Darwath Books
A California medieval scholar is pulled into a far-off magical world—and a fight to save mankind—in this novel by a New York Times–bestselling author.As a student of medieval history, Gil Patterson is a woman familiar with dark stories. She knows well the Crusades, the Black Death, and the other horrors of the Middle Ages, but it is another kind of atrocity that has begun to haunt her dreams. She sees forces of evil assaulting a beleaguered kingdom, whose kind people are on the brink of annihilation, and awakes each morning in a cold sweat. Gil dismisses the dreams until a wizard appears in her apartment. He has crossed into her dimension, passing through the fraying fabric of the universe, to ask her help. For mankind to survive he must protect an infant prince, whom he plans to hide in Gil's world. The student of history is about to get much closer to evil than she ever imagined.
Three thousand years before, the monstrous Dark had sprung from loathsome underground lairs to destroy most of humanity. Now they were again ravening and ruining in their blood-hunger. Only a few thousand people had managed to find refuge in the ancient fortress Keep of Renweth. There, even the magic of the wizard Ingold Inglorion could offer them little hope against the Dark. To defeat the savage horror, they must gain help from the Hidden City of Quo, to which all other wizards had been summoned. But Ingold could not pierce the walls of illusion that separated Quo from the world. With his student, Rudy Solis, the old wizard set out to cross two thousand miles of dangerous desert to the City of Wizards. What he might find there he could not know -- and dared not guess!
Outside the great stone Keep of Renweth, the night was the province of the Dark Ones -- monstrous creatures that had swarmed out of their eldritch underground caverns to destroy humanity. Inside, where the pitiful remnant of the once-great Realm of Darwath huddled, Chancellor Alwir and Bishop Govannin continued their bitter struggle for dominance. Against all advice, Alwir went ahead with plans to use Ingold, Rudy, and the other wizards in a hopeless, desperate invasion of the Nests of the Dark. The Bishop, obsessed with fanatical fury, sought to root out all magic by murdering the wizards. Both conspired together to seek the aid of Alketch, ancient enemy of the Realm. In that hotbed of ambition, hatred, and fear, no one except Ingold would heed Gil's discovery of the truth that lay behind the rising of the Dark!
Chaos reigned in the Eastern Lands: as the fearsome Alketch army mounted siege, the young Prince Tir was snatched from the heart of Dare's Keep. Behind the terror was the depraved, hook-handed general Vair na-Chandros. He had learned that the royal child possessed forbidden wisdom; a secret the bloodthirsty Vair intended to use to conquer the world. One man posed a threat to Vair's vaunting ambition: the legendary warrior known as the Icefalcon. Banished by his own people and scorned as a barbarian by others, only he could hope to free the boy from Vair's clutches. With his sister Cold Death--a sorcerer whose magic was as sharp as her tongue--the Icefalcon embarked on a dangerous mission of rescue and redemption that would force him to wage his greatest battle . . . for his prince, for his honor, and for all eternity.
A novelette of 10,000 words - The Keep of Dare is an enclosed fortress: no one knows all its secrets and corners. When people start disappearing, the Archmage Ingold Inglorion and his two Californian companions - warrior Gil Patterson and novice wizard Rudy Solis - are faced with the possibility that some deadly entity is hiding in the darkness of the Keep. And the situation is not improved when Ingold himself disappears.
A novelette of 14,000 words, sequel to Hambly's Darwath series. The teleporter is due to open between the Keep of Dare and an unknown Keep, lost for three thousand years - and Archmage Ingold Inglorion is snowed in fifty miles away and unable to be there to deal with whatever might be on the other side of that teleporter. California warrior-woman Gil Patterson, and California mage-in-training Rudy Solis, have to explore the unknown Keep on their own: to interpret its secrets, to prevent whatever might lurk there from following them back to the last Keep of humankind... and to destroy it when, in spite of their efforts, it does.
A novelette of 15,000 words, sequel to Hambly’s Darwath series. The builders of the ancient Keep of Dare communicated with other Keeps via a transporter – whose instruction manual unfortunately did not survive the centuries. Thus, Archmage Ingold Inglorion – the only trained wizard in the Keep – and his warrior-woman partner Gil Patterson of California find themselves in what they suspect is an unknown world, with no idea how to return home, while an army of deadly ghosts starts to appear within the Keep itself.