The Legend of Deathwalker

The story

The framing story is set during the siege in Legend and gives away how it ends for Druss.

The novel opens on the walls of Dros Delnoch during the siege told in Legend. A young sentry is thinking about deserting, and Druss steadies him by beginning a story from years before, and that story makes up the rest of the book. In it Druss, in his prime and already famous, has come to the lands of the Gothir, where a prophecy has made it politically necessary for him to lose a tournament. He will not lose to order, an attempt is made on his life, and his friend Klay is left paralysed and dying.

A mystic tells Druss of two jewels hidden in Nadir territory, the Eyes of Alchazzar, said to heal any wound, and he rides out onto the steppes with Sieben to find them. He is not the only one searching. Talisman, a young Nadir warrior trained as an officer by the Gothir, wants the same jewels, believing they will lead his people to the Uniter, the leader their prophecies promise will bind the tribes together. With him rides Zhusai, a young woman troubled by the ghost of a long-dead Nadir queen. At the Gothir court, Garen-Tsen, the real power behind the throne, wants the Eyes for himself.

The jewels lie somewhere in the shrine of Oshikai Demon-bane, the greatest of the Nadir's old heroes, and Garen-Tsen sends a Gothir army to take it. Against the army stand a handful of quarrelling tribesmen with Talisman as their strategist, a poet who would rather be writing about the battle than fighting in it, and a Drenai axeman whom the Nadir call Deathwalker. The siege lets Gemmell show the Nadir from the inside, as clans with long memories of Gothir cruelty, well before they became the horde that Legend puts outside the walls.

Reading notes

Deathwalker was the first Drenai novel published by Bantam Press, after six from Century and its Legend imprint, and it is the most openly nostalgic book in the series. It brings back Druss and Sieben, puts them in another stand against huge odds, and folds the whole adventure inside the siege of Dros Delnoch. The frame is the cleverest thing about it: an old man telling a frightened boy a story on a wall that is about to be attacked gives the adventure a weight it would not carry on its own.

Its best creation is Talisman, a young commander carrying the hopes of a people, who is more interesting than the villains set against him. The Nadir chapters, with their clan feuds and old grievances, change how the horde in Legend reads, and that is reason enough to read the book. Against that, some readers find it too close to Gemmell's earlier last stands, and the Gothir court is painted in broad strokes, with little to its villainy beyond cruelty. Read it after Legend, which the frame depends on and partly gives away, and preferably after The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend, which introduces Sieben and the friendship the book relies on.