Search Results for: magicians,-the

The Elder Isles – an ancient land where chivalry and the realm of fairie exist side by side. A land of mystery, strange beauty, high adventure and arcane magic. Kings are at war, opposing magicians devise ever more cunning stratagems. It is a land where princesses and changelings both can become embroiled in political rivalries and the quest for the grail.

The Gollancz Black Books have proved to be an immensely successful formula for getting well loved stories into the hands of people who also love well made books. Jack Vance’s Complete Lyonesse is a perfect addition to the series and contains Madouc the novel for which Vance won the World Fantasy Award.

A new life – but will it bring happiness?

Wonderfully compelling historical romance – perfect for fans of BRIDGERTON

Bridie Tantallon is setting out on a new life – one that she hopes will bring opportunities and, if she is lucky, happiness. It is the turn of the century, and she is setting out from London to Edinburgh to help her great aunt complete her memoirs.

An orphan, Bridie’s life has not been easy, but could this be just what she needs? So she is not deterred by her aunt’s pretended dipsomania, the various half-hearted attempts made on her life, or even her growing love for Lady Otranta’s long-suffering heir, Andrew. Otranta’s memoirs, detailing her rise from a music hall magician’s assistant to a confidante of Queen Victoria, are interwoven with the more recent tale of Bridie’s adventures.

A magician turned detective is caught up in the most baffling locked-room murder mystery…

‘One of the all-time greatest impossible murder mysteries’ Publishers Weekly starred review

‘Dazzling’ Saturday Review

‘A cornerstone of detective fiction’ New York Times


Master magician The Great Merlini has hung up his top hat and white gloves, and now spends his days running a magic shop in New York and his nights moonlighting as a consultant for the NYPD. When the crimes seem impossible, it is his magician’s mind they need.

So when two occultists are discovered dead in locked rooms, one spread out on a pentagram, both appearing to have been murdered under similar circumstances, Merlini is immediately called in. The list of suspects includes an escape artist, a professional medium, and a ventriloquist – and it is only too clear that this is a world Merlini knows rather too well…

Who will stop the planetary marauders?

For 6000 years the great Carina Empire ruled the galaxy – but slowly, under the remorseless erosion of centuries, the Empire faded as its Imperial bloodline ran out in weaklings who paid tribute to the wild, untamed Barbarians of the Rim. Finally came the day when the Barbarian legions struck at Carina itself, destroying in a single day and night the mightiest empire in galactic history.

In the ages that followed, the rest of the empire decayed, its individual suns and worlds losing contact, isolated Star-Kings fighting to hold their own cultures together . . . and failing. Ironically, only the Barbarians themselves remained the only coordinated power among the Near Stars. Their fleets drifted the star-trails, looting and destroying everything in their way.

One world alone stood against the dark night of savagery that was engulfing the galaxy – Parlion, the planet of the Star Magicians. And at last came the final battle for civilization in the stars.

Morgan Outworlder was born of Centaurus-stock, but two short years on Bargelix had made him almost a native of his adopted world. Trained to be a societic engineer in the Imperium, Morgan found little need for his science on the outworlds . . . but much need for a strong arm and a sharp sword. For Bargelix was a world in struggle, battling the dark forces of magic.

Morgan was marked as an exile because he had been caught up in the Tarsnian struggle for self-government – and when the Freedom Riots failed, he found himself barred forever from the worlds of the Imperium. But the way back to the inner stars lay through the struggle for his adopted world . . . and the man from the stars was hero enough to battle the darkest of magicians!

“Go to thy master and say that Mardanax hath come. I have lived to see the barbarian Thongor in his tomb.”

As the stranger throws back his cloak the hellish gleam of his emerald eyes confirms his statement – Mardanax, the Black Magician of Zaar – has survived Thongor’s destruction of the dread City of Magicians.

Mardanax strikes swiftly. His evil sorcery explodes with inconceivable power, and Thongor lies dead. Thongor’s beautiful queen is drugged into mindless obedience to the Black Magician. Her son, the prince, is kidnapped. Thongor’s empire seems to have fallen to the forces of Chaos.

