Search Results for: Tanith Lee

The exciting sequel to Black Unicorn and Gold Unicorn!
The young wanderer Tanaquil can mend anything that is broken – except her own heart. With the engagement of her beloved Honj to her sister, Empress Lizra, she returns home to her sorcerous mother – and her mother’s new lover, the magician Worabex.
Caught up in their combined magic, Tanaquil and her mischievous familiar – a literal pet peeve – find themselves in a parallel world where she meets Tanakil, a mirror-image princess with murder on her mind.

Tanith Lee today is one of the most versatile and respected writers of fantasy, horror, and science fiction, and DREAMS OF DARK AND LIGHT represents a massive mid-career retrospective of her achievements over the previous decade.

Here are unforgettable tales of werewolves that prowl chateaux, an Earthwoman in exile on a distant planet, demons that inhabit bodies of the living dead, a race of vampiric creatures who prey upon a cursed castle, and many other works of exotic vision, mythic science fiction, and contemporary horror. Also included are two stories that have received the World Fantasy Award, “Elle est Trois, (La Mort)” and “The Gorgon,” making DREAMS OF DARK AND LIGHT a distinguished one volume library of myth-weaving at its most eloquent and evocative.

HE WHITE WITCH –

She is Aztira, one of the magical Amanackire race, a pure white albino with powers both mysterious and terrifying. She can grant life and defy death, enchant men – or destroy them!

AND THE WARRIOR –

He is Rehger. Sold into slavery at the age of four, he will become one of the finest warriors and charioteers in the land. Yet all his prowess with arms will not save him from the spell of the White Witch, a dangerous bewitchment that will lead him to challenge the mightiest of mortals and immortals … and to embark on a fearsome quest in search of the legendary city that is home to the Amanackire.

Arpazia is the aging queen who paces the halls of a warlord’s palace. Cold as winter, she has only one passion-for the mysterious hunter who courts the outlawed old gods of the woodland. Coira is the princess raised in the shadow of her mother’s hatred. Avoided by both her parents and half forgotten by her father’s court, she grows into womanhood alone . . . until the mirror speaks, and blood is spilled, and the forest claims her.

The tragic myth of the goddess Demeter and her daughter, Persephone, stolen by the king of the underworld, is woven together with the tale of Snow White to create a powerful story of mothers and daughters and the blood that binds them together, for good or ill. Black queen. White maid. Royal huntsman. Seven little folk who live in the forest. Come inside, sit by the fire, and listen to this fairy tale as you’ve never heard it told before.

Once upon a time there was a mirror, and a girl as white as snow. . .

Sixteen-year-old Annie Ember lives in grinding poverty in the city…until one day in a mysterious shop she discovers a tiny and ancient ivory elephant. The subsequent murder of her sister’s husband leaves Annie homeless, and she is found employment in a country house far away.

Sir Hampton Smolte returned from India with a great fortune – and also a dark obsession with that conquered land. His mansion is fanciful and extraordinary, like a raja’s palace set down in green English parkland.

Annie becomes a scullery maid in this strange place full of stuffed animals, eccentric servants and the even more peculiar Smolte family. Soon she catches the eye of the handsome Rupert and gradually succumbs to his advances…till one night she learns in disgust and horror just what his lovemaking entails.

Annie’s helpless fury then transforms this dream-house into a whirlwind of panic and the impossible…legging in all the avenging power of the jungle, and unlocking Hampton Smolte’s darkest secrets.

Rachaela worked in a bookstore, a conventional young woman, living a conventional life. Then they beckoned, using a variety of ruses to lure her to the house by the sea. Now she is a prisoner, part of a family of creatures she cannot escape, lover to a demon who thirsts for her blood.

As an orphan growing up in the slums, Loren read her clandestine copy of Jane’s Story over and over, relishing every word. But Loren is no Jane. Savvy and street-smart, Loren could never be stirred by a man of metal, her passion never ignited by an almost-human – even one designed for pleasure.

Still, when the META corporation does the unthinkable and brings back updated versions of robots past-Loren knows she must see Silver. And just like Jane, it is love at first sight. But Silver is now Verlis. If he was perfection before, he is now like a god. Yet he is more human than his creators think – or fear. While Loren doesn’t quite trust him, she will follow her twice-born lover into a battle to control his own destiny – one that
will reveal to her the most astonishing illusion of all.

Four-BEE was an utopian city. If you didn’t mind being taken care of all your long long life, having a wild time as a “jang” teen-ager, able to do anything you wanted from killing yourself innumerable times, changing bodies, changing sex, and raising perpetual hell, it could be heaven.

But for one inhabitant there was always something askew. He/she had tried everything and yet the taste always soured. And then he/she succeeded in committing the one illegal act – and was thrown out of heaven forever.

