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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Robbing an Athyra wizard is only the beginning, 10 May 2002
By A Customer
This fourth volume of the Vlad Taltos series is (currently) the earliest in sequence. It's contained in the collection _The Book of Taltos_, the cover of which is graced with _Taltos_'s original Stephen Hickman cover art. (The only drawback to a 3-in-one volume is that one ends up with 1 rather than 3 of Hickman's cover paintings.) The more you know of Vlad's life story, the more you'll get out of this book.This is, in fact, the tale of Vlad's first encounter with Sethra Lavode, the Enchantress of Dzur Mountain, and Lord Morrolan e'Drien of Castle Black, whose idea of an invitation to come to Dzur Mountain was to push one of Vlad's employees into stealing money and fleeing to Dzur Mountain. Vlad's smart-aleck response to this is really cool. (At the beginning of their next encounter in _Dragon_, you'll see that Morrolan took Vlad's remarks to heart.) This is, in short, a tale of Vlad in his youth, when he was, errr, not overly burdened by a conscience and took no guff from anybody. Morrolan and Sethra have been looking for the soul of Morrolan's cousin Aliera ever since the Interregnum, 200 years before, when she was flung out of her body but never reached the Paths of the Dead. (Sethra, being undead, should know.) They've found it in a staff in the home of an Athyra wizard who refuses to sell it, and since his alarm system only keeps out 'humans' (i.e., Dragaerans), Vlad has been chosen to retrieve it. While he's not a professional thief, he can protect himself if the job goes bad. (Players of Looking Glass Studios' game _Thief: The Dark Project_ should enjoy this sequence; it would make a good mission in the game.) Unfortunately, not for one moment is the adventure to stop there; if Vlad gets the staff, someone has to take it to the Paths of the Dead and persuade the Lords of Judgement to let Aliera have her life back. And since Dragaerans aren't normally allowed to come out of the Paths of the Dead still living, and those rules don't (or may not) apply to Easterners... Brust experiments with nonlinear storytelling in this volume. Late in the book, Vlad must invent a new witchcraft spell, but the spellcasting isn't shown in that scene; instead, it appears a piece at a time, as a few paragraphs of flash-forward at the beginning of each chapter, which the reader only fully grasps on reaching the point where Vlad realizes he needs the spell - at which point, it's already been presented. Neat touch. Apart from that, Vlad indulges in reminiscence about his childhood as the son of an Easterner restaurant owner in a Dragaeran city, whose father wanted to *be* Dragaeran to the point of buying a title in house Jhereg, but whose grandfather runs a little witchcraft shop and uses only Eastern-style fencing. Here we see his first encounter with Kiera the thief as a child, and his first forays as an employee of the 'organization' side of House Jhereg. And if you've ever wondered about that 'blood of the goddess' story that he would never explain to Morrolan in later years, Brust has now put us out of our misery.
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by Steven Brust
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