The Black Mages Guild
The black magician ( English title: The Black Magician Trilogy ) is a fantasy - Trilogy by Trudi Canavan , which is about Sonea, a girl from the lower class of a medieval city, and their lives. The book series is divided into the books Die Rebellin , Die Novizin and Die Meisterin .
The Rebellin , the first book in the trilogy, appeared in 2001 under the title The Magicians' Guild (English. The guild of magicians ). The translation followed in 2006 by Michaela Link , who also translated the following two novels into German . The 2002 sequel The Novice with the original English title The Novice was translated in July 2006. Under the title The High Lord (Engl. The High Lord ) appeared in 2003, the third part of the trilogy, which in September 2006 under the title The champion was released as a German version.
Situation in Kyralia at the time of the action
In Imardin, the capital of Kyralia, there is a three-class system: the broad lower class is made up of day laborers, prostitutes, street children and the like who live in the so-called hut districts outside the city gates. The middle building is made up of craftsmen, traders and citizens, and at the top are the magicians' guild and the aristocratic upper class, "the houses". Another faction is represented by the so-called thieves who, as underworld greats, have great power in the slums and live just as well as the members of the houses.
The Mages Guild, while extremely powerful, generally stays out of the political and social life of the coastal town of Imardin, as the law requires. She lives isolated in her neighborhood; the magicians research, teach and supervise the use of magic. Because this may only be used by trained magicians of the guild for certain purposes. However, in order to become a magician, there must be an innate talent.
Non-members of the guild are not allowed to learn or practice magic in Imardin and the allied lands; the penalty for violating it is death. However, these laws are not only about maintaining power, but also about public safety: An unqualified magician cannot control his magic, it is released again and again in an uncontrolled manner, each time more destructively than before, until it kills the magician with a huge explosion and destroyed the entire environment.
The magicians keep as far as possible from the population, there is only one point where they are regularly used by the King of Kyralia, to whom they are subordinate: They “clean” the capital Imardin of the lower class every year. For this purpose they are rounded up and chased out of the city by a troop of magicians. The story of Sonea the rebel begins when such a purge is imminent.
action
The rebel
Sonea, belonging to the persecuted lower class, gets caught up in this purge in a roundabout way and is surrounded by magicians on the north square with many other people. These want to chase the alleged rabble out of town with a few bang effects. The angry crowd defends itself, hurling stones, paint bags and itching powder projectiles at the magicians. But they protect themselves from the attacks with a magic wall.
When Sonea finally smashes a stone at the magician from among her friends, it does not bounce off the magical protective shield, but penetrates it, hits a magician and leaves him unconscious. After a general moment of shock, the magicians turn to Lord Rothen, who immediately knows who the perpetrator is and points to Sonea; next to her, however, stands a boy whom the magicians believe to be the culprit. 19 magicians then attack him with a so-called "stun blow" each to prevent him from escaping. Some of the blows combine to form a "fire blow" that eventually kills the boy. Sonea believes the magicians want to kill her and passes out. Her friends then carry her out of town and hide her.
Soon the magicians set out to find her and offer her a reward. Sonea deeply distrusts the magicians, believing that the magicians want to kill her. The magicians, however, have no intention of doing anything, they simply want to teach them how to control their magical powers and, at a "request" from the king, accept them into the guild. Because the law of Kyralia says that every magician must learn to control his powers.
Sonea runs away from the magicians and her friend Cery helps her hide by demanding favors from some people. At some point Cery can no longer hide Sonea and the two turn to the thieves. Sonea should use her magical powers for the thieves and Cery has to work for the thieves so that they hide Sonea.
But not everyone in the Mages Guild has only the best for Sonea in mind. While the two magicians Dannyl and Rothen do everything they can to help the young girl, others are less enthusiastic about the idea. Because magic is usually only reserved for the wealthy classes of the population, even if this is not in any law, and Sonea is just a street kid. A race against time begins before Sonea's powers get out of hand and they destroy her themselves. After a lengthy search and chase, the mages surround Sonea, but Sonea's powers are already out of control and destroy everything around them. With the help of Lord Rothen, who is the only one able to identify Sonea as the one who threw the stone at Lord Fergun's head, Sonea manages to control her strength and collapses from exhaustion.
When Sonea wakes up the next day, she is in Rothen's quarters. Over the next few days, Sonea learns how to control her powers and does a guild tour with Lord Rothen and Lord Dannyl, a former novice of Rothen. Shortly thereafter, she is secretly visited by a magician named Lord Fergun, who is the magician she threw the stone at the beginning of the story. Sonea does not recognize this at first. Lord Fergun tells Sonea that she is deliberately deceived by Lord Rothen and that he withholds information from her. He influences her by telling her that if she leaves the guild, she will have to endure a painful procedure that will block her magic. So far Lord Rothen had kept this from her. He offers her, should she support him in his plan to become her mentor, that she can leave the guild and keep her magical powers. Sonea then asks for some time to think it over.
