18 April, 2004
Athyra, Steven Brust (243 pp, MMPB, 1993)
This is a big departure from the first five Vlad Taltos novels. For one thing, it's the first one to take place outside of the city of Adrilankha and without the attendant accoutrements. For another, it's the first which is not told from Vlad's First Person Smartass POV. For a third, it's very low on the jokiness scale. (Even more so than Teckla which has its snarky moments mixed in with the angst: Athyra isn't angsty, mind, just serious.)
Athyra takes place two years after Phoenix. Vlad, on the run from the Jhereg, is wandering the Earth like Cain, and he ends up in a small rural village. This village just happens to be part of the fief of an old adversary, Loraan from Taltos, who isn't quite as dead as one might have thought from what happened to him in that book. The story (for the most part) is told from the point of view of Savn, a Teckla youth whom Vlad befriends.
This book gives the reader very different views of both Dragaeran society and Vlad Taltos than one gets from either the other Vlad books or the Paarfi books. It shows how normal folks see Vlad, and how normal folks live in the Empire. "Normal folks" being peasants; all the other Dragaera books are aristocracy-centric, so it's easy to forget that the vast majority of people in a society like that would be peasants. And Vlad seems very different from Savn's perspective, but it is unclear at this point whether this is just a difference of perception, or if Vlad really has changed in the two years since Phoenix. Maybe it's a bit of both. Vlad certainly seems mellower, and less self-centered, than his previous self, but I don't think I'll be able to say for sure until I get to Issola (which is the next Vlad-narrated book which takes place post-Phoenix).
Athyra is one of my personal favorites in the Vlad series. I'm not sure why, maybe it's because it's so different. Maybe it's just because I like the way it three-dimensionalizes the Teckla. Maybe I just like Savn. Or, maybe it's the reference to the infamous Pig-with-a-Wooden-Leg Joke.
(Other books in the Vlad Taltos series)