Search Results for: wizard,-the

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.

The sails were the product of the Old Technology, lost long ago in the depleted Earth, and they were priceless. For with those fantastic sheets of etheric material, ships could sail the sky and even brave the radiant tides between worlds and stars.

The alchemists who had replaced scientists still sough the ancient secrets, and Rachad, apprentice to such a would-be wizard, learned that the key to his quest lay in a book abandoned in a Martian colonial ruin long, long ago.

But how to get to Mars? There was one way left – take a sea vessel, caulk it airtight, steal new sails and fly the star winds in the way of the ancient windjammers.

Here is an intriguing, unusual and colourful novel of ships that sail the stars riding before the solar breeze that blows between worlds.

Long ago, the wizards had vanished from the world, and all knowledge was left hidden in riddles. Morgon, prince of the simple farmers of Hed, proved himself a master of such riddles when he staked his life to win a crown from the dead Lord of Aum. But now ancient, evil forces were threatening him. Shape-changers began replacing friends until no man could be trusted.

Morgon was forced to flee to hostile kingdoms, seeking the High One who ruled from mysterious Erlenstar Mountain. Beside him went Deth, the High One’s Harper. Ahead lay strange encounters and terrifying adventures. And with him always was the greatest of unsolved riddles; the nature of the three stars on his forehead that seemed to drive him toward his ultimate destiny.

1945: Russian troops have entered Berlin, and are engaged in a violent orgy of robbery, rape, and revenge…

Wehrmacht officer Hasso Pemsel, a career soldier on the losing end of the greatest war in history, flees from a sniper’s bullet, finding himself hurled into a mysterious, fantastic world of wizards, dragons, and unicorns. There he allies himself with the blond-haired, blue-eyed Lenelli, and Velona, their goddess in human form, offering them his knowledge of warfare and weaponry in their genocidal struggle against a race of diminutive, swarthy barbarians known as Grenye.

But soon, the savagery of the Lenelli begins to eat at Hasso Pemsel’s soul, causing him to question everything he has long believed about race and Reich, right and wrong, Übermenschen and Untermenschen. Hasso Pemsel will learn the difference between following orders… and following his conscience.

For Mavin, coming of age as a shape-shifter is both exhilarating and terrifying. Recklessly headstrong, she is to become notorious in the lands of the True Game. With her brother, she leaves their home – a place of slavery and fear – only to have the boy’s powers of beguilement lead them into danger. Rescued by the Wizard Himaggery, the shape-shift and man of magic make a vow. When twenty years have come and gone, they will meet again.

But Himmagery has vanished, leaving only a letter of love behind for Mavin to find. If he were dead, she would know it: sorcerers could trace the scent of his trail, necromancers raise his bones from the dust. But he has disappeared – beyond the power of wizardy.
And so the search of Mavin Manyshaped begins.

This is the final volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s acclaimed The Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped

For Mavin, coming of age as a shape-shifter is both exhilarating and terrifying. Recklessly headstrong, she is to become notorious in the lands of the True Game. With her brother, she leaves their home – a place of slavery and fear – only to have the boy’s powers of beguilement lead them into danger. Rescued by the Wizard Himaggery, the shape-shift and man of magic make a vow. When twenty years have come and gone, they will meet again.

But Himmagery has vanished, leaving only a letter of love behind for Mavin to find. If he were dead, she would know it: sorcerers could trace the scent of his trail, necromancers raise his bones from the dust. But he has disappeared – beyond the power of wizardy.

And so the search of Mavin Manyshaped begins.

This is the second volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s acclaimed The Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped.

For Mavin, coming of age as a shape-shifter is both exhilarating and terrifying. Recklessly headstrong, she is to become notorious in the lands of the True Game. With her brother, she leaves their home – a place of slavery and fear – only to have the boy’s powers of beguilement lead them into danger. Rescued by the Wizard Himaggery, the shape-shift and man of magic make a vow. When twenty years have come and gone, they will meet again.

But Himmagery has vanished, leaving only a letter of love behind for Mavin to find. If he were dead, she would know it: sorcerers could trace the scent of his trail, necromancers raise his bones from the dust. But he has disappeared – beyond the power of wizardy.
And so the search of Mavin Manyshaped begins.

This is the first volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s acclaimed The Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped

Pel Brown knew nothing about parallel universes, let alone travel between them. Then he stepped through a portal that appeared in his basement – and his life turned upside down.

