Drenai · 2004
The Swords of Night and Day
A thousand years after his death, Skilgannon is grown again from his bones and wakes in a Drenai world ruled by a sorceress called the Eternal.
- Series
- Drenai · Book 11 of 11 by publication; the Damned 2 of 2
- First published
- 2004, Bantam Press
- Setting
- The Drenai lands a thousand years after Skilgannon's death, under a sorceress called the Eternal; the last story in the Drenai timeline
- Main characters
- Skilgannon, Harad, Landis Kan, Askari, Alahir
- Read first
- White Wolf
The story
Assumes you have read White Wolf. The set-up reveals that Skilgannon eventually died, some years after that book.
Skilgannon has been dead for a thousand years. His name survives in stories, and in a prophecy that he will return when his people most need him. The Drenai lands are ruled by the Eternal, a sorceress who has held power for centuries, and her armies include Jiamads: men and beasts fused into soldiers. The Drenai have been beaten and made to kneel to her. Only a remnant, the Legend Riders, still fight, and Dros Delnoch itself has been broken by centuries of war and earthquake.
Landis Kan, a man learned in the old craft of the Reborn, finds Skilgannon's tomb, gathers the bones and performs the ritual. What wakes is a young man with fragmented memories and dulled skills, stranded in a world he does not recognise, in a body that is his and not quite his. Kan has also experimented on other bone fragments from the tomb. The result is Harad, a huge, surly axeman with enormous strength and no memories at all, whom Kan regards as a failure. Skilgannon sees him differently.
The Eternal's forces are never far off. Kan's lands are attacked, and the story moves out across the ruined Drenai country with a small company that grows to include Askari, a huntress; Alahir, a rider of the last free Drenai, who has found the long-lost Armour of Bronze; and Charis, a peasant girl. An army follows them. To most of the people he meets, Skilgannon is a hero out of old stories, revered and only half believed in, and the young man in front of them does not look much like the legend.
Along the way the novel shows how Skilgannon's first life ended, which closes the story begun in White Wolf.
Reading notes
This was the last Drenai novel Gemmell wrote, and it is set later than any of the others. It is an odd and ambitious book, and the swords of the title matter less than the name suggests. Bodies grown from bone and soldiers bred from beasts push the Drenai world toward science fantasy, and the question underneath is what a legend is worth when nobody who knew the man is still alive.
Readers disagree about it more than about most of his books. Some rank it well above White Wolf, for the resurrection scenes and the way Gemmell resolves Skilgannon's story. Others find the plot muddled, the rules of the Reborn magic inconsistent and too much space given to recapping earlier books, and Kirkus, reviewing it on publication, complained that the series' jumps back and forth in time had become hard to follow.
Several characters carry identities that are revealed gradually, and long-standing Drenai readers will recognise more than one of them. That is a reason to come to it late. Read White Wolf first, and ideally Legend as well; newcomers will find the opening chapters hard going.