Then, wandering in the land of the dead, Thongor finds a powerful sword of light…

AN UNLIKELY BAND OF SUPERHEROES

A woman who loved in vain, a magician who loved only wisdom, and a warrior to whom love was a genetic impossibility – fought the Doom that filled the skies of their strange world.

And it came to pass that Zolobion the Magician and Ganelon Silvermane set forth from the land of the great Stone Face and took the first steps of their gigantic journey across the world, a journey so long and fearful and so filled with wonders that no man since time began until that hour had undertaken a like adventure.

But their mission was a logical impossibility. Hence what purpose in undertaking it?

Only that the Moon was falling.

The magician’s eyes gleamed with emerald hellfires as he looked at the council of nine.

“Let us enact upon Thongor of Valkarth the most terrible punishment conceivable to the human intelligence…the eternal slavery of the soul to Chaos.”

If the curse is carried out, Thongor’s body and soul will suffer throughout eternity. But much more than only Thongor’s fate is at stake. The Magicians of Zaar plan the conquest of the whole of Lemuria – and only Thongor stands in their way.

Can Thongor’s mighty sword keep his world from being enslaved by the sinister servants of Chaos?

Several years ago, Matthew the Magician ended an age-old war. It only cost him everything – and everyone – he knew and loved. Turning against his mentor, Jane Andraste, in the realm of Faerie left him physically crippled and his power shattered.

But Matthew remains the protector of New York City. So when he finds a young woman brutally murdered by a Fae creature, he must bring her killer to justice before Jane uses the crime to justify more war-and before he confronts an even larger threat in the greatest Adversary of all . . .

Welcome to Argylle, where the ruling family – a brilliant, flighty, civilized and occasionally dangerous clan of nearly-immortal warriors and magicians – are hoping for a few years of relative peace.

True, their Father Gaston has vanished, leaving both throne and family while he pursues some unexplained errand. His absence has stretched into years. True as well that their powerful Uncle Dewar has also wandered off without leaving a forwarding address, and hasn’t been heard from for a worrisome length of time. It’s a bad habit of running off that this family’s elders have.

But now young Prince Gwydion’s been stuck with ruling the Dominion of Argylle, and with any luck, life can go back to being a satisfactory mixture of intrigue, gossip and viniculture, periodically enlivened by amateur theatricals and the odd quest or two.

Yet Gwydion is finding this arrangement uncomfortable. Strange things keep turning up. A plague of monsters appears out of nowhere, attempting to take up residence in the local barns and forests. These are trumped by the arrival of a ravenous Great Dragon – ancient, sorcerous, profoundly cunning – so big you can see it thirty miles away. Meanwhile, a mysterious young woman has shown up, claiming to be Gwydion’s long-lost – indeed, quite unexpected – sister. And then there are the high-tech aliens, who say they just want to conduct a legal investigation. It’s enough, Gwydion thinks, to make a ruler want to find some nice long errand that’ll take him away from his homeland for a spell…

The Well-Favored Man is a courtly, complex, bloody-minded fantasy for those who love Roger Zelazny’s Amber, Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint and the fantasy adventures of Steven Brust.

After the Gorgorian barbarians conquer the civilized kingdom of Hydrangea, their leader Gudge makes himself king, marries Hydrangean Princess Artemisia and settles down to a highly satisfactory life of drinking and debauchery.

Royal triplets, separated at birth because of a Gorgorian superstition that multiple births suggest the mother’s infidelity, receive very different upbringings. The only girl, Avena, is brought up in the palace as Prince Arbol, heir to the throne and a fearsome swordsman. One brother, Wulfrith, is raised by a shepherd; although a young ewe is his favorite companion, his size makes him a fearsome battler. The other brother, Dunwin, reared by the outlawed wizard Clootie, develops into a talented magician.

War and wizardry, dark deeds and derring-do, matters of state and matters of the heart, and a dragon who thinks she’s a sheep. . . . This modern fantasy is the ultimate saga of flashing swords, high magic, and hopeless dynamic confusion – an event fans of the genre will not want to miss.

The dark force known as Shadow had been defeated, but its world-spanning web of power had survived. This incredible magical weapon was now held not by a prince or wizard, but by Pellinore Brown, a marketing consultant from Germantown, Maryland.