That first inexplicable doorway took him into a magic world called Faerie, ruled by the evil and mysterious Shadow. Another portal provided escape to a world of science and spaceships – and ruthless space pirates plundering the Galactic Empire.

Imperial forces rescued Pel. They would even send him home – but only after he returned to Faerie and destroyed Shadow. And so, with wizards, spacemen, and swordsmen as his unlikely allies, Pel set out to beard the enemy in its stronghold.

But real life is what happens while you’re making other plans – as Pel learned when he uncovered his malign foe’s true nature…

Young Ishta found it in the forest, buried beneath dead leaves: a rounded, flattened stone as black as onyx. One side held a golden oval that glowed with a unnatural light. Of course, it had to be magic.

But what did farmers know of magic? It could be dangerous, or it could be some harmless toy. They had to find out.

Since Ishta was too young to bring her discovery to the Baron of Varag’s stronghold, her older brother, Garander, went instead. Once there, Azlia, a beautiful wizard, recognized the stone immediately as Northern sorcery. She had to call Sammel, the local sorcerer, to find out its nature . . . a relic of the last great war.

When the Baron takes the stone for himself, that should have ended things. But it was just the beginning for Garander. Because that magical stone wasn’t the only relic left in the woods…

In his magical stronghold at the heart of a petrified forest Lebarran Magister gathers the surviving loyal members of the Order of the Apotheosis and plans for his coming triumph over the free peoples.

And in the Void, waiting hungrily for Lebarran’s call, is the monstrous Unformed; malign, implacable.

Unaware that the far-reaching eye of the evil sorcerer is resting on him, Red Cordell joins those allied to Prince Phaedran to face the shadow of Lebarran’s ambition.

Red’s friend, the dwarf-giant Krost, travels to his homeland to enlist the strength of the giants; Aurilia gathers the Sisterhood of enchantresses; Vallawn marshals his fellow wizards; the militia are called to arms. Only the enigmatic healer, Hallifort, refuses to lend his powers.

And so the army marches: towards a hopeless war; towards bloodshed and heartbreak; towards the growing evil that threatens the whole Continent from its fastness in the Leafless Forest…

There’s no place like home…

It was a pretty good life for a spellsinger from L.A. He’d battled demons, fought deadly Plated Folk, even met a socialist dragon and survived. Now Jon-Tom was quite happy to settle into domestic bliss with the fiery Talea, study magic, and practice spellsinging on his duar. But the magic instrument is broken when Jon-Tom protects the wizard Clothahump from thieves and he must set out across the Glittergeist Sea to find the one person who can fix it. With the irrepressible Mudge the Otter as a travelling companion, only the unexpected can happen. But cannibal muskrats, ogres, and a fierce pirate king parrot must seem ordinary indeed when Jon-Tom finds a way back to Earth – and he must choose which world is home.

A powerful fantasy novel in its own right, set in an expansive and complex fantasy universe, The Price of Blood and Honor brings to a grand climax the tale, begun in The Well-Favored Man and A Sorcerer and a Gentleman, of the kingdoms of Landuc, Noroison, and Phesaotois. The bitter, centuries-old feud between Emperor Avril and his wizardly brother, Prospero, has broken into open warfare, and events and armies are unstoppably on the move. In the midst of all this, Prospero’s two grown children – staunch, unworldly Freia, and her urbanely sorcerous half-brother, Dewar – find themselves thrust into the very heart of the action.

The Price of Blood and Honor is a rich, complex, and splendidly high-handed work, full of epic tragedies and comedies of manners, wars and romances, primal acts of creation, gritty military details, intricate espionage capers, talking animals, mythic beasts, ducks, and a great deal more besides, in the story that is the climax and completion of this series.

The mortal kingdoms are caught up in a shared catastrophe, cursed with sterility by the magic of the dark elves. Still, what elves have caused they may perhaps put right.

Humanity’s last hope hinges on a magical talisman-the Pica Stone. One of only nine solid objects ever created by magic, the Pica Stone was shattered in the days of the last Wizards. But when Captain, oldest of the elves, joins with his fellow light elves to work a spell to draw together all the scattered pieces of this legendary gem, eight shards remain missing, lost on worlds throughout the planes of existence.

The elves spell-shift a party of questers to each of these worlds to find the shards. Among the chosen are the Renshai warrior Kevral, her husband Ra-khir the knight, and Tae, a newly made prince and former thief. Each world offers unique challenges, but with the extinction of the human race as the price of failure, there can be no turning back….

