The Lord of Castle Black (Viscount of Adrilankha, Book 2) - Hardcover

Brust, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312855826 ISBN 13: 9780312855826

Publisher: Tor Books, 2003

Synopsis

Continuing the swashbuckling epic begun in The Paths of the Dead

Journeys! Intrigues! Sword fights! Young persons having adventures! Beloved older characters having adventures, too! Quests! Battles! Romance! Snappy dialogue! Extravagant food! And the missing heir to the Imperial Throne!
In the swashbuckling, extravagant manner of The Phoenix Guards, Five Hundred Years After, and The Paths of the Dead, this is an old-fashioned adventure--moving at a twenty-first-century pace.

The Interregnum is over. To everyone's astonishment, Zerika, a very young Phoenix, has coolly emerged from the Paths of the Dead, carrying with her the Orb, which everyone had thought was lost in Adron's Disaster. The Orb is the heart of the Dragaeran Empire, the source of all its magic--and the infallible sign that Zerika is the new Empress.

But not everyone is happy to hear the news. It's been 250 years since Adron's Disaster, and power vacuums never stay that way for long. Kāna, a Dragonlord, has been expanding his holdings. He now controls almost half the area that was once the Empire -- in effect, the Empire re-created, with himself on the throne.

Among those opposing him is a young Dragonlord named Morrolan - the same Morrolan familiar to every reader of the Vlad Taltos adventures. Until recently, Morrolan was an orphan raised among Easterners, unaware of his lineage, but it has belatedly come to his attention that he's a high-ranking Dragonlord, and now he means to act like one. And from Sethra Lavode he has received a gift of immense significance and power: Blackwand, a magical artifact in the form of a sword.

He'll find plenty to do with it.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

The Lord of Castle Black
Book Two of The Viscount of Adrilankha

"Delightful, exciting, and sometimes brilliant, Steven Brust is the latest in a line of great Hungarian writers, which (I have no doubt) includes Alexandre Dumas, C. S. Forester, Mark Twain, and the author of the juiciest bits of the Old Testament." -Neil Gaiman

"Filled with high adventure, intrigues, a great deal of good humor, and moments of genuine hilarity, this is easily Brust's most mature and entertaining work to date. It's rare for a book over four hundred pages to seem as short as this one. It's even rarer to find one that seems likely to satisfy such a broad range of reader expectations, humor, adventure, intrigue, and wit all in the same package."-Science Fiction Chronicle on Five Hundred Years After

"As always, Brust invests Vlad with the panache of a Dumas musketeer and the colloquial voice of one of Zelazny's Amber heroes. This is a rousing adventure with enough humor, action, and sneaky plot twists to please newcomers as well as longtime series fans."-Publishers Weekly on Issola

"Steven Brust might just be America's best fantasy writer." -Tad Williams

"Steven Brust, in a genre that's mostly done by the numbers these days, maintains a hipster charm and an originality of mind." -The Philadelphia Inquirer

About the Author:

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and raised in a family of Hungarian labor organizers, Steven Brust worked as a musician and a computer programmer before coming to prominence as a writer in 1983 with Jhereg, the first of his novels about Vlad Taltos, a human professional assassin in a world dominated by long-lived, magically-empowered human-like "Dragaerans."

Over the next several years, several more "Taltos" novels followed, interspersed with other work, including To Reign in Hell, a fantasy re-working of Milton's war in Heaven; The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, a contemporary fantasy based on Hungarian folktales; and a science fiction novel, Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille. The most recent "Taltos" novels are Dragon and Issola. In 1991, with The Phoenix Guards, Brust began another series, set a thousand years earlier than the Taltos books; its sequels are Five Hundred Years After and the three volumes of "The Viscount of Adrilankha": The Paths of the Dead, The Lord of Castle Black, and Sethra Lavode.

While writing, Brust has continued to work as a musician, playing drums for the legendary band Cats Laughing and recording an album of his own work, A Rose for Iconoclastes. He lives in Las Vegas, Nevada where he pursues an ongoing interest in stochastics.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0312855826
• ISBN 13: 9780312855826
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560