Search Results for: magicians,-the

Young Walter Scot is hot on the heels of cattle raiders in the service of the dark Lord of Soulis when he encounters his kinsman Michael Scot – and his life is changed for ever. Even in the turbulent Borderlands of the thirteenth-century Scotland Michael had a fearsome reputation as a magician and master of forbidden arts, trafficking with the demons of middle air. Now he has returned from years of exile with the Pope’s pardon and the favour of the Emperor, a peaceful man of God – and yet strange events still follow him.

The mysterious fire that blasts the raiders. The fourth voice that laughs where only three men were seen. The luxury that suddenly appears to furnish his long-abandoned castle – the mystery about him only deepens.

But still darker forces are at work behind the bloody rivalries of Border politics, black sorceries stirring within the sinister castle of Hermitage. When Walter’s father is ambushed and killed, his betrothed flung into a dungeon and his lands and his very life threatened by the necromancer-baron Soulis, Michael appears to offer the aid he desperately needs. Aid that, as Walter soon discovers, is almost as frightening as his enemies’ threats – as he is transported to another world, ensnaring, enchanting, seductive. There he finds a new life, new heroism and a new, all-consuming love. But there is a terrible price he must pay…

In the north, the Nibelung Empire covering Scandinavia and Northern Europe. In the south, the Tyrrhennian Empire, decadent child of once mighty Rome. In between, Volker Seefried, musician and sorceror’s apprentice, finds himself in danger of being crushed to dust.

Having left the city of Worms hurriedly when his master’s final conjuration resulted in a congealed magician, Volker finds himself in Nurnberg. He is offered work by a rich merchant who asks him to recruit three bravos to accompany them on a perilous journey. And thus – not without some minor disasters – is formed a group of modern musketeers whose motto might be “All For One and Each For Himself!”

The Weirdest Drinking Establishment in the Universe

Gavagan’s Bar – presided over by Mr. Aloysius P. Cohan, bartender. Where you will meet such not-so-regular customers as:

Councilman Maguire, who brought his own leprechaun with him from Ireland. Mrs. Vacarescu and her husband Putzi, the were-dachshund. Mr. Murdoch, who borrowed a very small dragon to rid his apartment of mice and lost it. And assorted witches, magicians, devils, dryads, and the occasional demigod.

The gods of Poseidonis – or Atlantis – were powerful and real. Now they were determined to destroy the kingdom ruled by the father of Prince Vakar, the one man whose mind they could not read. The only way to save the kingdom was to discover that thing which the gods feared most.

To find it, Prince Vakar set out across the largely unknown world where dangers multiplied with every league. There he found savage countries and strange people – the wild Amazons; a voluptuous, ensorcelled queen; a too-charming girl who was half-horse, half-woman; dangerous magicians who ruled hordes of headless slaves; and the Gorgons, who could paralyze their victims at a glance.

Behind was his ambitious brother, determined that Vakar must fail. Even closer were unknown enemies set on his trail by the suspicious gods.

And to add to his troubles, Vakar had no idea of what he sought!

Acting sergeant Thorolf Zigramson of the Fourth Commonwealth Foot, an aspiring scholar but a soldier by default, somewhat reluctantly rescues Yvette, the beautiful countess of Grintz, from the soldiers set after her by an evil duke who covets her body and her land. After elderly magician Doctor Bardi mistakenly transforms Yvette into an octopus, Thorolf turns to sinister Doctor Orlandus to restore her true form and discovers that the Doctor Orlandus has invaded the minds of his followers, including Yvette, and is slowly assuming control of the government of Rhaetia. When Thorolf is accused of Doctor Bardi’s murder, he flees to the trolls, one of whom he must wed to gain sanctuary and keep from being eaten. From their uncertain stronghold he mounts an expedition to rescue his beloved countess and his country.

SUSPEND YOUR DISBELIEF

And plunge headlong into the always wild, constantly weird, and frequently whimsical realm of fantasy as invoked by that master magician L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP!

– A social protestor who just happens to be a ghost.
– A mail-order magic business that conjures up a universe of trouble.
– A fledgling wizard who doesn’t know the strength of his own power.

And these are only a sprinkling of the outrageous and amazing creatures and things you’ll encounter as you whir through a world where everything is probable.

After centuries of fighting wizards, dedicated scientists have found the answer to winning the war: turn magic into science. Reduce it to its final empirical base, to be read and studied.

But to gather such information, the Special Office decides a transmitter must be implanted in a legendary unicorn, the prize talisman of the most powerful magician. Then it can spy upon the highest councils of sorcery and the daily transmissions analyzed.

