Showing results by author "Barbara Hambly" in All Categories

After the death of his mentor, an apprentice wizard must fight to escape a world he doesn’t understand. When the wizard Jaldis heard the cry from beyond the Void, telling of a world where magic was dead and begging for his aid, he and his apprentice, Rhion, went to help. Crossing the Void takes all of their strength, and when Rhion awakes on the other side, he learns that the task is beyond them. Jaldis is dead, and the portal home gone with him. Now he is trapped in a place called Earth, in a nation beset from all sides by its enemies. The men who called him here need a wizard to save them, and though Rhion is but a novice, he will have to do.

When Rhion the banker's son met the Master Wizard Jaldis, Jaldis said, "Come." Rhion came, leaving everything behind to answer the call in his blood. And through long years of drudgery and persecution, he had no regrets. Thus he became a wizard. A noble burned out Jaldis' eyes to please some god; Rhion made magic glasses so he could see. Together, they opened the dark well to the Abyss between universes, and a cry for help came from a world that had lost all magic. Could that happen to their world? Though forced to flee again, Jaldis was determined to reach that world through the Abyss, to help and to find how the magic was lost.

Mexico City in the autumn of 1835 is a lawless place, teeming with bandits and beggars. But an urgent letter from a desperate friend draws Benjamin January and his new bride, Rose, from New Orleans to this newly free province. Here they pray they’ll find Hannibal Sefton alive - and not hanging from the end of a rope.

It is St. John’s Eve in the summer of 1834 when Benjamin January - Creole physician and music teacher - is shattered by the news that his sister has been arrested for murder. The Guards have only a shadow of a case against her. But Olympe - mystical and rebellious - is a woman of color, whose chance for justice is slim. As Benjamin probes the allegation, he is targeted by a new threat: graveyard dust sprinkled at his door, whispering of a voodoo death curse. Now, to save Olympe’s life - and his own - Benjamin knows he must glean information wherever he can find it.

When slave owner Simon Fourchet asks Benjamin January to investigate sabotage, arson, and murder on his plantation, January is reluctant to do any favors for the savage man who owned him until he was seven. But he knows too well that plantation justice means that if the true culprit is not found, every slave on Mon Triomphe will suffer. Abandoning his Parisian French for the African patois of a field hand, cutting cane until his bones ache and his musician’s hands bleed, Benjamin must use all his intelligence and cunning to find the killer - or find himself sold down the river.

RAN AWAY. So began a score of advertisements every week in the New Orleans newspapers, advertising for slaves who’d fled their masters. But the Turk, Hüseyin Pasha, posted no such advertisement when his two lovely concubines disappeared. And when a witness proclaimed he’d seen the “devilish infidel” hurl their dead bodies out of a window, everyone was willing to believe him the murderer. Only Benjamin January, who knows the Turk of old, is willing to seek for the true culprit, endangering his own life in the process.

Abishag Shaw is seeking vengeance for his brother’s murder - and Benjamin January is seeking money after his bank crashes. Far beyond the frontier, in the depths of the Rocky Mountains, both men are to be found at the great Rendezvous of the Mountain Men, a month-long orgy of cheap booze, shooting matches, tall tales, and cutthroat trading. But at the rendezvous, the discovery of a corpse opens the door to hints of a greater plot - of madness and wholesale murder.

Nineteenth-century New Orleans is a blazing hotbed of scorching politics and personal vendettas. And it’s into this fire that Benjamin January falls when he is hired to follow Oliver Weems, a bank official who has absconded with $100,000 in gold and securities. But it’s more than just a job for January. The missing money is vital to the survival of the school for freed slaves that he and his wife, Rose, have founded.

In February 1835, the cold New Orleans streets are alight with masked Mardi Gras revelers as the American Theater’s impresario, Lorenzo Belaggio, brings a magnificent yet controversial operatic version of Othello to town. But it’s pitch-black in the alley where free man of color Benjamin January hears a slurred whisper, spies the flash of a knife, and is himself wounded as he rescues Belaggio from a vicious attack. Could competition for audiences - or for Belagio’s affections - provoke such violent skulduggery?

