The Union teeters on the brink of war with the Northmen and the Gurkish Empire, but in its gilded capital of Adua three very different lives are about to collide. Logen Ninefingers—the Bloody-Nine, most feared warrior in the North—finds himself adrift after his crew is scattered, and is reluctantly drawn south by the scheming First Mage, Bayaz. Jezal dan Luthar is a vain and comfortable young officer who cares chiefly about his appearance and his tournament scores, completely unaware that the world he inhabits is already shifting under his boots. Sand dan Glokta was once the Union's finest swordsman; now he is a broken, tortured inquisitor who extracts confessions for the Closed Council and has long since stopped believing in anything.
Set in a secondary world where the last war against the demonic Shanka left deep scars, The Blade Itself subverts classic high-fantasy conventions at every turn. Heroes are compromised, villains have reasons, and the institutions men fight to protect are no better than what threatens them. Abercrombie introduces a cast of extraordinary moral complexity—each perspective honest about its own ugliness, each voice darkly funny—and sets them on a collision course whose full reckoning comes in the two volumes that follow. This first volume is largely a novel of characters and world-building, moving deliberately to establish a world in which cynicism is the only honest response.
