In the Hall of the Dragon King

A knight is carried into the temple mortally wounded and dies before he can finish his errand, and the acolyte on duty volunteers to finish it for him. Quentin is a boy with a message for Queen Alinea: Eskevar, the Dragon King, is not coming home from the war, because the sorcerer Nimrood has him. Prince Jaspin is already measuring the empty throne.

What follows is a plain quest carried by its company. Durwin is a hermit, Theido a knight outlawed by the usurper, and the queen comes along rather than waiting to be told. They reach Dekra, the ruined city of an older people, where Quentin has the religious revelation the book has been walking toward, and it redirects everything after it. Then a sea crossing to Karsh, Nimrood's island fortress, where the rescue goes wrong before it goes right and the king still is not where he is supposed to be.

This is Lawhead's first novel, out from a Christian house five years before Taliesin, and the distance between the two is enormous. The prose is flat, Nimrood is a cackler, and the theology is not woven through so much as set on top, with Dekra stating the argument aloud. It reads young. Taken as the thing an author does before he finds out what he can do, it is pleasant enough; taken on its own, it is ordinary sword and sorcery with a sermon in the middle.