stories into one account of how the world has already ended more than once.
Reading notes
Gemmell had meant Wolf in Shadow to stand alone. In his foreword to The Last Guardian he names three reasons he went back: a reader's letter insisting that Shannow was not dead, a song by Tracy Chapman, and a hostile review by a critic named Broome which said he dreaded to think of people who looked up to men like Shannow. His answer to that review is Josiah Broome, a man who loathes everything Shannow stands for and is drawn into his world anyway.
Broome is the book's most interesting addition, because Gemmell does not make the argument easy for either side. Shannow's way gets people killed, and so, at a key moment, does Broome's. Beth McAdam is a fine creation too, a practical frontier woman who is nobody's decoration. The Atlantean strand gives the series a larger history and some memorable strangeness, though the two timelines take a while to converge and the explanations of the Fall occasionally stop the story to lecture.
Some readers rate it above Wolf in Shadow, and it is certainly the more ambitious book. It should be read second, since it takes the first novel's revelations as given and builds on them.