One day her friend Cery sneaks into the guild and is caught. Instead of the magicians punishing him, they allow him to visit Sonea. When he wants to leave again, Lord Fergun offers to accompany him to the exit. Instead, Fergun locks Cery in a dungeon under the guild's university. When Sonea has still not decided after a while whether she would like to support Fergun's plan, Fergun shows his true colors and blackmailed her with Cery's capture. If, at her hearing, who will be her mentor, she does not explain that Fergun was still looking at her before he went down, which is how he first sensed her magical power, Fergun will kill Cery.
A mentor is a person of authority for the respective novice in the guild and a person who accompanies the respective novice on his or her path of being a novice. Few of the novices who join the guild are mentored. An average novice (student) of the guild takes five years of training to rise to the rank of magician and thus to receive the title of lord or lady. In total, there are three major areas that can be learned after training: the art of war, alchemy and the art of healing.
In truth, Lord Fergun wants to be her mentor in order to force her to flee and thus to show the guild that one can only accept noble youngsters into the guild. At the hearing of Sonea in the Guild, she explains that Lord Fergun discovered her magical potential in the incident in which she hit him with the stone in front of Lord Rothen, who also wants to be her mentor. You yourself, Lord Fergun and Lord Rothen know that this is a lie.
Meanwhile, Lord Dannyl goes into the underground tunnels under the guild. A few days ago he saw Lord Fergun disappear into the tunnels with a tray full of food. Another reason for his action is a letter from the thieves who are already missing Cery. On the search for this forbidden he is discovered by the High Lord Akkarin, who sends him out of the underground tunnels again. The High Lord finally finds Cery and brings him to the hearing. When Sonea sees Cery, she explains that Lord Fergun blackmailed her and held Cery prisoner. The guild's administrator, Lord Lorlen, checks this through a mind reading at Sonea. He also sees that Sonea has observed the High Lord, the head of the guild, as he used the forbidden black magic. The administrator asks Sonea not to tell anyone about it except her new mentor Lord Rothen, otherwise the whole guild would be in danger. Rothen suspects that Lord Fergun will be given a job that will take him to a remote location for several years, and Sonea decides to follow Lorlen's instructions and join the guild, since he believes it will be safer there than in the Hüttenviertel and because she would like to become a healer one day in order to build a hospital in the Hüttenviertel.
The novice
For Sonea the training to become a magician begins. She - as well as her mentor Lord Rothen - knew that it would not be easy, but her classmates harass her more than expected because they reject Sonea as a former street child. Sonea decides to study so much that she can move on to the next semester. She succeeds, but the worst of her classmates, Regin, follows her into the new class, so that she is still exposed to his harassment, even if her new classmates do not participate in his actions.
The second storyline describes Lord Dannyl's duties as the newly appointed second ambassador of the guild and his travels through the allied countries, this in the company of the scholar Tayend von Tremmelin, an unusually handsome young man, romantic feelings begin to arise between the two. While Dannyl is officially on a diplomatic mission, he tries, at the request of Administrator Lorlen, to learn more about the secrets of the head of the guild, Akkarin. He traveled the countries in his youth, and Lorlen suspects that he learned black magic here, but tells Dannyl nothing that could arouse suspicion.
When Akkarin notices that Rothen, Sonea and the administrator know of his secret, he takes over the supervision of Sonea himself in order to blackmail them. This creates even more problems for her with the other classmates, as she is now the High Lord's protégé (whose protégé is a great honor that is rarely given to a student). In addition, Sonea is now obliged to live in Akkarin's residence after she had to swap Rothen's residence for the novices' quarters because of rumors of an affair.
The abuses of the classmates then become more and more brutal, apparently with the approval of the High Lord, who regards this as the only way for Sonea to reach her potential. Through Rothen's son, the healer Dorrien, who fell in love with her during his visit, she then finds the courage to challenge Regin to take on her tormentor in a magical duel. Reluctant to reciprocate Dorrien's feelings, Sonea challenges Regin in public so that it is impossible for him to decline. She is assisted in her preparation by the war mage Lord Yikmo. In a formal duel, Sonea wins the challenge in front of the entire guild (including Dannyl, who returned to Imardin shortly before the start of the fight) against Regin and can thus prove to be worthy of the entire guild, whereupon the harassment of the classmates stop there Regin as the main responsible person does not want to risk another humiliating defeat. Sonea can win the favor of the guild members in particular by not relying on her greater magical power in battle, but rather proving that she thinks strategically and is more adept at using magic.
