C. J. Cherryh

This is a re-read after many years of the first in the Morgaine series, and at first I wondered if I would enjoy it as much as last time. The beginning, an extended info-dump that gives the background to Morgaine's mission to close the inter-planetary and time travelling gates because the temporal anomalies they caused led to disaster, is by today's standards an old fashioned way of story telling. But focus soon switches to the character of Nhi Vanye, a driven young man who has been raised as a charity case by his father, head of clan Nhi, and tormented for his whole life by his two legitimate half-brothers. Vanye has killed one of them, swearing they were trying to kill him, and maimed the other, almost as great a sin in a warrior-centred culture.

He is cast out as an outlaw and doomed to wander till he dies, either of starvation, exposure, being murdered in revenge or being killed by one of the strange creatures which Thiye, a clan leader with a reputation for using the evil magics of the past, has brought through the major gate, which he controls. Vanye's only hope to win back his honour and cancel his outlaw status is to find a lord who will accept his oath of service for either a year or to carry out a task, though surviving such service is not easy.

The story switches to his plight a couple of years later when, half-starved and freezing in the winter, he tries to shoot a deer with his bow, but succeeds in driving it through the pillars of what his people regard superstitiously as the Witchfires - a minor gate linked to the main gate on their planet - on a hill which is normally shunned but where he has accidentally wandered too close. The deer's entry displaces Morgaine, trapped within the gate for a century. She and her surviving comrades came to the planet to destroy its gates, and raised an army among the various clans, but disaster struck and Morgaine was blamed. Pursued, she had been forced to ride into the gate and been trapped there in stasis ever since. Her distinctive appearance - she is nicknamed Frosthair - indicates her identity, but Vanye, forced to shelter with her and share the meat from a deer she kills with one of her fearsome weapons, tries to tell himself it was only exhaustion which led him to think she rode out from between the stones. He then finds himself forced into swearing an oath of allegiance to her for a year's service or to complete her mission if she is unable to, and his problems really begin. The only mitigation is that, as a sworn follower of his lord - and Morgaine has lord status from her previous dealings with the indigenous people - he is in theory protected by her, but he soon meets members of various clans, including his surviving half-brother, who have different ideas.

Things become complicated when these various clans make demands upon Morgaine, trying to use her and her technology for their own ends, and it transpires that she is not the only individual with a knowledge of gates. For there are a number of villains in the story, greater and lesser.

When shelving this book, I elected to put it under both science fiction and fantasy, because the background is SF - interplanetary timetravel, ray weapons, a 'sword' which taps the power of the gates and has the power to pull living things through - but the setting is classic fantasy, with warriors and a warrior culture which is slightly reminiscent of the Japanese Samurai. It falls into the genre category of 'science fantasy' for these reasons.

The story is told from the fairly close third person viewpoint of Vanye so we never enter Morgaine's viewpoint and can only see her through his eyes. She is honest about the fact that she will abandon him at a moment's notice if it serves her mission, and she is totally focused upon the need to destroy or close the main gate at Ivrel, which is controlled by Thiye. Vanye, meanwhile, is torn by the deeds which his oath condemns him to perform, and a lot of the book concerns his angst at the rift with his surviving half-brother and his conflicting loyalties. The one weakness is really the geography - it becomes difficult to envisage how the various clan territories impinge and why travelling in a particular direction would bring him back within the grasp of his brother, for example. The edition I was reading did not have a map, and that would have helped. But I enjoyed the book and am rating it 4 stars.… (more)

This follow-up to 'Rider at the Gate' follows on almost immediately where the first novel leaves off. The winter is now setting in fully, and Dan Fisher, the young "greenhorn" rider of the first novel is maturing fast under the weight of responsibility thrust upon him, though still making mistakes. He and his nighthorse, Cloud, have to escort two teenage boys and their comatose sister to the next shelter up the mountain - because a nighthorse, whose rider was shot in the first book, is following them, and Dan dreads what might happen if the girl, Brionne, wakes up and bonds with the horse. In the first book, she did so with a rogue animal driven mad by its rider's death and in doing so, destroyed her whole village community.

I won't say too much about the setup of this alien planet and its telepathic life, as I covered that in my review of book one. Suffice to say, this is much more the story of Dan and the older of the two boys, Carlo, and both are anxious not to let on too much about what happened previously when they finally have to shelter in the next village up the mountain, a place called Evergreen. But the various villagers have their own agendas, and Dan is torn this way and that, trying to protect the boys but also trying to shield the villagers from what might happen if another rogue horse has followed them there. All complicated by the fact that anyone near a nighthorse has enormous difficulty in keeping secrets.

I enjoyed this book more than book one because it seemed to have less of the chopping and changing around between characters and the almost stream of consciousness writing which attempted to characterise nighthorse communication. There are still words shown in pointy brackets, but the narrative is far easier to follow. The characters of Dan and the boys are well developed, and there are other interesting minor characters such as the riders at Evergreen, and the doctor who takes in Brionne and has her own hangups.

The main thing that let down the story for me towards the end was the focus on another menace in the 'Ambient' - the general telepathic background generated by the native lifeforms. Certain storylines had been set up through most of the story to do with the villagers' plan to decamp to the boys' village as soon as the weather allows so that they can start claiming it before the other villages find out. That was shaping up to be an interesting story of mixed motives and plain all-out greed - the lost village needs to be resettled because it is low enough down the mountain to be the HQ for all trade in and out of the mountains and without it, the other villages will face enormous difficulties with trade and hiked up prices - but people can also see the personal benefits of settling there, such as a milder climate, control of the re-established trade, opportunities for enlarged businesses and an escape from having to put up with the problems caused by miners, among other motives. But that all comes to nothing in the end because the story veers off to deal with the renewed problems caused by Brionne, plus an out-of-left-field bonding with a nighthorse.

