The Stones of Power: the Sipstrassi novels

The Sipstrassi are golden stones that came out of Atlantis and scattered across the world after its fall. A stone will heal, feed, transform or kill, limited mostly by the imagination of whoever holds it, but its power runs out, and a stone recharged with blood turns red and pulls its owner towards violence. Five novels are built around them, in two strands that can be read separately. The first four were collected in 1992 as Stones of Power: A Sipstrassi Omnibus.

Ghost King and Last Sword of Power are set in Britain after the Roman legions have gone, with Saxons and other invaders pressing in and a Witch Queen behind them. Thuro, a boy of royal blood, is trained by the mountain warrior Culain, and the second book moves the story on nearly twenty years. The Arthurian echoes are deliberate, but Gemmell fills the old roles with his own people, and he uses the legend of the lost Ninth Legion along the way.

Wolf in Shadow, The Last Guardian and Bloodstone follow Jon Shannow, the Jerusalem Man, three hundred years after a catastrophe that tipped the Earth on its axis and drowned most of civilisation. He rides a broken country with his guns and a Bible, looking for a Jerusalem he knows only from scripture. The books mix the western, the post-apocalyptic adventure and the stones' magic, and Atlantis itself comes into play. Gemmell wrote the first as a standalone and later extended it into a trilogy.

Read Ghost King before Last Sword of Power and the Shannow books in order; either strand can come first, and publication order, which interleaves them, works well. Lion of Macedon and Dark Prince also use the stones, and fan chronologies put them at the start of the sequence, but their publishers list them separately and so does this guide, under Macedon. What unites the five is Gemmell's interest in power that corrupts whoever leans on it, and in hard men who refuse to be corrupted.

Reading order

Publication order. Two independent strands: Ghost King then Last Sword of Power; Wolf in Shadow, The Last Guardian, Bloodstone. Either strand can be read first.

1. 1Wolf in Shadow (1987)A gunman with a Bible rides a drowned and tilted world in search of Jerusalem, until a blood-fed cult called the Hellborn makes his fight personal.
2. 2Ghost King (1988)Britain's king is murdered and the Sword of Power is lost. The heir is a sickly boy, and only an old mountain warrior can make him fit to rule.
3. 3Last Sword of Power (1988)Uther's soul is chained in hell and the Sword of Power is lost, while Wotan's Goths advance. A warrior named Revelation goes looking for a demon's son.
4. 4The Last Guardian (1989)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.
5. 5Bloodstone (1994)Twenty years on, a harsh church has made the vanished Jerusalem Man its saint. Then he rides back, wounded and half-remembering, to hunt its killers.