awrence Watt-Evan's Ethshar series began nearly 20 years ago, with 1985's The Misenchanted Sword. For several years, the series seemed quiescent, until the arrival of Night of Madness in 2000. The volume under discussion is to be followed soon by The Spriggan Mirror, heralding a rejuvenation of the saga.
The wonderland of Ethshar is dominated by three cities joined in a hegemony—Ethshar of the Rocks, Ethshar of the Sands and Ethshar of the Spices—allowing the author to flit in book after book from one venue to another for variety's sake. The current tale takes place in Ethshar of the Rocks. Here, the 17-year-old wizard's apprentice Kilisha is experiencing a bit of frustration under her master, Ithanalin, who is not bringing his student along quickly enough for her tastes. Chafing under his tutelage, Kilisha is still unprepared for the vast responsibilities about to descend on her shoulders.
In the midst of an animation spell, Ithanalin undergoes an accident. His human body is frozen into stasis, while his spirit is fractured into eight pieces and distributed among the furniture of his parlor. The now-living furniture bolts in ignorant haste from the wizard's house, all save the mirror on the wall, which subsequently informs Kilisha of what's happened. Unable to secure help from any of the town's more experienced wizards (they're embroiled in a subplot that concerns a usurper in another city), Kilisha faces the task of gathering all the disparate parts of Ithanalin's soul and performing Javan's Restorative to reunite them in the wizard's body.
After some initial successes—it's hard for even a living bowl and spoon to get very far, and a sheepish coatrack offers little challenge—Kilisha finds the recovery of the remaining objects trickier. She is aided by Yara, Ithanalin's long-suffering wife, and their three children. Additionally, a young, handsome city tax collector, Kelder, joins the quest. As their scavenger hunt continues, they discover that a feisty, impetuous spriggan—one of the city's gnomish undercreatures—is also involved.
Finally, only the largest piece, a distinctive couch, is left missing. When it's discovered to be in possession of Ethshar's Overlord, in a formidable fortress, Kilisha arms herself with her best magics and, full of trepidation, forges bravely ahead.
A frothy fantasy of screwball sorcery
Having missed out on all the previous installments of the Ethshar series, I am unable to offer a judgment on how the newest volume slots into the run, whether it advances the overall development of this particular fantasy world sufficiently. Nor am I able to rank this book quality-wise in its proper place among its siblings. However, I can report that as a standalone adventure, it is suitably satisfying and welcoming, requiring no special knowledge of past events from the novice reader. (There is a small hook backward to the Night of Madness events, and the subplot about the "mad magician Tabaea" and his overthrow of the government of Ethshar of the Sands is left unresolved, possibly a setup for future tales.)
What we have in this single volume anyhow is the kind of frothy, light fantasy so favored by a number of writers—and apparently by a large number of readers as well. Piers Anthony, of course, is the best-known purveyor of this kind of work, but the names of Neal Barrett, Christopher Stasheff, Michael Shea and John Morressey spring readily to mind. The latter in particular, whose Kedrigern series began about the same time as the Ethshar mythos, seems a very close cousin to Watt-Evans' work. In both series—judging admittedly on this one book from Watt-Evans—magic is portrayed as a whimsical profession without any mortal consequences. Its practitioners are prone to comical goofs leading to screwball proceedings, which ultimately dissipate in a restoration of the status quo. It's all good fun, but don't expect to meet either Gandalf or Sauron in these pages.
Still and all, Watt-Evans has hit upon a neat MacGuffin here. One of my favorite characters from the Oz books was always the animated Sawhorse, and here we have that attractive character multiplied by eight (although none possess the Sawhorse's depth of personality). By clearly and ingeniously demarcating the boundaries of Kilisha's quest, Watt-Evans insures a shapely plot with a decisive outcome. He saves his most action-packed scenes for the climax, although there's enough going on earlier to keep the reader's interest engaged.
Kilisha comes off as a believable young lady, a mix of confidence and doubt, ambition and timidity, cleverness and shortsightedness. By the end of the book, her trials have matured her to a reasonable degree. Being absent for most of the book, Ithanalin is nonetheless a vivid enough figure to make all the activity centered on him plausible. And the supporting characters do their jobs well.
At one point in her musings on the nature of magic, Kilisha realizes: "A really good wizard could even sense whether other ingredients could be substituted [in a spell], other words spoken, or the very nature of the spell somehow altered—that was how new spells were discovered. Such wizards ... were very rare." Watt-Evans creates no heretofore unseen spell here, but he does materialize an entertaining version of an old one.