There was presumably meant to be a sequel that might have delivered some of what was promised, but the events towards the end of the story wreck key elements of that, as certain characters are removed from the narrative one way or another and would no longer be part of the migration to the first village. For example, certain characters scheme to take over the property that the boys have inherited, but this comes to nothing because they are killed off. The book didn't need the mcguffin introduced at the end - there would have been enough interest in the various human conflicts. I also found it difficult to believe that Carlo could be allowed to benefit from his "crime" in the way suggested despite the mitigating circumstances. So for these reasons, the book loses a star in rating and I can only give it a 4 rating.… (more)

In the third of the Morgaine books (and the conclusion to the trilogy, as the fourth book was produced years later), Morgaine and Vanye have come through the Gate between worlds/times, along with the horde of Barrowers, Marshlanders and Shiua lords (degenerate descendants of the qual, the alien race who originally caused havoc with uncontrolled time travelling via the Gates). They are forced to flee to the vast forest which surrounds the plain - Azeroth - which contains the Gate, known in this world as the Fires. They encounter peaceful human communities which live in harmony with this world's qual - for once, the descendants of the qual here are protective to the humans and have a close bond, some of them forming two person teams who protect the various human villages in clearings within the forest.

As ever, Morgaine's mission is to close the Master Gate and thereby disable all others, but she discovers - via the sword Changeling - in reality a portable Gate - that the Gate through which they entered is the Master, and it is controlled by a vast army of their enemies in a loose coalition led by the halfling lord who caused murder and mayhem in his own land. Other factions follow their enemy, the longlived qual who body-snatched the body of Vanye's cousin Roh, but only for as long as it suits them. Morgaine and Vanye have to convince the qual protectors in this world who are disquieted by their arrival among such a threatening mass, and who would oppose her mission if they knew it, as they have small jewels which they use to protect the forest - actually fragments of the same Gate-stuff of which Changeling is made. As ever, nothing goes smoothly and Vanye is soon separated from Morgaine, who he last saw wounded by an arrow, and tortured by his Barrower enemies, then 'rescued' by a qual noble from the invading army, who hands him over to his supposed halfling lord. Roh - who may or may not be more his good-hearted cousin than the cynical murderer who possesses his body - is Vanye's only hope of survival.

The story features a lot of action after an idyllic beginning among the peaceful villagers, and kept me guessing till the end whether they would survive, whether Roh would betray them or they would kill him, and whether they would somehow succeed in their mission. There is a nice hint towards the end that Morgaine, despite her often cold-hearted exterior, actually has far more regard for Vanye than he could have dreamed. And the epilogue, featuring a minor character who befriended Vanye at the start and who appears at intervals in the story, is rather touching.

The only thing that kept this from a 5-star rating is that there are quite a few bit parts on the side of the good guys who have names which are not dissimilar and it sometimes gets confusing keeping straight who is who, plus some of the characters who are established earlier on as the pair's guides are hardly more than name checked when they finally reappear. It's easier keeping track of who is who among the villains, though there are several of them too.… (more)

This sounded like a concept that would be quite fascinating: on a remote planet, a colony of humans have set up a sort of wild west society in which they depend on the sentient nighthorses, creatures which bond with humans. Most of the wildlife is telepathic and has the ability to send distorting emotion laden images which can overwhelm and kill human beings in umpteen different ways: the nighthorses defend against those and keep most at bay. They also enable travel and trade, with their riders acting like a travel guild who ride gunshot, literally, on convoys of trucks between settlements, enabling people to live a fairly comfortable if precarious existence.

Into this, early in the tale, comes the rumour of a rogue horse: one which can turn human emotions and impressions back on themselves and amplify negative emotions to a fever pitch, resulting in fights, murders, and at worse, people opening the gates of towns and letting in the multitude of predators great and small which look on human beings as a walking larder. A man called Guil Stuart is told his partner Aby has died because of a rogue horse, but then enemies of his start to twist things, amplified by the large numbers of nighthorses in the rider camp beside a large settlement town, into making out Stuart and his horse to be the rogue. He is forced to set off into the wilderness, initially unarmed and wounded, on a quest to kill the real rogue.

Another main character is a young man, Danny Fisher, a town boy who has been 'called' by a nighthorse, Cloud, and villified by his family and the local priests who teach that listening to nighthorse sendings means people will go to hell - despite the fact that without nighthorses, human existence is impossible on the planet. Danny is struggling to come to terms with his alienation from his family and his inability to calm his young horse at crucial moments. Feeling a debt to Stuart who once gave him sound advice, he becomes involved in an attempt to track Stuart and then falls in with Stuart's enemies.

The story switches constantly between the different characters, mainly Stuart and Danny, but others also, as the situation with the rogue becomes deadly for all.

So far so good. But I found the execution of the story a barrier to enjoying it fully. The narrative is an attempt at immersion in the experience of emotion-laden telepathy, with words constantly appearing in pointy brackets, and becomes quite hard to follow in places. Also, the story seems overworked and laborious, taking pages and pages for the smallest bit of action, and a lot of emphasis on travelling in the onset of winter. The story didn't really need 468 pages to tell in my opinion and might have worked better with some judicious cutting of what came over in places as unnecessary blow by blow spelling out of every piece of character internal dialogue. For that reason, I can only give it a 3-star rating.… (more)