ShadowBreed

ShadowBreed is the second book of David Ferring's Konrad trilogy, and it picks up the instant the first volume leaves off, ramping the violence and the strangeness up considerably. If you have not read Konrad, start there; this is not a series to come into halfway, whatever the occasional bursts of recap might suggest. For those of us who followed Konrad from the burning of his village, though, ShadowBreed is the book where the saga deepens, darkens, and begins to show both its real ambition and its real strain.

A reminder of the author, for the uninitiated. David Ferring was the pen name of David S. Garnett, a genuine British SF writer and editor working within the early GW Books line at the turn of the 1990s, and one of the small group of talented authors that David Pringle brought to the very first wave of Warhammer fiction. That pedigree shows. ShadowBreed, which appeared in 1993, is unmistakably the work of someone who loves the sword-and-sorcery tradition and is enjoying himself enormously playing in it.

The story resumes with Konrad, now grown from boy to hardened mercenary, leaving his mentor Wolf behind to chase Skullface, the scarred figure he glimpsed and wounded on the night his home was destroyed. That pursuit drags him through some of the trilogy's most memorable sequences. He is captured by a beastman horde and escapes; he descends into a hidden city of skaven, the ratmen, deep beneath the earth; he contends with dubious wizards, blood sacrifices, and trippy mystical visions; and he has a long, doomed, oddly tender encounter with a daemoness whom he allows to recover a little of her lost humanity before the end. That last sequence is, for me, the high point of the book, and a sign of what Garnett could do when he let the weirdness breathe.

There are real revelations here too, and they are what lift ShadowBreed above mere episodic adventure. We learn a great deal more about Elyssa, the lost love from the first book, including some genuinely horrific details of her family that cast their earlier scenes together in a far sadder light. A surprise meeting with her brother begins to hint at a vast conspiracy threading through the very heart of the Empire, and Konrad's growing musings on his own fate start to suggest that he is caught in something larger and more cyclical than a simple quest for revenge. The idea slowly takes shape that Konrad exists within a kind of cosmic pattern, and it is the connective tissue that holds the increasingly wild plot together.

That said, this is also where the cracks begin to show. ShadowBreed is more plot-driven than its predecessor, and the machinery grinds a little louder. The coincidences mount, later developments grow increasingly improbable, and one or two earlier threads are brushed over or quietly forgotten. Konrad's knack for surviving against impossible odds, charming at first, starts to wear at the suspension of disbelief. The handling of the women is uneven, and a touch disappointing after the care taken with Elyssa. It is, in short, silly, crude and extremely violent, and yet, curiously, it contains not a single curse word, which lends the whole blood-soaked enterprise an oddly innocent quality I find rather endearing.

None of this dimmed my affection, either as a younger reader or now. ShadowBreed does not quite live up to the promise of Konrad; it is messier, more strained, and more obviously the middle of something. But it is also bigger, stranger and more emotionally resonant in places, and it ends on a genuinely compelling cliffhanger that left me, both then and now, impatient for the finale. For the reader already invested in Konrad's journey it is essential, flaws and all; a dark, lurid, imaginative middle chapter that asks a great deal of the book still to come.