The Magicians’ Challenge by Tom McGowen, 1989.

This is the third book in The Magician’s Apprentice trilogy. It picks up soon after the second book, with the magician Armindor, his apprentice Tigg, Jilla, and Reepah the grubber on their way to the city of Ingarron, where Armindor and Tigg were originally from. They’ve already told the people of the city of Inbal of the threat posed by the reen, the ratlike creatures that are scheming to take over the world by finding old forms of lost technology and using them to dominate and destroy humanity.

Before they return to Ingarron, they want to stop in Orrello and take care of some business there, letting that city know about their discoveries about the reen and the ancient technology they’ve uncovered. On the ship to Orrello, they begin to get some insight into one of the pieces of old technology they’ve uncovered – the magnetic compass. When they first found it, they didn’t know what purpose it served. All they could tell about it was that the compass’s arrow always points in one direction, no matter how you move it. When they show it to the captain of the ship, he says that he could see a purpose in having such a thing if it pointed to a place that he knew he wanted to go, and Tigg begins to realize that the compass doesn’t point to a specific place but the general direction north. They still have a concept of north and south as directions, but they don’t think in those terms unless they’re comparing one known location to another known location, which is why they didn’t think of it before. Armindor is overjoyed at the revelation. Their people currently depend on known locations or observing the sun and stars in the sky to find their way, but with a compass (which they consider a “spell” of finding your way), people could navigate even in unfamiliar areas where the sky isn’t easily visible. This is the sort of thought and investigation that “magicians” (scientists) have had to do since the old technologies were lost and forgotten following a great nuclear war. After thousands of years, people are starting to rebuild society and redevelop technological knowledge, but because they don’t yet understand most of the principles behind it, they think of it as “magic” and “spells.”

However, as they are about to arrive in Orrello, they discover that the city has already been attacked by the reen, and many people there are dead. The captain of the ship says it’s not safe to go to the city now, so Armindor asks him to drop off his party further down the shore so they can continue to Ingarron and warn them of the danger. Now that they understand how the compass works, they can use it to find their way. (Although, readers will notice that, because language and writing have changed over the centuries, they don’t understand which of the letters on the compass actually represents “north”, and they think it’s the ‘S’ symbol, so ‘E’ represents “west” and so on. Close enough. They have the basic principle, and as long as they’re consistent, it will still work.)

On the way to Ingarron, they find a young man who escaped from the attack on Orrello. The young man, tiLammis, turns out to be the nephew of an important merchant in Ingarron, and he confirms that it was reen who attacked Orrello. The others are grateful that tiLammis witnessed the attack so he can help describe and confirm their accounts of the reen.

When they reach Ingarron, they are relieved to see that it has not yet been attacked. Tigg is promoted from Apprentice to Novice Sage and becomes a member of the Guild of Sages. They warn the other sages and the Lord Director of Ingarron about the reen, and tiLammis’s account of the attack on Orrello helps to convince them of the danger. Because they know that the reen hide among human populations and spy on them, Armindor says that they will have to make their preparations to protect Ingarron in secret. No one outside of the city leaders and sages should be told about what is happening. Rumors are already starting to spread about the destruction of Orrello, but the city leaders decide to pretend that they think some marauding barbarians are responsible. They discuss the armor and weapons they’ll need and the possibility of making a first strike on the reen by going into the sewers and tunnels beneath the city, where they know the reen are hiding, pretending to be normal rats.

Thanks to Tigg’s deprived upbringing in the streets of Ingarron, he knows someone who could be invaluable – the King of the Ratcatchers, Goorm. The Ratcatchers are a guild of intermarried families who, for generations, have made their profession catching and killing rats, thus eliminating a city pest and providing meat to poor families, who can’t afford anything else. When Tigg approaches Goorm and the other Ratcatchers to explain the problem of the reen and why the city needs their help, he discovers that they already know about it. They didn’t know exactly what the reen were or how many of them there were, but they’ve encountered them before while hunting rats, and they’ve even lost some of their members to them. They’re more than ready to help lead an expedition against them with the help of the city’s soldiers.

There is a complex system of underground roads beneath Ingarron, which the Ratcatchers explain were once above-ground roads because Ingarron was built over the ruins on a much-older city. Sometimes, Ratcatchers even find old artifacts from the Age of Magic (our time) there. The reen have poison darts that kill instantly, but the humans have improvised incendiary weapons made of flammable liquid in bottles. (Basically, they’ve figured out how to make Molotov cocktails, although they don’t call them that. They just call them “fire bottles”, which is descriptive.) The ensuing underground battle between the reens and the humans seems to end in victory for the humans with many reen dead. The humans are quick to celebrate their victory, but the story isn’t over yet. Tigg and Armindor determine that, although hundreds of reen were killed in the human attack, it’s not enough to account for the full reen population. Although the Lord Director and soldiers want to believe that the remaining reen have fled, they haven’t, and the battle has really just begun.

