The realm of Barokan is ruled by a powerful wizard selected by all the other wizards and magically endowed by them with sorcerous talents that render him virtually unassailable. To prevent a Wizard Lord from using his powers selfishly and establishing a dictatorship, the wizards have also created talismans that grant their owners a variety of very specific powers; the nature of these powers is made clear enough by the names of those chosen to bear them (collectively, the Chosen): the Swordsman, the Seer, the Beauty, the Thief, the Archer, the Leader, the Scholar and the Speaker.

When a Wizard Lord goes bad, the wizards, following the defeat of their evil compatriot, and with all the benefit of hindsight, create a new talisman ... and a new Chosen to go with it. In The Wizard Lord, a young man named Breaker joined the eight Chosen, assuming the mantle of the Swordsman, along with a new name: Sword. And it fell to Sword to slay the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills. In the course of this, the Leader of the Chosen, Farash, betrayed his comrades. A new Leader was chosen and a ninth talisman created, though the nature of that talisman, and the identity of its owner, were kept secret by means of a spell so powerful that even a Wizard Lord couldn't break it.

In The Ninth Talisman, the new Wizard Lord, Artil im Salthir, embarked on an ambitious program to wean Barokan from its dependence on magic, replacing it with technology—a program that may or may not be related to a perceived weakening of magical forces in the world, which are derived from supernatural entities known as ler. Suspicious of the Wizard Lord's intentions, especially upon discovering that Farash is advising him, Sword and other Chosen confronted him. But Salthir imprisoned the Leader and the Scholar, then killed or scattered the remaining Chosen.

Now Sword is on his own, with no idea which—if any—of his fellow Chosen survive. As far as he knows, he and he alone is duty-bound to slay Artil. But he can't do it in Barokan, where the Wizard Lord's power far outstrips his own. Conveniently, however, in the neighboring kingdom of the Uplands, home to a very different sort of ler, the magic of Barokan doesn't work, and, again conveniently, Artil has built a summer palace there, in the very spot where all his magic is useless. Sword decides to pass the winter there and assassinate the Wizard Lord upon his return.

But the Upland winters are so severe that even the natives flee the snow and cold, migrating to Barokan until spring. And if the hardy Uplanders can't survive, how does Sword, whose own enhanced magical abilities are useless beyond the border of Barokan, have a chance?

All the suspense of a how-to manual

Though competently—even, at times, elegantly—written, sprinkled with entertaining set pieces and speculations about the nature of power and its attendant responsibilities, on the whole The Summer Palace is bloated, repetitive and strangely lacking in drama. Watt-Evans's illogical and unwieldy political system could have come out of a gaming manual written by Rube Goldberg, and it's difficult to see how such a system could ever have evolved. To be fair, I prefer novels that possess an intrinsic organic wholeness, or the artfully constructed illusion of it, while Watt-Evans, at least here, seems content to simply graft a gimmicky idea onto a standard fantasy template.

But the political system is the least of this novel's problems. Chief among these is the main character, Sword, who is not exactly the sharpest blade in the armory. Dull-witted and ploddingly obsessive, he continually misses or misconstrues plot points so obvious that even the most obtuse reader will groan in disbelief. Again and again, Sword fails to think through his situation and options, resulting in lost time and endangering himself and his plans. Further, he is luckier than a main character has any right to be, and without some supernatural aid from the local ler, inexplicably rendered, he simply would not survive the consequences of his ill-conceived scheme.

The plot itself moves at a glacial pace, especially once Sword has reached the Uplands and takes refuge with one of the nomadic clans that survive by hunting large flightless birds known as ara, whose feathers have the strange (and, again, convenient) property of shielding against magic. So methodical are Watt-Evans's descriptions of Sword's efforts to craft a spear, learn to hunt and make suitable clothes for himself that I feel I now could survive in the Uplands myself.

Yet for all his patience in describing the minutiae of day-to-day life among the Uplanders, when Sword and Salthir finally cross paths, the climactic confrontation is both brief and unsatisfying ... and the aftermath places further demands on a suspension of disbelief that, for many readers, will already have been stretched to the breaking point.