Wearing this electronic eye in places of his own, Aden enters the Holy City and carries out the mission. But it leaves him vulnerable to the wonders of enchantment, and he wanders the middle ground between two warring forces. As scientific rationality picks up momentum and the enchantment of the enemy crumbles away before it, Aden – and those out to stop him – races to find the unicorn again.

New races of man had evolved, new species of beast; science had vanished and magic had arisen to dominate the twilight of our world as it dominated the earth’s morning. The Dying Earth is Jack Vance’s finest work – a stunning evocation of a world peopled by wizards, witches, demons, monsters, dashing princes and forlorn maidens. A bejewelled gallery of strange and wonderful beings in the eminent tradition of Tolkien and William Morris.

Jack Vance’s preferred title for this collection is Mazirian the Magician, but while we have elsewhere deferred to his wishes, in this case the book is so famous under a title of which he apparently strongly disapproves that we concluded it would be absurd to change it.

All Jack Vance titles in the SFGateway use the author’s preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance’s admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps.

In the dim far future of Earth, when the sun had shrunk to a small red disk in the dark sky and the race of man lived in isolated cities that echoed with the vastness of the world’s history, science, myth and magic had become one. Sorcerors who read the books of ancient times held great power, and fearsome monsters created in ages long forgotten stalked the land. In this world of mystery and danger, the adventurer known as Cugel the Clever was forced to undertake a quest for Iucounu the Laughing Magician – a quest that was to take him to lands stranger than any he had dreamed of, and pit his wits and his sword against powers from beyond time itself.

Previously published as The Eyes of the Overworld, this is the second of a quartet of titles sharing the same far-future setting first introduced in The Dying Earth

Contents: The Overworld, Cil, The Mountains of Magnatz, The Sorcerer Pharesm, The Pilgrims, The Cave in the Forest, The Manse of Iucounu.

All Jack Vance titles in the SFGateway use the author’s preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance’s admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps.

The Magnificent Showboats follows the farcical adventures of Apollon Zamp, owner of the showboat Miraldra’s Enchantment, and his troupe of acrobats, magicians and actors. Zamp is invited by the King of Soyvanesse to travel up the river Vissel to the distant city of Mornune, there to participate in a contest. A rich prize awaits the showboat captain who stages the most spectacular performance and succeeds in entertaining the king.

Rhialto the Marvellous takes up the personal and political conflicts among a conclave of two dozen magicians of Ascolais and Almery in the 21st Aeon. The shocking appearance of the Llorio the Murtha, a powerful female force from an earlier aeon threatens to unbalance nature by “ensqualming” or feminizing the magicians. This triggers a tremendous struggle for power and the other mages turn against Rhialto. Hoping to reestablish his rightful place, Rhialto travels to other aeons to restore the missing Perciplex which projects the Mostrament, the constitution of the association. In his final adventure, Rhialto must, ultimately, travel to the very ends of time and space to confront an old adversary whom he had wronged and must commit further misdeeds to restore order.

The fantastic quests and adventures of Cugel: the greatest rogue in the realms of fantasy.

For the second time, Cugel the Clever has been carried north over the Ocean of Sighs and dumped half a world away from home, on Shanglestone Strand. Swearing revenge on the Laughing Magician, Cugel sets off through mud pits and bars, through villages, manor houses and across the seas. At last, after many an extraordinary adventure, he comes once more to the land of Almery and the chance to exact the vengeance he craves . . .

Thrown into the alternate universe of 14th century England, 20th century mathematician Jim Eckert and his wife Angie have become Sir James, Baron de Bois de Malencontri, and Lady Angela. A bit of a shock, but they’d coped with it. In fact they were dealing with their new life’s hazards and magical manifestations just fine. Until Jim is suddenly transformed into a dragon. None too pleased about this latest turn of events, Jim turns for help to his neighbour, the magician S. Carolinus, who takes him on as an apprentice. When Prince Edward is captured by the French at the Battle of Poitiers, Jim sets out with some companions, including Aaargh the wolf, to join the English forces. He ends up as chief pawn in a battle against the Dark Powers – with extraordinary consequences.

It seems a simple quest for a happy occasion: Sir James Eckert, the brave Dragon Knight, accompanies Sir Brian Neville-Smythe to the Holy Land to ask his beloved’s father for her hand.

But the Holy Land holds more than they bargained for. As the pair face pirates, sea giants, and the legendary Djinn, this ‘simple’ quest becomes the most dangerous odyssey the Dragon Knight has even undertaken. For the Djinn hold more power over good and evil than even the most powerful magicians – including the Dragon Knight himself . . .