However, as Tigg and Jilla seek shelter from the reen’s retaliatory attack underground, they come face-to-face with the reen and realize that there is more than one faction of reen, including one that might be willing to negotiate instead of fight.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I haven’t talked about religion in this post-apocalyptic future, but they do have a different concept of religion from our time. They are polytheists in the fashion of ancient civilizations, with gods who represent different natural forces, like weather, or different professions, almost like patron saints. However, the names for their gods are completely unfamiliar, not based on any classic mythology. I haven’t explained about this before because they only make passing references to their gods and don’t go too deeply into their lore, so it’s hard to say much about them.

In the last book, they described the origins of one god, Roodemiss, who is the god of sages and “magicians”, and it seems that he might be based on some scientist or astronaut from the past because they describe him as a magician who ascended into the sky in a machine that he built in order to keep watch over the Earth from above during the nuclear holocaust that brought an end to civilization as we know it on Earth. However, they don’t explain any more about him, and he apparently never came back to Earth, which leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Was there supposed to be some kind of space station or maybe a Martian space colony where some humans went? I’m guessing a space colony would make more sense because space stations need to be resupplied from Earth, something that would be impossible for people to continue to do after the nuclear holocaust. On the other hand, because we don’t know who “Roodemiss” is, he might not necessarily be a human being, even though they describe him as being a “magician.” It occurred to me that, just as people in this time don’t really understand the difference between “science” and “magic” or “inventions” and “spells,” they might have gotten the story about “Roodemiss” wrong, and Roodemiss might actually be a satellite that would monitor conditions on Earth from above. Since they really only have legends about Roodemiss and no direct, continuing contact, it’s hard to say. Roodemiss is only represented by an eye because he is supposed to be watching over the world. If Roodemiss was a human in a space ship, space station, or space colony of some kind, we have no information about what happened to him or whatever group he may have been with in the thousands of years that have passed since his time. Sometimes, I wondered if the names of the gods are something that I should recognize, like corruptions of the names of modern people or things that I should know, but I just don’t recognize them and can’t think of what they are or would be, so that might not be the case. If anyone thinks they can recognize what “Roodemiss” or “Badoween” (the weather god) or “Durbis” or “Garmood” are supposed to reference, please comment below.

Part of the reason why I’m talking about religion now is that the Ratcatchers have made their headquarters in what is clearly an abandoned church. Tigg recognizes from the way it looks that it was once a place of worship, but he’s not quite sure what god was worshipped there. He looks at the pictures on the walls and describes seeing winged humans (angels), but he doesn’t know what to call them and doesn’t know what god they are surrounding. It gives him an odd feeling, and he worries about what happens to a god if people forget about him. We don’t know by what process this monotheistic society (we know from the previous book that Tigg’s society is located somewhere in North America) turned polytheistic or whether they will ever uncover their religious and cultural past, but there are remnants of that past still there, waiting to be uncovered, along with lost technology.

In the end, the humans and the reen do negotiate with each other. Although a large faction of the reen have wanted to destroy humans, another faction would really rather just be separate from human society. What they want is to leave human cities and build their own civilization in the uninhabited Wild Lands, where humans normally don’t go. The decision to negotiate isn’t easy for the humans because they don’t trust the reen. They consider possibly attacking the reen as they leave the city because they will be vulnerable, and if they kill them there, they could eliminate an enemy who might return to attack them again later. However, Armindor argues that a sneak attack after a peace agreement would be a dishonorable betrayal. There are also the other communities of reen in other cities to consider. If they hear stories about betrayal and massacre of their kind in Ingarron, it will only fuel their hatred of humans and lead to further war and massacre. Armindor and the other sages have the sense that, even though they don’t really understand what exactly the nuclear weapons that lead to the destruction of the past civilization were, that they were weapons of some kind that were used in a great war, and they don’t want their civilization to go the same way, just when they’re beginning to make some real progress on rebuilding it. The Lord Director is persuaded by their arguments and decides to allow Tigg to carry the message to the reen that they will be allowed to leave the city in peace and go to the Wild Lands.

It seems like a sudden end to the conflict with the reen, but only on the surface. There really are no easy answers. In the last book, the humans made the discovery of a computer with tutorials about ancient knowledge, but although the computer is telling them things they’ve always wanted to know, they first have to understand the language that the computer uses, and that’s going to take time. Even then, they’re going to have to work their way up through simple concepts to more complex ones in order to regain the level of technology that society once had. This agreement with the reen of Ingarron is also only the first step into an unknown future. The reen of Ingarron are only one faction of a much larger reen society that extends to other human cities. The reen have already destroyed and conquered Orrello, and as the book and the trilogy ends, it remains to be seen whether reen in other human cities will favor conquest and destruction or if they will join with the reen from Ingarron in building a new society of their own. They have a shared resentment of humans from generations of being treated like pests that need to be eliminated, but they’ve reached the point where they now have intelligence and abilities that are equal to those of human beings. Whatever happens to them, they now don’t have to live off of the crumbs of human society and can continue to build an independent society of their own. It’s possible that gaining recognition as an intelligent species with a society of their own that must be respected will calm some of their anger and resentment, so their future with the humans may include trading with human society as an independent, sovereign nation, but all of that is left to the imagination. It’s enough to know that all of the societies that now inhabit the Earth, both human and non-human, are beginning to change, and that’s a start.