Warblade

Warblade is the third and final book of David Ferring's Konrad trilogy, and it arrives carrying a heavy burden. This is the volume that has to gather up every thread spun across Konrad and ShadowBreed and tie them off, and it is where my long affection for this series has to make its peace with reality. I love these books, but I can see clearly, now more than ever, where this one falls short of what it might have been.

Some context explains a great deal. The Konrad story was, I gather, originally conceived as something far larger than a trilogy, possibly as many as seven volumes, and Garnett (writing here, as throughout, under the Ferring pseudonym) seems to have been told partway through that there would be no more after the third. GW Books was winding down by the time Warblade appeared in 1993, at the very dawn of what would later become Black Library, and you can feel the squeeze on every page. A story built to unfold at leisure has been forced to sprint to its conclusion.

The book moves to Altdorf, the capital of the Empire, where Konrad, now an older and harder man, several years on from where we left him and still searching for the long-lost Elyssa, becomes embroiled in a skaven plot to replace the Emperor Karl Franz with a double. As he digs, he discovers that the Chaos cults have wormed their way deep into the nobility and the guard around the Emperor himself, and that, true to the cosmic pattern hinted at across the earlier books, everything and everyone seems connected to the great struggle into which he was born. Escaping the city, he is reunited with his old mentor Wolf, and at last begins to understand his own place in the scheme of things, before gathering his allies for a final confrontation.

There is plenty to enjoy. Armed now with the mystical sword that gives the book its title, forged especially for him, Konrad finally gains some genuine agency and self-knowledge after two books of being swept along by forces beyond his control. The strongest material, by some distance, is his reckoning with how much he has changed; having survived the horrors of the Chaos Wastes and the Bronze Knight, he finds the scheming Chaos cults of the capital almost beneath his notice, child's play after what he has seen, and his willingness to hurt and kill anyone standing between him and Elyssa shows just how far the boy from the forest has been corrupted. This is the most convincing character work in the whole trilogy, and it suggests Garnett had a great deal more he wanted to do with Konrad than he was given room for.

But the constraints win in the end. The conclusion is rushed, crowded and confusing, cramming the answers to a dozen long-running mysteries into far too little space, with some resolved hastily and others left dangling. The central conceit, that one man and a band of allies, including a crew of pirates, might storm Altdorf and save the Emperor, strains credulity badly even by the generous standards of heroic fantasy; it simply does not feel plausible within the world the earlier books built so carefully. The result is a finale that is intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying, an ending that raises nearly as many questions as it answers, and that leaves you with the strong sense of a story cut off before its time.

And yet. I cannot bring myself to be hard on Warblade, because I know what it was trying to be and why it could not get there. Read as the triumphant conclusion the trilogy deserved, it disappoints. Read as the truncated final act of an ambitious, idiosyncratic, genuinely strange piece of early Warhammer fiction, written by a real author pressing against the limits of a licence and a dying imprint, it is a flawed but fascinating close. For anyone who has come this far with Konrad, it is required reading, and despite everything it gives the character a measure of the growth and the answers he was owed. Not the ending I wanted, but an ending I am glad I read, and one that has stayed with me for twenty years regardless.