Waylander

The story

The Drenai king is dead, killed by a crossbow bolt, and a Vagrian army is pouring into the country with orders to spare no one. The man who fired the bolt goes by the name Waylander. He took up killing for money after his family was murdered years earlier, and once the job was done his employer turned on him. Now he is on the run, hunted by the Vagrians and their sorcerous Dark Brotherhood, and before long by a celebrated rival assassin as well.

Early on he walks into a brigands' camp to take back a stolen horse. He kills the five men there and is about to ride off when he changes his mind and cuts down their prisoner, Dardalion, a young priest of the Source who has been tortured and will not raise a hand in his own defence. Against every habit he has, Waylander keeps collecting people he ought to leave behind: Danyal, a young woman fleeing the invasion, and the orphaned children she is trying to bring to safety. Meanwhile Dardalion, attacked in the spirit world, finds that he is no longer able to be a pacifist.

Then an old blind man comes to their fire. He is Orien, the king who abdicated in favour of the son Waylander killed, and he knows exactly who the assassin is. He asks him to ride north into Nadir territory and bring back the Armour of Bronze, which Orien hid when he gave up the throne, because its return could rally the Drenai. Waylander sets out with a party of refugees guided by Durmast, a rogue he has known for years. Behind him the Drenai general Karnak fights to relieve the besieged port of Dros Purdol, and Dardalion gathers other priests willing to fight, the beginnings of the order readers of Legend know as the Thirty.

Reading notes

Waylander was Gemmell's third novel and the one that ended his newspaper career: he used colleagues' names for characters, was sacked, and from then on wrote full time. It sits at the very start of Drenai history, so it explains the Armour of Bronze and the Thirty, both of which Legend takes for granted, without asking the reader to know Legend at all. That makes it the other natural way into the series.

Its subject is redemption, handled with little sentiment. Waylander does not become a better man because a priest is kind to him; he accepts responsibilities one at a time and then finds he cannot put them down. Dardalion moves the opposite way, from refusing all violence to leading priests into battle, and Gemmell treats that change as seriously as the assassin's. The argument between the two men is the backbone of the book. The tone is bleak and the Vagrian atrocities are described plainly. The Dark Brotherhood are villains without any shading, which suits the pace but sits oddly with the book's interest in moral change. The quest is also a little mechanical, a sequence of pursuers to be outwitted one by one. It remains one of the fastest and hardest-edged of the Drenai novels, and a good choice for readers who prefer an antihero to a paladin.