The Ruby Knight

[sawyl]

Over the weekend I arrived at The Ruby Knight, the second book in David Eddings' Elenium series. Following the events of the first novel, Queen Ehlana of Elenia is in a coma after being poisoned and her life is only being sustained by a spell that involves slowly sacrificing the lives of twelve Pandion knights. Having discovered that only magic can cure his Queen, Sparhawk has returned to Cimmura, the Elenian to consider his options. Late one night, following the death of another of knights in involved in the encasement spell, Sparhawk is summoned to the cathedral where the ghost of Ehlana's father, King Aldreas, tells him that the Queen can only be saved by Bhelliom, the mythical sapphire rose once set in the crown of King Sarak of Thalasia but now lost for five hundred years.

Sneaking back to the Pandion chapter house through the foggy streets of Cimmura, Sparhawk slips past a hooded figure whose face seems to be glowing green. Dismissing the incident, he calls a meeting of his friends and they come up with a plan to locate Bhelliom: to travel to the battlefields surrounding Lake Randera, where King Sarak was last seen, and use necromancy to question his retainers until they find the lost crown. Travelling north, they are attacked by a mismatched group of emotionless people led by a hooded figure with a glowing face. Sephrenia, the Pandions' instructor in magic, identifies the creature as a Seeker; an insect-like tracker infused with the spirit of the Elder God Azash. Escaping from the Seeker's hypnotised troops, the party ride into Lamorkand where they find themselves caught up in a siege after offering to help escort Patriarch Ortzel to the Holy City of Chyrellos before the castle of his brother, Baron Alstrom, comes under attack from Count Gerrich. But Alstrom is outflanked and the party find themselves caught up a siege led by Adus and Krager, the underlings of the renegade Pandion Martel, and by the Seeker of Azash.

Finally, a new antagonist! With Martel largely absent from the narrative until the last book and his tame Damork mysterious absent since halfway through The Diamond Throne, the Seeker of Azash is a more than welcome addition to the cast. Not only does it possess superb tracking skills but it can turn humans into mindless killing machines whose only thoughts are to destroy the insect's targets, even to the point of being able to leave hypnotised people behind it to guard points of strategic importance. But like any near-perfect killer, it has its achilles heel, allowing Sephrenia to sneak the party past it rather than leaving them besieged behind high battlements.

Escaping from Alstrom's castle, the group travel on to Lake Randera where they begin questioning the dead. After a few initial successes the plan goes wrong when they accidentally attempt to raise one of Azash's fiends, leaving Tynian, Bevier and Kalten seriously injured. Forced to change tack, Sparhawk decides to look into folk history to see it contains any information. Eventually a tanner suggests points him in the direction of Count Ghasek, but whenever they ask for directions to the Count's estate, the party are warned against a terrible evil that lives there. After a journey through a gothic forest, complete with wolves and crows and crazed minstrels, they arrive at the Count's castle only for Sparhawk to realise that he has seen the Count's sister before: she was the woman he saw leaving the Zemoch house in Chyrellos several months earlier, having sold her soul to Azash. Fortunately the knights are able to right the wrong of Lady Bellina and the Count is able to help them locate Sarak's grave. Returning to the lake, they consult the King's ghost and locate the probable resting place of Bhelliom. Realising that they are probably being watched, they decide to leave the crown where it is and to return later in a boat to collect it but in the interim, the crown is seized by Gwerig the Troll, the original carver of the Sapphire Rose.

The middle section begins by toying with the horrific —from Tynian's necromancy and the attack of the undead fiend from the mound — before appearing to change tone with a series of semi-comic encounters with the local folk-historians, who grate less than some of Eddings' other attempts at dialect. But with the first mention of Ghasek, the horror returns in full, with the journey along the bad road, past villages of surely peasants, through the dark, omen infested woods to the Count's brooding castle, where they arrive with one member of the party — Bevier — on the brink of some sort of hysterical overreaction. The call back to the house in Chyrellos is a little heavy, but Lady Bellina's gruesome behaviour adds considerable darkness to the setting and makes it very clear that Azash is a true force of evil, delighting in the pain and suffering of the most vulnerable — a group that probably ought to include Bellina, through her debauchery, and her brother and Occuda through association.

Following the troll's trail, Sparhawk runs into King Wargun of Thalasia, who is collecting an army to go and liberate Arcium from a group of Eshandist Rendors. Reluctantly, Sparhawk and his party tag along until they reach the city of Acie where, with the help of Preceptor Vanion, he, Kurik, Talen, Flute and Sephrenia slip away on a ship to Emsat. Once Talen has arranged for help from Emsat's master thief, Sparhawk has him shipped back to the city in chains — he wants to avoid putting the boy at risk — while the rest ride up into the mountains above Heid to seek out Gwerig's cave. Breaking through the magical barrier surrounding the lair, the four descend to a gallery where they hear Gwerig muttering to himself as he plans to create new control rings from fragments of the original sapphire. Unable to allow this to happen, Sparhawk and Kurik attack. After a tense battle, during which everything appears to be lost, Sparhawk finally accepts possession of Bhelliom.

After the scramble and hunt through the Count's histories, the final moments in the quest for the crown are enjoyable; not least for the way it seems to slip through the knights' hands in their moment of triumph, leaving Sparhawk to seethe with frustration as he endures the company of the alcoholic Wargun. The drunken Thalasian king is fun and the informal conversation he has with Sparhawk about the colossal Patriarch Bergsten is one of my favourite comic moments in the book. After the journey through the mountains of Thalasia, the final battle plays a nice trick on the reader's expectations: the fight with Gwerig seems like it ought to be the climax, but its too short for that; instead the book is capped by the revelation on the very last page.