Yendi
Steven Brust
209 pages
published in 1984
Other reviews
While reading, I kept thinking of this as Yentl, which wasn't helping. It also took me some time to figure out that this, the second Vlad Taltos book, was actually a prequel to the first one, Jhereg. From what I've learned from discussions in rec.arts.sf.written, Brust often pulls stunts like this; he likes to play around with time.
For those who haven't encountered the Vlad Taltos novels, they're set in Drageara, a fantasy world populated by Dragearans, a sort of long-lived elves and humans, called Easterners because they live to the east of the Dragearan. All Dragearan are divided into seventeen houses, each named after an animal and partaking of said animal's characteristics. Dragons e.g. are warriors, while the Yendi are expert plotters and manipulators. Vlad Taltos himself is an Easterner who bought himself into the Jhereg, the Dragaeran criminal class and apart from the serf-like Teckla, the only one to allow Easterners to their ranks, for the right price. Jhereg themselves are flying scavenger reptiles, who can form a telephatic bond with their owner, as Loiosh has with Vlad.
In Yendi, Vlad has only been a minor gang boss for about a year or so, when he gets involved in a gang war with one Wellock, a somewhat more succesful gang boss. It soon becomes apparant Wellock is sponsored by someone powerful, someone even Vlad with his powerful friends can't beat. As the title might indicate, there is more going on than is apparant at the surface...
During this gang war, Vlad also meets Cawti, his true love, as told in Jhereg. He falls in love with her when he goes to interrogate her after she killed him. Dragearans having the power of revivication, being killed is not as fatal as it could be and fortunately for Vlad, he has the right friends to do this for him.
I had been looking out for this book for some time, but for some reason copies of it are scare around here, neither to be had new nor secondhand. Fortunately, my favourite if somewhat overpriced secondhand bookstore got in new stock from the USA, including this one and I grabbed it quickly before it disappeared. I wanted to read this because there are quite a few people on rec.arts.sf.written and elsewhere who like Brust and especially the Vlad Taltos novels, but not enough to special order it from Amzaon or something. I can see why people like this series: Vlad is a nicely cynical funny narrator in the best sort of fantasy hardboiled tradition and the plot moves fast enough to stay interesting. If, as people have told me, the later books in the series actually have some depth to them, Brust certainly deserves the accolades he has gotten. On its own however, Yendi is a fun distraction, but not spectacularly good.
