The first two books limned a longstanding world that, in the most simplistic sense, consisted of two opposed forces. On the one hand we had the rich cities of the Khaiem, where daily life had attained relative sophistication and ease due to a single potent factor: a class of men known as poets and their genie-like servants, the andats. Able to perform a variety of supernatural miracles, the andats, reluctantly obeying their human masters, brought riches to the Khaiem. And then we had the Galts: dwellers in harsh lands, militaristic, envious, constantly scheming to undermine their soft rivals.

Our main cast: Otah, now ruler of the city of Machai. His poets, Maati and Cehmai. Otah's wife Kiyan, and children Eiah and Danat. Appearing after a long interval are Maati's ex-lover Liat and their son Nayiit, whom we are seeing for the first time as an adult. These folks are very familiar to us from the prior volumes. But new to the scene is perhaps the major player of what is to come: the Galt general Balasar Gice. A warlord of surpassing ingenuity, Balasar has contrived a plan to overthrow the Khaiem once and for all, by tampering with every single andat. He's enlisted a rogue poet named Riaan to accomplish this.

The first half of the book finds Otah managing his kingdom amid many stresses. He's trying to second-guess the Galts and build an army to meet their heretofore nebulous threat. (The Khaiem have no tradition of soldiers.) He's arguing with the head poet, the Dai-kvo. He's worried about his capricious teenage daughter Eiah and his chronically sick male heir Danat. Then, when Liat—once also Otah's lover—arrives in town, the ruler's life becomes truly complicated.

At the novel's halfway mark, Balasar's plan succeeds, and he is able to throw his carefully amassed army of 8,000 tough soldiers against helpless Khaiem. The rest of the book charts the military struggles—which do not entirely supersede the affairs of the heart—and also the desperate measures that the poets Maati and Cehmai are willing to undertake to insure the survival of their nation.

Tragedy flavored with exoticism

Daniel Abraham's major accomplishment in this splendid series—besides, of course, the craftsmanly triumph of telling a fine, alluring, exhilarating story with characters you can really believe—is, so far as I can see, to revive an old form of genre fiction best instanced by citing the tradition of Blue Book and Argosy and Adventure magazines, and the writings of Harold Lamb. Whatever could I mean by that?

Well, once upon a time, a mere 80 or 90 years ago, the world and its history were still much less explored in popular fiction. To the average pulp reader, names like Samarkand and Timbuctoo and Genghis Khan conjured up fantastical, dreamy notions of exotic cultures, high deeds of derring-do, weird rituals and religions—in short, romance. The pulps and their masters exploited this Kiplingesque mode so thoroughly, eventually rendering the great talismans of romance somewhat mundane, that even during the lifetime of the pulps, writers like Robert E. Howard were motivated to invent fantasy realms to host fresher occurrences of these eternal fables.

Note that this is not Tolkienesque fantasy, with its magic swords and dragons and celestial underpinnings, but another beast entirely. The occult is less important than eternal dramas of treachery, love, vengeance. Conan's best moments are not battling demons, but in taverns and battlefields.

Looking at The Long Price Quartet, the reader must concede, I think, that the fantasy element is almost—but only almost—entirely removable without detriment to the tale. True, the andats and their powers lie at the core of events, and the big shocker in this newest installment could have occurred in no other way. But if some other mundane MacGuffin were substituted—the Khaiem held the secrets of superior shipbuilding, say—than the rest of the story would be undiminished.

And what does Abraham focus on, then? Shakespearean high tragedy (no comedy, by the way), where the seeds planted by the characters' vices and virtues bear their eventual fruit. (Consider that the second volume was practically a retelling of Macbeth.) He's meticulous in following the threads he began three books ago (some 25 years to 30 years pass for the characters) to their destined ends, providing much emotional heft and resonance.

By daring to destroy his subcreation, Abraham regenerates an entire mode of fantasy.