In the epilogue, Sonea notices the high lord killing a Sachakan assassin using black magic. He explains to her that assassins keep coming to town to kill him. They are also said to be responsible for the strange series of murders that have plagued the city.
The champion
In the third and last part of the trilogy The Guild of Black Magicians , the former Hüttenviertel child Sonea won the respect of her classmates. As a novice of the high lord, however, she is forced to lead a double life, as she knows that Akkarin wields black magic, but that this must remain a secret. After a while, she finally tells Akkarin the reasons for his actions: Black magicians lived in the neighboring country of Sachaka who want to attack Imardin, but first need proof that the guild has banned black magic. This is interesting for those black magicians because the guild cannot produce powerful magicians without the use of black magic. To this end, they would regularly send spies to Imardin who Akkarin would have to kill with black magic to protect the country from invasion.
Sonea then demands that he be trained in the art of black magic in order to protect Kyralia from the threat from neighboring Sachaka should Akkarin die. But as expected, the guild finds out that Akkarin is using black magic and banishes him to Sachaka. Sonea insists on going with him. In Sachaka the two are pursued by two Ichani who were sent by their leader Kariko to kill them. They seek shelter in the mountains, but the Ichani stay behind.
In the second storyline, Guild Ambassador Dannyl roams the allied Elyne and scouts a group of wild magicians on behalf of the High Lord. The latter wants Dannyl to gain their trust, and implies that Dannyl should make the wild magicians believe that they could blackmail him. Dannyl understands this to mean that he should indicate to the group that he and his companion are a couple. This is made credible by the fact that he was accused of homosexuality in his novice period , which is a moderately serious crime in Kyralia, and that his Elyne companion is known as the "boy" (polite term for homosexuals in Elyne) (although people believe that Dannyl is none of it know and find the thing quite funny). In the end, he succeeds in gaining the group's trust and arresting them.
Cery has real problems. Meanwhile, Sonea's old friend from hut quarters has risen to one of Imardin's underworld greats, and his most urgent task is to put an end to the mysterious series of murders. Nobody knows who the perpetrators are and what their motives are, but a culprit has to be found. In order to free the respectable members of the half- and underworld from any suspicion, he should track down the killers and render them harmless. When he comes across Savara during his investigation, he doesn't know whether the stranger is more of a help or more of an obstacle. Just like him, she's chasing the serial killers, but something is wrong with her.
At the end of the book, eight black magicians actually attack Kyralia. Sonea and Akkarin, who have returned to Imardin with Dorrien's help, meet Cery, who was the thief who had worked for the High Lord. He realizes that the two have fallen in love and are now a couple. They manage to kill the attackers, who are called Ichani, one after the other. During the defensive battle, however, the guild administrator Lorlen and Sonea's teacher Yikmo fell. Finally, there is a fight between Kariko, the leader of the Sachakans, and his two remaining companions against Sonea and Akkarin on the guild premises. Akkarin is badly wounded in the course of the fight whereupon he gives Sonea his remaining magical power, who then also kills the Ichani with it. After the fight, she finds that Akkarin has not saved any strength for himself, but gave her everything he had left, which he knew would result in his death. Since the two fell in love in the course of the third volume, this is a heavy blow for them. The mages decide to take Sonea back into the guild. She is only allowed to leave the guild with escort. Sonea's wish to provide free medical care for the poor in the city is granted. She is pregnant by Akkarin and asks her aunt to stay with her until the birth.
continuation
Under the title The Magician's Apprentice (in Germany: Magie ), Canavan published a prequel to the events of the trilogy in 2009. It is about Sonea a few hundred years before the events.
Another trilogy called The Traitor Spy Trilogy continues the story of Kyralia. The first volume, entitled Sonea: The Guardian , was published in May 2010. The second serial novel Sonea: The Healer was published in May 2011. The third volume Sonea: The Queen was published in November 2012 in Germany.
Awards
- The novice was nominated for the " Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel".
- The third book, Die Meisterin , was nominated in 2003 for "the Best Novel Ditmar category".
See also
literature
- Trudi Canavan: The Black Magician's Guild; The rebel. Blanvalet, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-442-24394-7 .
- Trudi Canavan: The Black Magician's Guild; The novice. Blanvalet, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-442-24395-5 .
- Trudi Canavan: The Black Magician's Guild; The champion. Blanvalet, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-442-24396-3 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ trudicanavan.com: The Magician's Apprentice ( Memento of the original from September 22, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ trudicanavan.com: The Traitor Spy Trilogy ( Memento of the original from October 12, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