The North shall rise again!
When Avram became King of Detina, he announced his plan to liberate the blond serfs – and immediately plunged the kingdom into a long and bloody civil war, setting brother against brother. The northern provinces, dependent on the labour of their serfs, seceded, choosing Avram’s cousin, Grand Duke Geoffrey, as their king. To save the kingdom, Avram sent armies clad in grey against the north, battling Geoffrey’s army, arrayed in blue.
Though King Avram held more land and wealth than Geoffrey, Geoffrey’s men were better soldiers and the north had more powerful wizards. Still, as the war raged on, the greater population and the superior organisation of the South began to tell and the tide turned against the north.
Even so, the war is far from over. The armies of the sough must now battle the north on its own ground – ground which will prove treacherous and deadly…

After the Gorgorian barbarians conquer the civilized kingdom of Hydrangea, their leader Gudge makes himself king, marries Hydrangean Princess Artemisia and settles down to a highly satisfactory life of drinking and debauchery.

Royal triplets, separated at birth because of a Gorgorian superstition that multiple births suggest the mother’s infidelity, receive very different upbringings. The only girl, Avena, is brought up in the palace as Prince Arbol, heir to the throne and a fearsome swordsman. One brother, Wulfrith, is raised by a shepherd; although a young ewe is his favorite companion, his size makes him a fearsome battler. The other brother, Dunwin, reared by the outlawed wizard Clootie, develops into a talented magician.

War and wizardry, dark deeds and derring-do, matters of state and matters of the heart, and a dragon who thinks she’s a sheep. . . . This modern fantasy is the ultimate saga of flashing swords, high magic, and hopeless dynamic confusion – an event fans of the genre will not want to miss.

It was bad enough when Henghis Hapthorn, Old Earth’s foremost discriminator and die-hard empiricist, had to accept that the cosmos was shortly to rewrite its basic operating system, replacing rational cause-and-effect with detestable magic. Now he finds himself cast forward several centuries, stranded in a primitive world of contending wizards and hungry dragons, and without his magic-savvy alter ego. Worse, some entity with a will powerful enough to bend space and time is searching for him through the Nine Planes, bellowing “Bring me Apthorn!” in a voice loud enough to frighten demons.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold

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.

Tabaea was an ordinary thief, sneaking and prowling and stealing for a living. Then one night while burgling a house, she witnessed a wizard teaching his apprentice a spell – the creation of a magic dagger.

Tabaea decided to try the magic for herself. But even though she could feel the power rising around her as she went through the steps of the ritual, something had clearly gone wrong. The apprentice’s dagger had glowed; it had resisted attempts to pick it up; and there had been a blinding flash at the end of the ceremony.

But Tabaea’s dagger didn’t do any of those things. And it wouldn’t free her from bonds, or heal her wounds – it didn’t seem to be magical at all. It just turned black.

Then, by chance, Tabaea discovered that her dagger indeed had its own kind of unusal magic – a dark, powerful magic that promised invincibility to its bearer.

But magic can be dangerous even in the hands of an expert – and for Tabaea, magic and power could spell disaster . . .

The romantic legend of the Holy Grail is almost without parallel in the stories of chivalry. It has about it a quality of inspiration and a standard of purity that transcends everyday life. It shines like a star through the darkness of the Dark Ages. But what if Satan has his own counterpart? What if – just as the Black Mass of the witches and wizards, is an abominable reversal of the Holy Communion Service of the Christian – what if, then, there is an Unholy grail? A sinister thing of death and terror. A glittering, golden chalice forged in the nethermost chasms of Hell, wrought by the hands of unholy craftsmen. Gilded by demons, decked with gems by jewellers who life with the Prince of Darkness.

A thing that originated below the dark hills where trolls dwell…

That, too, would be the object of many a quest. There would be dedicated heroes searching to destroy it. There would be unscrupulous men who wanted to employ its dark power for their own ends. There would be weak men unable to resist its call. There would be strong men whose wills clashed with the almost irresistible power of the Golden Goblet.

Kelder had always dreamed of a life more exciting than what waited for him on the family farm. So when a fortune-teller predicted a glorious future, that he’d roam free and unfettered and be a champion of the lost and forlorn, he immediately set out on the fabled Great Highway to Shan in search of adventure.

