Oops. I broke my reading order.Moorcock's bibliography is a nightmare. I catalog my books on LibraryThing, an ongoing experiment in wiki-style public book cataloging. There's a forum for those members who try to straighten out tangled bibliographies, clear up ambiguities, etc. I did a search for Moorcock's name and found that basically everyone who's ever looked at the problem has thrown their hands up in despair and walked away.
For instance. The Eternal Champion is a novel as well as the second book in the UK omnibus series and the first book in the US series. The UK omnibus includes The Eternal Champion, Phoenix in Obsidian and The Dragon in the Sword. The US omnibus omits Dragon but includes The Sundered Worlds and To Rescue Tanelorn...
For another instance. Stormbringer is a novel as well as the twelfth UK omnibus, whose contents are identical to the eleventh US omnibus which is entitled Elric: The Stealer of Souls, which is also the title of the first volume of a new series of Elric collections with different contents altogether!
My head hurts. Anyway, the suggested reading order I'm using is an amalgam of the UK and US omnibuses mixed in with some other stuff. The list zigged, I zagged, and I read Tanelorn about forty books early. Mea culpa.
The cover. One thing about DAW: unlike a lot of publishers they were always conscientious about crediting their cover artists. Not that Michael Whelan needs it. There's his stylized badge/emblem/signature thingy carved into the top step. Note also the elegant framing and composition. Dig those baubles. No one baubled like Whelan back in the day.
And is that a near-subliminal face on the chest of the Lich King? Is that from the book? I don't remember.I also don't remember this story, though I know I read the Elric books in my teens. Maybe I skipped it because Elric wasn't in it. That sounds like me.
It's a graceful little story and I don't think I'm really spoiling anything if I tell you the entire plot.
City is threatened.
Hero goes on quest for supernatural aid.
Hero returns with aid just in time to save city.
Well, duh! That's like spoiling Titanic by telling you the ship sinks.
Since we know where we're going the journey is everything. Here's how it starts.
Beyond the tall and ominous glass-green forest of Troos, well to the North and unheard of in Bakshaan, Elwher or any other city of the Young Kingdoms, on the shifting shores of the Sighing Desert lay Tanelorn, a lonely, long-ago city, loved by those it sheltered. Tanelorn had a peculiar nature in that it welcomed and held the wanderer. To its peaceful streets and low houses came the gaunt, the savage, the brutalized, the tormented, and in Tanelorn they found rest.
Now, most of these troubled travellers who dwelt in peaceful Tanelorn had thrown off earlier allegiances to the Lords of Chaos who, as gods, took more than a mild interest in the affairs of men. It happened, therefore, that these same Lords grew to resent the unlikely city of Tanelorn and, not for the first time, decided to act against it.
An unlikely army is raised against the unlikely city and Rackhir the Red Archer sets off for help. He acquires a companion, travels through five Gates and across five mystical realms, encounters an old flame (now an enemy), recruits allies against Chaos, and returns in the very nick. All in less than 10,000 words, another example of Moorcock's profligacy of imagination.
When it's all over Rackhir must deal with that old girlfriend, Sorana, who stood with Chaos against his beloved Tanelorn. His solution proves that he is entirely worthy of the peace he desires.
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