The decaying Canaan House on the planet of the absent Emperor holds dark secrets and deadly puzzles as well as a cheerfully enigmatic priest who provides only scant details about the nature of the competition.and at least one person dedicated to brutally slaughtering the competitors. The heir and secret ruler of the Ninth House, the ruthless and prodigiously talented bone adept Harrowhark Nonagesimus, chooses Gideon to serve her as cavalier primary, a sworn bodyguard and aide de camp, when the undying Emperor summons Harrow to compete for a position as a Lyctor, an elite, near-immortal adviser. But after her most recent escape attempt fails, she finally gets the opportunity to depart the planet.
Trained to fight, she wants nothing more than to leave the place where everyone despises her and join the Cohort, the imperial military. Gideon Nav, a foundling of mysterious antecedents, was not so much adopted as indentured by the Ninth House, a nearly extinct noble necromantic house. This debut novel, the first of a projected trilogy, blends science fiction, fantasy, gothic chiller, and classic house-party mystery. Hard to understand the large-selling appeal of this and similar dime-a-dozen epics, but certainly whoever buys them has an insatiable need for the reassuringly familiar. Understandably, only Par shows any enthusiasm-though all three manage to embroil themselves in sticky situations, with everything nicely cliff-hanging-ready for Chunk Two. He tells young Par Ohmsford, whose magic is the wishsong, to find the lost Sword of Shannara Par's uncle, the highly magical but reluctant Walker Boh, to restore long-vanished Paranor and its Druids and free-spirit Wren Ohmsford to locate and retrieve the long-vanished Elves. So, up rises the ghost of the powerful Druid, Allanon (no, he's not a problem drinker) with sage advice on What Must Be Done. The world is now threatened by: the Federation, which is slowly exerting political and military control, and repressing the peoples and: the evil, nasty-ugly Shadowen-they're made of warped, remaindered bits of magic and absorb their victims by osmosis.
Brooks takes another stab at the not-so-hot Shannara wimp-magic fantasy conveyor-belt (most recently, The Wishsong of Shannara, 1985) with this first of a new series called The Heritage of Shannara-just in case you hadn't guessed.
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