But once he was on the road, life was hardly as exciting as he’d hoped – until he met Irith. She was the most beautiful girl, and the only girl with wings, Kelder had ever seen. They teamed up to see the world, and then Kelder found adventures aplenty: there were bandits and demons, and there were curses to lift, wizards to seek spells from, orphans to champion, and legendary cities to visit. For the young and carefree, life on the Great Highway was filled with fun, action, and magic.

But Kelder began to wonder about his beautiful companion. Irith certainly had seen a lot of the world for one so young – and everyone along the highway seemed to know her . . .

Soon, discovering Irith’s secrets became Kelder’s greatest adventure of all . . .

When Avram became King of Detina, he intended to liberate the blonde serfs from their ties to the land. The northern provinces, who would not accept his lordship, seceded from Detina, choosing Avram’s cousin, Grand Duke Geoffrey, as their king in his place.

Avram refused to let Geoffrey rule the north and sent armies clad in grey against them. Geoffrey raised his own army, and arrayed his men in blue.

Avram held the larger part of the kingdom, and the wealthier part, too. But Geoffrey’s men were bolder soldiers. And the north, taken all in all, had better wizards than the southrons did. The war raged for almost three years, until Avram’s General Guildenstern moved against the northern army under Count Thraxton the Braggart and his commander of unicorn-riders, Ned of the Forest, which held the town of Rising Rock, close by Sentry Peak. Both sides knew this was a crucial battle in the desperate war, but neither guessed just how crucial it would be…

I am called Jinian Footseer by some. By some, Jinian Star-Eye. And by some, the Wizard Jinian. One or two call me Dervish Daughter.

On thinking it over, I decided I had been right all along. Everything I had told Peter was true. All the evidence pointed in one way and one way only. I felt as I had felt so long ago, travelling toward Bleer with Peter, when he put the clues to a mystery in my hands and asked me to make sense of it. Now, as then, all the pieces were in my hands, or my head.

The great flitchhawk who had granted me a boon in Chimmerdong, and the d’bor wife, and the gobblemole. The story of Lite Star and the Daylight Bell. The Oracle. The Eesties. Yellow crystals and blue, separated by a thousand years of time. My illness in Chimmerdong, the diagnoses of Bartelmy of the Ban, the Dervish, my mother. All these. No matter how I turned them, there was no other explanation.

Could anything be done?

Since time began, twenty Gods have ruled the universe. Though each god possessed different abilities, each was all-powerful within his realm. Now one of the Gods has upset the balance of power, leaving the others scrambling for control in the new order…

Here is the epic tale of the Great War of the Gods – and the proud people upon whom the fate of the world depends. When the God of the desert, Akhran the Wanderer, declares that two clans must band together despite their centuries-old rivalry, their first response is outrage. But they are a devout people and so reluctantly bow to his bidding.

Enemies from birth, the headstrong Prince Khardan and impetuous Princess Zohra must unite in marriage to stop Quar, the God of Reality, Greed, and Law, from enslaving their people.

But can Khardan and Zohra keep from betraying each other? Can their two peoples maintain their fragile alliance until the long-awaited flowering of the legendary Rose of the Prophet?

Against the powerful legions of the evil Amir, Khardan and Zohra fight to save the desert people – a fight unexpectedly joined by an exiled wizard named Matthew and the mysterious powers of his alien land.

In an age of wizards and walled cities, Raffalon is a journeyman member of the Ancient and Honorable Guild of Purloiners and Purveyors. In other words, a thief.
His skills allow him to scale walls, tickle locks, defeat magical wards. He lifts treasures and trinkets, and spends the proceeds on ale and sausages in taverns where a wise thief sits with his back to the wall.
But somehow things often go the way they shouldn’t and then Raffalon has to rely upon his wits and a well calibrated sense of daring.
Here are nine tales that take our enterprising thief into the Underworld and Overworld, and pit him against prideful thaumaturges, grasping magnates, crooked guild masters, ghosts, spies, ogres, and a talented amateur assassin.
Includes “Inn of the Seven Blessings,” from the bestselling anthology, ROGUES, and “Sternutative Sortilege,” which appears only in this collection.

Praise for Matthew Hughes:

“Matthew Hughes does Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself” – George R.R. Martin
“Heir apparent to Jack Vance” – Booklist
“Hughes’s boldness is admirable”- New York Review of Science Fiction
“Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable”- Publishers Weekly
“A towering talent”- Robert J. Sawyer
“A treasure” – David Gerrold