The Kharkanas Trilogy - Forge of Darkness and Fall of Light (2 books with rights through Camelot)

Forge of Darkness

Dust jacket and interior illustrations by Grant Griffin.

In Forge of Darkness, the magisterial opening volume of Steven Erikson’s Kharkanas Trilogy, the deep past of the incredible world introduced in the beloved ten-volume sequence, The Malazan Book of the Fallen, is masterfully explored. Erikson’s Malazan novels have been described as the greatest fantasy epic of the modern age, and his extraordinary imagination is given full flower in this tale of darkness and war.

Set hundreds of thousands of years before the Malazan novels, Erikson makes able use of his background as an archeologist and anthropologist. A gift to devoted fans, who will be rewarded with clues and characters presaging the Malazan Book of the Fallen, this is also a splendid jumping-off point for first-time readers of Erikson.

Here is a world populated by different races, but these are not the elves and dwarves of typical fantasy fare. Instead, we meet the powerful but xenophobic Jaghut, the masters of magic and masonry known as the Azathanai, and the savage, shapeshifting Jhelek. The focus is on telling the story of the long-lived Tiste Andii, servants of the monarch known as Mother Dark, who may be ascending to godhood. Her people are on the brink of civil war, the political and familial dynamics of their ruling class a complex web of arranged marriages, military rivalries, and exchanged hostages.

Erikson’s trademark use of dozens of characters acting in numerous interweaving subplots offers up intrigue, battle, magic, an ancient threat from a dead sea, and the everyday travails of everyday people. All of this is done in a style that pairs excellent prose with the sense of poetry and rhythm of the great Elizabethan dramatists.

Erikson has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and his bestselling novels have been reprinted and translated around the world, earning him a legion of devoted fans. Forge of Darkness is yet another demonstration why.]

Fall of Light

As promised by its evocative title, in this, the second book of Steven Erikson’s Kharkanas Trilogy, night falls across the whole of the world known by the ancient Tiste Andii. But the children of Mother Dark are far from the eldest of the disparate peoples gathering against one another, as civil war wracks the shadowed land from without, and alien invaders of unknown purpose march on Kharkanas from every direction.

In the absence of his brother Sons of Darkness, Silchas Ruin must build an unlikely friendship with Grizzin Farl, called the Protector, one of the mysterious Azathanai, who are not only the most powerful of Erikson’s many and varied races, but may have in fact created all the others. The embattled general leading the forces opposed to Mother Darkness, Vatha Urusander, reforges himself into the first Mortal Sword, a title and role that will echo down hundreds of centuries to the era of the Malazan Empire. And far to the north, two characters long known to readers of the unparalleled epics of Steven Erikson, Caladan Brood and Anomander Rake, kick the ashes of a burned forest from their boots and sally forth on an errand that imperils all.

The legions of fans who have followed what can only be called a modern cycle of legends have known for decades that in these pages, not all is at is it appears. Erikson’s dragons are far more than dragons, his sorcerers draw on powers unlike any other in modern fantasy, and his gods are at one turn as petty as any human, and at another as inscrutable as the blackness between the stars.

Limited: 500 numbered copies, hardcover, signed by the author

Lettered: 52 copies, specially bound, signed by the author, housed in a custom traycase