But forever is not a term any native of that robotic utopia understood. And so he/she challenged the rules, declared independence, and set out to prove that a human was still smarter than the cleverest and most protective robot.

The 20 short stories in this collection explore the forests of the imagination and the creatures that dwell there – the wolves and vampires; tigers and unicorns; dwarves, demons and enchanters.

In this rich and varied collection of fantasy, science fiction and horror stories, Tanith Lee brings her power to bear on the nature of relationships between women and men. The witch, the femme fatale, the vengeful goddess, the Amazon – past, present and future – spring to live in these tales of mystery and imagination.

He came to the Honey Garden looking for Cyrion. He was a man in grave danger, convinced only one man alive could help him. A man he had heard about in song and story. A man practically everyone knew something about. A man he had never met.

CYRION

Some said he was the stolen son of a western king, raised by nomads in the desert. A freelance swordsman, a sorcerer, a master of disguise, some said he attracted bizarre, uncanny events as some persons attract misfortune.

He with hair like the sky of earnest sunrise, his fair complexion, his whiplash reactions and quicksilver elegance was like a being from another world. A legend. A myth.

But was he real?

And was he for hire?

Grace is green-eyed, beautiful, a psychic healer – and also a whore. She walks the streets of Black Church to make a living.

After years of horror and poverty as a brothel slave, Saul Anger was adopted into a life of ease, and now he has taken on the mantle of his dead uncle’s house, as well as the leadership of a secret society whose figurehead is Anubis, the jackal god of Egypt. Dedicated to justice and to retribution, this society will destroy those it deems evil. There must always be blood.

One midnight in the great clock-tower of the city, a man hangs himself – and secret desires are let loose. A demon now stalks the streets and alleys, slaying the wicked and the innocent alike. But can Saul locate the source of the destruction and tame it?

Or will beautiful Grace – who has fallen in love with him – be able to stem this tide of madness and primeval terror? For, aided by the goddess Pasht and by all the cats of the city, perhaps she alone can turn back the clock.

Hesta Web, with her hot red hair and her tough, guarded coldness, is trapped with a mother who hates her and a father who is mostly away earning money on an oil rig. When Hesta discovers that her mother and her mother’s lover have had rampant sex in Hesta’s bed, she absconds with her friend Janey to the seaside.

It is the last day of the season, sun bright and sea sparkling. The bars and shops are open, the funfair spins round with shrieks and shouts. As night falls, the illuminations go on. But when Janey catches the last train to London, Hesta stays behind. She falls in with the gothic-looking, unpleasantly attractive Skilt and his subject colony of junkies and beggars. In a rotting hotel on the front, among the broken marble balustrades, the mouse-eaten rooms and the bonfire in the ballroom, Hesta takes up her new life. She hears drugged legends told beside the fire, the rumours of ghosts and the strangeness of the sea.

For now the season has ended, the seaside is deserted, the illuminations are switched off, this place is very strange. Does Skilt know its secret? Should Hesta be wary of the blond man who watches her from the pier? And what happens when the lights go out?

It’s dark.

Love, history or blood…which is the strongest?

In childhood something black settled on Mechail Korhlen and drank from his throat. And later somebody pitied him enough to kill his poor deformed body when he became an adult. But then Mechail chose to return from beyond the veil to enact revenge – and to follow Anjelen, ruler of the sinister monastery sited deep in the forest.

The fulfilment of his destiny had begun.

Searching for the beautiful witch Jemhara, the magician Thryfe at last finds her in the reinvented town of Kandexa, where a strange and passionate wooing begins. From this union a son is born – golden-skinned, red-haired, blue-eyed – and thus the Lionwolf returns to the world of men.

Unaware of this birth, his original mother the goddess Saftri has begun her own search for her lost love Athluan . . . while elsewhere the black and shining ones, the Children of Chillel, seek to establish claims on the ice-locked planet. Beyond, over, under all, the evil god Zzth rages and plans the ruin of these separate and immortal lives.

Strafed by the tumult of such conflicting powers, the be-wintered realm of mortals can only wait to learn its destiny.

Killed by the power of the god Zezeth, his true father, Lionwolf has been cast into a bleak and icy hell lit just by a cold blue sun. Here he and others of the living dead must wage endless combat and war, to appease the whim of a deathly King whose face is made of stone. But when Lionwolf encounters the King’s wife, she is none other than the beautiful, god-fashioned Chillel, his own former lover – and nemesis.

As Lionwolf struggles in the toils of Hell, elsewhere in the hell-cold ice-age of the mortal earth, men and women work out their own destinies. An empire has fallen. Ru Karismi, Capital of the Kings, has been abandoned to the poisons of the White Death. Reivers cross the lands of the Jafn and the Ruk, preying wherever they wish.