Pel Brown wished no one ill; he merely wanted his family back. But the Galactic Empire that had seen Shadow as a threat saw him as Shadow’s heir, a menace to be destroyed as Shadow had been. And when the awesome magical might of Shadow’s legacy was turned against the rayguns and spaceships of the Empire, entire planets were caught in the middle.

Pel Brown wished no one ill – but hundreds would die to put an end to … THE REIGN OF THE BROWN MAGICIAN

The exciting sequel to Black Unicorn and Gold Unicorn!
The young wanderer Tanaquil can mend anything that is broken – except her own heart. With the engagement of her beloved Honj to her sister, Empress Lizra, she returns home to her sorcerous mother – and her mother’s new lover, the magician Worabex.
Caught up in their combined magic, Tanaquil and her mischievous familiar – a literal pet peeve – find themselves in a parallel world where she meets Tanakil, a mirror-image princess with murder on her mind.

Since the day her father’s fishing boat returned without him, Peri and her mother have mourned his loss. Her mother sinks into a deep depression and spends her days gazing out at the sea. Unable to control her anger and sadness any longer, Peri uses the small magic she knows to hex the sea. And suddenly into her drab life come the King’s sons-changelings with strange ties to the underwater kingdom-a young magician, and, finally, love.

Searching for the beautiful witch Jemhara, the magician Thryfe at last finds her in the reinvented town of Kandexa, where a strange and passionate wooing begins. From this union a son is born – golden-skinned, red-haired, blue-eyed – and thus the Lionwolf returns to the world of men.

Unaware of this birth, his original mother the goddess Saftri has begun her own search for her lost love Athluan . . . while elsewhere the black and shining ones, the Children of Chillel, seek to establish claims on the ice-locked planet. Beyond, over, under all, the evil god Zzth rages and plans the ruin of these separate and immortal lives.

Strafed by the tumult of such conflicting powers, the be-wintered realm of mortals can only wait to learn its destiny.

Killed by the power of the god Zezeth, his true father, Lionwolf has been cast into a bleak and icy hell lit just by a cold blue sun. Here he and others of the living dead must wage endless combat and war, to appease the whim of a deathly King whose face is made of stone. But when Lionwolf encounters the King’s wife, she is none other than the beautiful, god-fashioned Chillel, his own former lover – and nemesis.

As Lionwolf struggles in the toils of Hell, elsewhere in the hell-cold ice-age of the mortal earth, men and women work out their own destinies. An empire has fallen. Ru Karismi, Capital of the Kings, has been abandoned to the poisons of the White Death. Reivers cross the lands of the Jafn and the Ruk, preying wherever they wish.

Against this unsettled backdrop, Jemhara the sorceress determines to save the Magician Thryfe from a dire self-inflicted punishment, and Saphay, now a goddess of the far north, seeks to lead her people to a new world.

Yet Seseth’s violent hadred shadows all – and from the depths of an ice-locked sea his other terrifying son, the mountainous whale-leviathan Brightshade, is once more rising for vengeance…

Somewhere in a far galaxy a being inconceivably alien is surging tumultuously from an unimaginable womb.

In a solitary prison cell on the Underworld, the vast prison-satellite in perpetual Earth-orbit, Terra Viridian is tormented by a vision, an imperative which has already driven her to an insane bloodletting.

On an Earth embalmed in peace by a ubiquitous bureaucracy, the Magician weaves his musical spells and tried to close his mind to the thoughts of others.

– just three links in a chain stretching across space and time towards a testing as awesome as it is unpredictable.

Francis Simnel was a pathetic old man who lived in a strange world of his own, a world of puppets and marionettes. His sister Agnes was a demoness incarnate, a female fiend in human form, a relentless, ruthless, driving force urging the old man to a macabre destiny. There was something different about Simnel’s Puppets. They had personality and a realism that was uncanny. They bore a sinister resemblance to the newly-dead.

What began as the wildest and most improbable suspicion, crystallised into near certainty in the mind of Josephine Starr. She began asking questions, and the Satanists scented danger. She fell into a trap that had been set with diabolical cunning. Her life was balanced on a razor edge, with all the macabre resources of the Black Magicians weighing against her.

