TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

Moving along in my quest to burn myself out of R.A. Salvatore books, I moved on to the ninth book of the Legacy of Drizzt series. This is nine of ten before I can take a break and move on to a couple other books. That’s probably a good thing.

Siege of Darkess is pretty much the culmination of the previous eight books. I guess Salvatore had decided that eight books of build were enough. Pretty much every character we’ve seen through the entire series plays a role in this book to get everyone together in one giant Drow vs. Everyone battle at Mithril Hall. Mithril Hall, if you were keeping track, was the underground kingdom conquered by evil forces and liberated by the Companions. The dwarves invited the barbarians to be their trading partners on the surface and everyone was happy. All of the random political and racial stuff is put aside in this book to bring us to the battle.

Finally, we find out why Matron Baenre has taken such an interest in following Drizzt through the Realms. It turns out not to be his rogue status but instead because he travels with Bruenor Battlehammer. Matron Baerne, you see, was previously involved in a surface raid against Mithril Hall and trapped the soul of Bruenor’s 8x great-grandfather. The location of the hall was eventually lost to the drow, but Matron Baerne bid her time and waited until a rogue drow randomly found her trapped soul’s great-[...]-grandson so the two of them could decide to find the hall. Thank god that happened or the plan would not worked out at all. The drow believe they can use Mithril Hall as access to the surface for supplies via trade or theft.

This is probably the best book of the nine so far winding up everything that’s been left dangling in one neat little package. Save for the extremely contrived set-up of the raid I was glad to see there was something of a payoff to the constant attention Drizzt received from Matron Baerne. Even if it was somewhat unbelievable that no one died in the onslaught (save for bad guys) it was a satisfying conclusion to a bit too much build up. The victory of the surface dwellers borders on disappointing, too. Before the battle started, you knew they were going to attack at night. It was glaringly obvious that the sunrise was going to eventually drive them back.

If I have one single complaint about the book it’s that it treats the Time of Troubles as almost an afterthought. For those uninitiated to the Forgotten Realms, there was a period during which the gods were banned from their home planes and were forced to walk the earth as avatars. There was a whole trilogy about this (one of the better ones) called, conveniently, The Avatar Trilogy. This was a time of chaos. Magic went wild and gods died and other gods ascended and various different amounts of good stuff. This book treats it as almost a nothing occurrence… which considering the fact that Menzoberranzan’s entire social structure, government, life, and everything else is based on the will of their goddess is pretty silly. It’s used to introduce one Menzoberranzan house that makes use of psionics only to see the house utterly obliterated after the Time of Troubles Ends. It was pretty disappointed, overall. The chaos in that city should be a book of its own — not an afterthought conflict in a book where they completely reorganize their city in time to assault the surface.

All told, I really liked this one and felt like the ending of the story arcs were mostly satisfying. Except for one, which will be addressed in the next book.