Against this unsettled backdrop, Jemhara the sorceress determines to save the Magician Thryfe from a dire self-inflicted punishment, and Saphay, now a goddess of the far north, seeks to lead her people to a new world.

Yet Seseth’s violent hadred shadows all – and from the depths of an ice-locked sea his other terrifying son, the mountainous whale-leviathan Brightshade, is once more rising for vengeance…

The house… always growing, adding to itself, blooming, decaying, becoming reborn…

But Susan doesn’t live in the house of Catherine, her grandmother. Instead, she grows up in a one parent family, with her mother, the glamorous and determined Anne. And Catherine, old forbidding and unkind, is only a nuisance. When Catherine dies, no one mourns.

Why is it then that whenever some new problem swamps Susan’s far from calm existence, she is driven to revisit the house? As when her mother takes up with the worrying Wizz. Or years later, at the end of a deeply-felt and broken love-affair of Susan’s own.

The house is always changing. As if at last it must achieve some irresistible transformation.

Frankly, there is something uncanny about the house.

Isn’t there.

As she says of herself, Jay is a ‘chancer’. But she finds she is out of her depth when she meets the beautiful artist, Jilaine Best.

Jilaine has everything – looks, talent, and wealth – even so her life is imperfect. In adolescence she lost her mother in circumstances both mysterious and painfully unpleasant. Now, unable to conceive, Jilain’s one wish is for a baby – even if another woman gives birth to it.

Jay can’t resist this opportunity – she tells Jilaine that she, Jay, is pregnant. And so the great lie begins.

It seems easy enough – for there conveniently is the handsome young cab driver, only too willing to make love with her… But the spun web is already tangling. Can anything result from it but danger – and destruction?

White-skinned, black-haired Sovaz is beautiful and wayward, yet seemingly soulless – as if vampirised by some unknown force. Wife of a very wealthy but older husband, she is the prize ornament of his treasure collection, yet she is toying with a naive young American lover. And while the faces of this doomed trio converge, somewhere outside the glowing casements a creature of darkness prepares to feed…

Here are a novel and twelve short stories encompassing all the richness and variety of Tanith Lee’s unique talent.

This fascinating and disturbing collection casts a new and chilling light on that ancient mythical creature, the mermaid… pinpoints the ultimate peril of mankind’s fascination with the domestic cat… sucks us into the pulsing horror of bricks and mortar with a life of their own… investigates the dark and marvellous legends of tree spirits, and the tantalising allure of other carnal obsessions.

Vivia, a paragon of youth and beauty, daughter of Lord Vaddix, is alienated from his brutal campaign of violence and fear. Her only solace lies in the secret cave in the bowels of the castle, known only to her and the arcane god whose shrine she believes it is.

When plague enters the castle, bringing an orgy of death and destruction, Vivia seeks shelter in this seductive place. Drawn to her innocence and beauty, a presence – Zulgaris – is resurrected who claims her as his own. Wakened to the wonder of the undead, Vivia is granted the secret of eternal life, but she has been betrayed. Her immortality stretches before her like a damnation.

Handsome Zulgaris, dark prince, war-leader and alchemist. Is Vivia to be his lover, or his pet? Or, far worse, is she but one more thing to be used in this relentless quest for sorcerous power.

Emerging from the burned remains of their old home, the ancient, elegant Scarabae ready themselves for a new life of seduction and feasting, until little Ruth ignites a blaze of chaos through the streets of London that threatens them all.

This is book two in the Blood Opera series.

All the magic and mystery of fabled India is woven into these marvel tales of seven strange nights. For that vast land which many have conquered and none have subdued is the home of ten thousand gods and a hundred thousand demons – and the teeming races that dwell on its shrouded plains and marbled cities have kept their mystic secrets. Here are hidden gods and demonic possession, here are were-beasts and subterranean terrors, here are beings transformed and souls reborn, here is Terror and Wonder.

I saw her, hanging in the sky like a flake of the moon. A woman, her face masked by a black shireen, her body by a black shift, but her white arms spread, and her white, white, bone-white hair blowing all around her like a flame composed of smoke. Recognition was immediate. It was my mother. I shouted at her. It was crystal clear to me, what he had meant for me, my father, Vazkor, what she had robbed me of. And I drew from my belt my hunting knife and threw it at her heart.

She woke from a sleep of countless years, reborn from the heart of a raging volcano. Her body was a masterpiece all men desired, her face a monstrosity that must go masked. Warrior, witch, goddess and slave, she was doomed to travel through a world of barbaric splendour, helped and betrayed by her lovers, searching for escape from the taint of her forgotten race, and the malice of the demon that haunted her.