In the north, the Nibelung Empire covering Scandinavia and Northern Europe. In the south, the Tyrrhennian Empire, decadent child of once mighty Rome. In between, Volker Seefried, musician and sorceror’s apprentice, finds himself in danger of being crushed to dust.

Having left the city of Worms hurriedly when his master’s final conjuration resulted in a congealed magician, Volker finds himself in Nurnberg. He is offered work by a rich merchant who asks him to recruit three bravos to accompany them on a perilous journey. And thus – not without some minor disasters – is formed a group of modern musketeers whose motto might be “All For One and Each For Himself!”

As the sun gleamed off the gilded domes of Videssos the city, Abivard, marshal of Makuran and son of Godarz, pondered the impossible. How could he carry out the command of Sharbaraz, King of Kings, to destroy the invincible Empire of Videssos?
Then, against all expectations, the Emperor of Videssos invaded Makuran itself. Abivard was thrust on the defensive, forced homeward to drive the invaders from the fabled land of the Thousand Cities.
Abivard needed not only his greatest battle skills but his most powerful magicians, for no one doubted that Videssian military strategy would be accompanied by the finest sorcery. Yet even as reality reversed itself and renegades plotted Abivard’s ruin, the undaunted warrior vowed never to surrender…

To see the stars.

This was the great and paradoxical dream. To stand and look upward into space, at the myriad pin-points of light, forever out of reach, just as their forebears on Earth had in the long gone days before the building of the planetary shells.

Mars, Jupiter, Saturn… Shell had succeeded shell, each studded with its captive caged worlds, each progressively populated by men who could look up only into a sky of artificial luminaries and space debris.

Always Zeus, man-created prime mover, was at work beyond them, the giant space machines forming and working the next shell.

Uranus, Neptune, Pluto…The last shell.

Again they journeyed: Maq Ancor, Master Assassin, Magician Cherry and Sine Anura, Mistress of the Erotic, to reach the outer shell, to return to the past when Man could see the stars.

Endless Things is the fourth and final installment in Crowley’s Aegypt sequence.

Spanning three centuries, and weaving together the stories of Renaissance magician John Dee, philosopher Giordano Bruno, and present-day itinerant historian and writer Pierce Moffitt, the Aegypt sequence is as richly significant as Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Crowley, a master prose stylist, explores transformations physical, magical, alchemical, and personal in this epic, distinctly American novel where the past, present, and future reflect each other.

Young Walter Scot is hot on the heels of cattle raiders in the service of the dark Lord of Soulis when he encounters his kinsman Michael Scot – and his life is changed for ever. Even in the turbulent Borderlands of the thirteenth-century Scotland Michael had a fearsome reputation as a magician and master of forbidden arts, trafficking with the demons of middle air. Now he has returned from years of exile with the Pope’s pardon and the favour of the Emperor, a peaceful man of God – and yet strange events still follow him.

The mysterious fire that blasts the raiders. The fourth voice that laughs where only three men were seen. The luxury that suddenly appears to furnish his long-abandoned castle – the mystery about him only deepens.

But still darker forces are at work behind the bloody rivalries of Border politics, black sorceries stirring within the sinister castle of Hermitage. When Walter’s father is ambushed and killed, his betrothed flung into a dungeon and his lands and his very life threatened by the necromancer-baron Soulis, Michael appears to offer the aid he desperately needs. Aid that, as Walter soon discovers, is almost as frightening as his enemies’ threats – as he is transported to another world, ensnaring, enchanting, seductive. There he finds a new life, new heroism and a new, all-consuming love. But there is a terrible price he must pay…

His real name is Ul Quorn, but he is known throughout the Solar System as the Magician of Mars. With sheer scientific mastery and cunning he once terrorised the entire population of all nine planets – until Captain Future put an end to his evil deeds.

Now Ul Quorn has broken loose from the escape-proof Interplanetary Prison – a feat that was believed impossible. His plan to obtain wealth and power is more ingenious than ever before and more deadly to the System.

Soon he will be master of the Universe. But first he must settle a score with Captain Future…