Lyorn by Steven Brust

I don't know that Steven Brust is planning to end his Vlad Taltos series with something like a trilogy. He's a quirky writer given to experimentation and odd ideas, so it probably wouldn't be that straightforward to begin with.

But Lyorn is the seventeenth book, in a series Brust has consistently said would be nineteen books long, and it certainly seems to be setting up for a big ending, throwing out plot elements and ideas that are not resolved in this book and don't have a whole lot longer to be resolved.

So: maybe not a trilogy. But the books that I expect will be called Chreotha and The Last Contract are definitely going to follow out of this book, and it looks like they will follow their predecessor in plot more closely than has been typical for the series.

Up to this point, you could read the series in any order. It wasn't a great idea: best practice is to follow publication order, because Brust wrote them that way, and he's a tricky writer who plays games with what the reader "knows," but it was plausible, and you could generally read each book as a novel that way.

From here, I doubt that will work as well. But who jumps in on book seventeen of nineteen, anyway? Just go back and pick up Jhereg; if you like that, read more.

At this point, I usually need to explain the background of the series, so let me pull back out this bit I wrote about Hawk a decade ago; it's still the basics:

The Vlad Taltos novels appear to be sword & sorcery, first-person caper novels set in a fantasy world where humans are a minority and tall, magic-using, long-lived Dragareans (whom humans call "elfs") are dominant and whose empire has a complex clan-based social structure and a millennia-long history. Vlad himself is a human who by this point in the series has attained and lost a high position in the Dragarean House of the Jhereg (organized crime), gotten an Imperial title, become reasonably adept at human witchcraft (quite different from Dragerean sorcery), made close friends with many of the most powerful and dangerous Dragareans alive, and been on the run for nearly a decade from his ex-friends in the Jhereg. Underlying that surface is a deeper story Brust will probably never tell completely: this all takes place millions of years in the future, Dragareans are a genetically modified successor race to humanity, much of the sorcery may have a mildly SFnal explanation, and these stories (with a few minor exceptions) have been narrated directly by Vlad to a mysterious figure from beyond his world who is taping them for unknown purposes.

On top of that, Vlad now owns a Great Weapon - this is fantasy, so there are normal weapons, and special soul-destroying weapons (called Morganti; Vlad had one of those for a long time), and extra-special, named Morganti weapons with the power to kill gods. He's got one of those now, and, if you've got a god-killing weapon, then killing of a god is now on the table. One of the larger plots in Lyorn is about that: there are those who want to maneuver Vlad into killing a particular god for a particular purpose. My bet is that will be at least one of the plots of that last book - but there's one more book in between, so things could shift.

(If you want to dig into the history of the series, here are my posts for the last decade or so: Tsalmoth, Vallista, Hawk, Tiassa, Iorich, Jhegaala, and Dzur.)

After a couple of books of sidebar stories - or, perhaps I should say, after Brust filled in some important backstory; whole books function something like chapters in the overall story - we are returning to the main sequence of the plot, following (I think) Hawk. In that book, Vlad had come back to the big imperial city of Adrilankha with a huge price on his head from his former compatriots in the House of the Jhereg (organized crime; every bit of Dragarean society is organized to within an inch of its life and channeled into specific Houses and traditions and whatnot). And he managed to get the Jhereg to remove that price, by giving them an entirely new and hugely lucrative bit of organized crime to start exploiting.

But, as it turns out, there are plenty of other people who are still really interested in murdering Vlad, and one is the "Left Hand of the Jhereg," a parallel all-female, all-magical organization that handles other kinds of crime, which was not part of the deal, and which is still very very interested in making him dead.

Well, maybe not all of them. Maybe mostly just one influential leader, whose sister Vlad killed some time ago.

So Vlad hides out in a theater - as you do; he actually has good in-story reasons for it, though the Doylist reason is that Brust is organizing this particular novel around the rhythms of the stage - and there plots to get out from under this death sentence.

But, as I said, even if he does - and that's the plot of this book - he still has some larger, looming problems. He's no longer just some random minor Easterner; his soul was involved in major events of the history of this world and major forces have been maneuvering around him to put him into position to either kill a god or break the Cycle that organizes all of Dragarean society - or maybe do both.

Brust, as always, does this all in light-adventure mode. It's serious for Vlad, and I would not be surprised if he dies at the end of the series (he might not, but it's a possibility), but the books are amusing and light - he has in-universe songs, parodies of famous tunes from stage musicals, to open each of this book's traditional seventeen chapters - even as they're about assassination and death and the potential upheaval of this entire society.

Like the others, Lyorn is fun, it's quick, it's sly, and it's deeply entertaining. Again, don't start here, but it's a nice place to end up.