Kyra was preparing for her final wizard test before the Council. But suddenly, something was twisting her magic, weaving sinister portents of doom into even the simplest of her spells. Then she knew for certain that her young sister Alix was soon to marry--and soon to die. And so she journeyed back to the family who had disowned her.

New Orleans, 1838. When Benjamin January suddenly finds that his services playing piano at extravagant balls held by the city's wealthy are no longer required, he ends up agreeing to accompany sugar planter Henri Viellard and his young wife, Chloe, on a mission to Washington to find a missing friend. Plunged into a murky world, it soon becomes clear that while it is very possible the Viellards' friend is dead, his enemies are very much alive - and ready to kill anyone who gets in their way.

There was a time when Joanna Sheraton knew nothing of the Void. She was an ordinary computer programmer, toiling in a cubicle in air-conditioned Southern California comfort, unaware that sinister forces had penetrated her universe. But from across the interdimensional divide, an evil mage had put in motion a scheme for eternal life by transferring himself into a computer that feeds on Earth’s life force. Called upon to help by the wizard Antryg, Joanna could do nothing more than delay.

It is 1923, and silent film reigns in Hollywood. Of all the starlets, none is more beloved than Chrysanda Flamande, a diva as brilliant as she is difficult to manage. Handling her falls to Norah, widow of Chrysanda’s dead brother. She has always done her job well, but she was never equipped to deal with murder. When a violent killing shocks Chrysanda’s entourage, and other weird happenings swiftly follow, Norah begins to suspect that some strange power is stalking the star. In Chinatown she receives warning that a curse has been placed on the actress as vengeance for wearing a sacred amulet in one of her films.

Condemned to die for consorting with demons, dragonslayer Lord John Aversin sits in a dank prison cell and calculates the odds of escape, all the while smelling the smoke of the executioners’ pyres. Far away in Winterlands, Jenny Waynest pays a heavy price for turning away from dragonkind and choosing to be human. She mourns the loss of her husband, Lord John, even as she turns to face the dangers that engulf her family.

Once the most powerful mage in the land, defeater of dragons, Jenny Waynest is now a broken woman. She was possessed and corrupted by a demon, losing all she held dear - including her love’s trust. Rebuilding her life seems impossible. Her husband, Lord John, now bears his own torment far away: he tricked the beautiful and cruel Aohila, a rival hell’s demon queen, in order to free his wife from possession, and now he is plagued by her memories.

A dark and gritty trip into the imagination of one of science fiction's most gifted authors, this collection presents all nine tales of the Budayeen gathered together in one must-listen volume. Here is the Budayeen: a gritty fusion of Bogart's Casablanca, New Orleans' notoriously seedy French Quarter, and a futuristic Muslim city, all welded together and serving as the perfect backdrop for Marid, a drug-addled policeman and anti-hero of world-class proportion. T

When the Black Dragon seized the Deep of Ylferdun, young Gareth braved the far Winterlands to find John Aversin, Dragonsbane - the only living man ever to slay a dragon. In return for the promise of the King to send help to the Winterlands, Aversin agreed to attempt the nearly impossible feat again.With them, to guard them on the haunted trip south, went Jenny Waynest, a half-taught sorceress and mother of Aversin's sons.But at the decadent Court, nothing was as expected. Rebellion threatened the land.

Something is amiss with the world's magic. Spells don't work the way they used to—when they work at all. Only the powers of the Crystal Mages remain as they were, powers founded on the use of the mystical element adamis, the harvesting of which has enslaved the peoples of the Twilight Lands. Ravenous beasts have begun to appear, legendary creatures that seem to be proof against any magic.

In a world where wizards are relegated to ghettos, it is no surprise to see one murdered in the street. But for Stonne Caris, a young warrior monk who sees the killing and gives chase to the culprit, there is nothing ordinary about seeing a murderer disappear into a black, inky portal. The Archmage sends him in search of Antryg Windrose - a half-mad mage who understands the nature of these passages between dimensions.

When an overworked team of government physicists unwittingly invites something catastrophic into the world, rising young New York lawyer Cal Griffin is forced into a strange new role in a world of nightmare and wonder.