The Sorcerers’ Plague
Book One of Blood of the Southlands
David B. Coe
Release Date: 12/2007

This review has been a long time coming. I started reading it months ago, but put it down in favor of a slightly newer novel in an effort to “keep up with the times” (and as you can see, I regret it greatly). After my prolonged and disappointing break from Plague, I was happy to pick it up once again and settle down for a good story.

The prologue grabbed me, starting with a young girl walking through a thunderstorm, willing herself to live. Curiosity about what horror she was running from – her family and village dead, allegedly her fault – propelled me to the first chapter. This began an introduction to an intriguing fantasy world whose details were continually and skillfully dropped throughout the book.

So despite little action or outright adventure (those looking for swordfights and spectacular magic should look elsewhere), I found myself pulled onward with each new character development, by Coe’s ideas and new twists on old fantasy concepts, as well as the mystery behind a girl-turned-killer. I was entertained and intrigued to the very end, only it wasn’t the end – this is “Book One of Blood of the Southlands.” By the time the players in the novel caught up to the former little girl (she’s an old woman when the actual novel begins) I knew it couldn’t be over, wasn’t over – the ramifications of her killing spree are much larger than her mad reasoning, more than she ever intended, so I found myself turning the last page, going, “Where’s Book Two?”

Synopsis:

Coe’s style is that subtle “slice of life” flavor of writing with an otherworldly twist. He dangles interesting tidbits about the world and the people, stringing readers along until they are reminded that this story began with a mysterious horror. That horror rears its ugly head again as a village is destroyed by a terrible plague that has thrown the inhabitants’ magic terrifyingly out of control. And once again, Coe’s subtle style leads readers on, this time adding the lure of not what is happening, but why, as it quickly becomes obvious that Licaldi, the little girl from the prologue, is now an old woman – and a genocidal sociopath.

As tales of plague swirl about, one man from Licaldi’s village realizes what she is doing. Though old, perhaps too old to travel, he takes it upon himself to track her down, and if need be, kill her.

While the old woman – a “Mettai witch” who does magic with her body’s blood on her blade and dirt from the ground – is a driving force behind this story, Coe also turns the reader’s attention to a traveling Qirsi family. The head of this family is Grinsa, a powerful Weaver, the protagonist from Coe’s “Winds of the Forelands” series. As he had a starring role in Coe’s previous series, so he cannot escape from being caught up in the major events of this one. On the run from the aftermath of a political war in the Forelands, Grinsa once again gets caught up by politics and power struggles, this time of a Qirsi clan in the Southlands. From there, he becomes enmeshed in the havoc the old Mettai woman creates. Qirsi and Mettai are two races diametrically opposed, with centuries of hate and an ancient blood feud between them; Grinsa somehow becomes the middleman, a lone voice of reason amongst enraged Qirsi as war threatens to flare between the races once again because of the actions of a lone crazed woman.

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