The team of Janet Morris and Chris Morris once again grace us with another excellent anthology of Homeric Heroic Fantasy, featuring Tempus, Niko and their Sacred Band of Stepsons. I recommend that you pick this book if you like short stories, strong, fantasy characters and dark fiction. It is a welcome thing that I had to experience such darkness only in a book.
Would it not be even more meaningful to say, “I am so very glad that I was not there with Tempus and the others to see what they saw-to do what they did?” Would it not be better to say simply, as I close the back cover, “I am pleased that I have read it?” I could write of all the things that make these stories technical excellence and a great addition to a wonderful series. I could write of their attention to detail and the trueness with which they bring characters and locale to life. I could easily write of the quality and skill of the authors’ tradecraft. The authors relay this point very well in the way their writing pulls you into the moment-an attribute in each of the stories within. These stories are about humanity and its capacity to love and hate and kill and, most importantly, to endure. In these stories, you will find heroism on a scale that matches that of the books that came before, and it will leave you wanting. The Sacred Band faces the penalties of their victory, the hopelessness of a broken land, specters and dark magic-emissions from the war's oozing wounds-that are every bit as terrible as combat and bloodletting on the field of battle. It is into such that we stride when we enter these stories. Deep and ingrained, theirs are ghouls and phantoms summoned by deeds done and seen. It is usually the beginning of something somehow worse.Īnd for the warfighters themselves, the wars will never end. It has happened a thousand times in history.
Magnified by cities and homes that have been leveled by years of war, food is scarce and starvation commonplace, even water is difficult to find, deaths often as great as the war itself. The survivors of wars face wrath wrought by the victors, and bandits and hate-filled revenge-seekers that unleash ghastly vengeance upon ravaged populations.
They set up the reader to wade into the unknown, the remnants of a broken world and face what comes next. Janet and Chris Morris spin for us a series of stories that overwhelm us with the sheer desperation of the situations within.
But, the stories within these pages will challenge the most stalwart among us to face reading on without trepidation. I am not usually a lover of short fiction. I undertook to read the one book of the Sacred Band Series that I had not as of yet read.
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