Gordon R. Dickson continues his spectacular saga of a twentieth-century American transformed into a Dragon Knight – and transported into a fantastic medieval adventure.

The waters rose, and darkness was upon the earth.

For a few decades after the Twenty-Minute War and the Red Plague, there were those who remembered the ways and pleasures of civilization, but soon the harsh realities of life in the flooded seaboard of North America pushed the survivors into a new Dark Age – an age of superstition and brutality, but one of seeking and poetry as well. This is the world of Edgar Pangborn’s classic Davy, portrayed here over centuries of its change and growth. Here are heretics, and harpers, crusaders and cowards, magicians and mundane folk, in a stunning cycle of stories that have timeless quality of legend.

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.

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…

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.

Where the moon washed the deck, something sat, its huge head raised, more like the visage of a bear than a wolf, yet long-snouted, the jaws open. Cold eyes that had no soul in them mirrored the moon…
After the killing of his brutal father, golden and handsome Daniel Vehmund has sought refuge in an exotic faraway land. But his contentment is shattered when a fabulous diamond is pressed on him by a sinister graverobber. From that first fatal contact, Daniel is doomed each night of the fill moon to become something else…something dark and powerful and savage. And nothing that originates on this earth can destroy him.
Laura, a beautiful redhaired farm-girl, lives with her two awful sisters and her selfish grasping parents in the remote English countryside. Apparently condemned to a life of drudgery, all is transformed when she is wooed and wed by a wealthy local squire. But this gilded existence is threatened when a travelling magician persuades her besotted husband to buy from her a very unusual diamond. For this gem is “The Wolf”, the diamond that had transformed Daniel Vehmund’s destiny. And when he himself returns at last to England, his fate and Laura’s are devastatingly intertwined…
Meanwhile some dark, malignant presence continues to prowl the woodlands and hedgerows…and seemingly nothing can curb its unquenchable bloodlust.

As the sun gleamed off the gilded domes of Videssos the city, Abivard, marshal of Makuran and son of Godarz, pondered the impossible. How could he carry out the command of Sharbaraz, King of Kings, to destroy the invincible Empire of Videssos?
Then, against all expectations, the Emperor of Videssos invaded Makuran itself. Abivard was thrust on the defensive, forced homeward to drive the invaders from the fabled land of the Thousand Cities.
Abivard needed not only his greatest battle skills but his most powerful magicians, for no one doubted that Videssian military strategy would be accompanied by the finest sorcery. Yet even as reality reversed itself and renegades plotted Abivard’s ruin, the undaunted warrior vowed never to surrender…

Endless Things is the fourth and final installment in Crowley’s Aegypt sequence.

Spanning three centuries, and weaving together the stories of Renaissance magician John Dee, philosopher Giordano Bruno, and present-day itinerant historian and writer Pierce Moffitt, the Aegypt sequence is as richly significant as Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Crowley, a master prose stylist, explores transformations physical, magical, alchemical, and personal in this epic, distinctly American novel where the past, present, and future reflect each other.

In The Moment of the Magician Alan Dean Foster continues the adventures of Jon Thomas Meriweather, the Spellsinger, in a land where magic and constant danger combine against a background of beauty and individual courage.

Jon-Tom (as he is known in the land), in his quest to find a way back to his own world, discovers that there exists in the land another human from Earth who may hold the secret he so desperately seeks. This individual, however, is reputedly evil and has strange powers.

Jon-Tom’s adventures in seeking out this mysterious and dangerous human make this sequel to The Day of Dissonance a suspenseful and exciting saga in the Spellsinger epoch.

His real name is Ul Quorn, but he is known throughout the Solar System as the Magician of Mars. With sheer scientific mastery and cunning he once terrorised the entire population of all nine planets – until Captain Future put an end to his evil deeds.

Now Ul Quorn has broken loose from the escape-proof Interplanetary Prison – a feat that was believed impossible. His plan to obtain wealth and power is more ingenious than ever before and more deadly to the System.

Soon he will be master of the Universe. But first he must settle a score with Captain Future…

Mercury Shell, Venus Shell, Earth, Mars, Asteroid, Jupiter, Saturn. Each shell concentric, studded with artificial planets, each planet embedded in its shell, spinning like a ball-bearing. The whole Zeus-created in the service of Man but now beyond his control.
Now mathematics and space physics, converging, suggested another shell, its existence hidden from Man. A shell of utter darkness, cold and silence where only extreme mutants could survive.
To find that shell, the three were journeying again: Maq Ancor, Master Assassin, Magician Cherry and Sine Anura, Mistress of the Erotic. Together, daring the all-seeing, all-sensing hostility of Zeus.