The Book of Dreams by Jack Vance

I remembered the last line of this book for decades - maybe not quite exactly word-for-word, but pretty close.

I have been deserted by my enemies. Treesong is dead. The affair is over. I am done.

Where other authors would be triumphant, Vance instead shows us the deflation of his hero, a man who focused his entire adult life on one thing...and has now done that, so there's nothing left. I thought that was interesting when I first read The Book of Dreams as a teenager, and it's fascinating now as an older man.

That melancholy, that lurking worry behind the drive for revenge, was an undertone in the first four books on the Demon Princes series - The Star King, The Killing Machine, The Palace of Love, and The Face - and is still an undertone here, though closer and closer to the surface until that last sentence.

Kirth Gersen survived an assault and massacre in his youth: the settlement Mount Pleasant, on a remote bucolic planet a thousand or so years in the future, in a human-dominated galaxy, was attacked by a group of gang leaders calling themselves the Demon Princes. The five Princes each led large criminal organizations, trafficking in slaves and drugs and other illegal things in the wild stars Beyond the civilized worlds ruled by law, and they came together for this one massive operation. Gersen and his grandfather were among the very few to escape; his grandfather spirited the two away to old Earth, where the young Gersen was trained up to be an instrument of vengeance, to eventually find and kill all five of the Princes.

The series of books that bear their collective name starts when Gersen is about thirty, and cover a few years of time - how much isn't clear. Maybe two years, maybe five. Not much more than that.

And The Book of Dreams is the last. As it opens, there's only one Demon Prince left.

The Princes were never close associates, though. The reader gets the sense that Mount Pleasant was a quirky one-off. They didn't work together any other time, and they don't care - or possibly even notice; there's no sign in the series that Gersen's destruction of earlier Princes is known to them or society at large - that someone is hunting them.

The last one is Howard Alan Treesong, who organized the group to take Mount Pleasant. It would be a cliché to say he was the worst, the most megalomaniacal. And not really true: each Prince, as Vance made clear throughout the series, is uniquely horrible in a different way. Treesong is a schemer, who desires power. He's also - Vance doesn't underline this, but makes it clear - possessed of, or possessed by multiple personalities, who seem to mostly do what the core Treesong wants but with their own separate whims and manias. He's mercurial, changing, many men in one.

And, as this book goes on, Gersen learns Treesong had two major plots recently - one of which Gersen foils in the novel - to take over two of the political and social pillars of the human universe. If Treesong had succeeded, he would have been not just a Demon Prince, but something like emperor of all humanity.

As in the last two books, Gersen uses his pose as Henry Lucas, special writer for a major galactic magazine - which Gersen secretly owns - as a way to lure his quarry out of hiding. A picture supposedly showing Treesong in a group of people comes into his possession, almost randomly, from the magazine's archives. And Gersen-as-Lucas launches a massive contest to identify all of the people in the phot, which, as expected, attracts Treesong's attention.

As in the other books, there's a fair bit of cat-and-mouse, as Gersen tries to keep his interest secret and to ferret out Treesong, and Treesong uses agents to get closer to the contest and find out who is investigating him.

We know how it ends. We know how it must end. This is a five-book series about revenge, and that means Gersen will kill Treesong in the end, and be finally free.

Or "done," as he puts it. Whether that's done like a necessary task, or like a steak, is up to the reader to decide.

(Consumer Note: I read the whole series in the two-volume Tor omnibus editions - Volume 1 has the first three books and Volume 2 the last two. Above, I've linked the current single-volume edition, from the Vance-family-controlled Spatterlight Press. Either one would be a decent choice; these books are also available used fairly easily.)