The Warded Man

The first book in Peter V. Brett's trilogy, the Demon Cycle. The Warded Man (also known as The Painted Man in the United Kingdom) is the story of mankind's struggle to survive in a world where demons rise each night to kill those not protected by magical wards. Society has crumbled and humans survive in isolated settlements, ranging from cities to small hamlets. Few will brave the roads to travel between settlements. The book tells the tale of three children, each born in different hamlets, who manage to overcome tragedies and leave the safety of their homes to find their destinies. Better Than It Sounds.

The Warded Man was published in 2009(2008 in the UK) and has been followed by the Desert Spear. Brett has also released The Great Bazaar and Other Stories, a collection of short stories set in the same universe. The third and final volume, The Daylight War, is expected to be published in 2012. Paul W.S. Anderson is currently planning to make The Film of the Book.

Tropes used in The Warded Man include:

• Adaptive Ability - May be the cause of some of the Warded Man's powers, not counting the titular wards. He has a noticeable healing factor, is able to keep up at a trot with his warhorse (while on foot) all day without any signs of exhaustion or even breathing hard, and starts to get pulled down into the Core with a demon he's pinning. This is explained in the book as being due to the warding magics gaining their strength by siphoning off the magic of the demons and channeling it into their bearer. It could also be at least in part down to him occasionally eating demons.
• Adults Are Useless - Arlen's dad. His inaction leads to the death of Arlen's mother and eventually leads Arlen to go down a dark path of vengeance. Leesha's dad is a cuckold who allows his wife to walk over him and his daughter. Eventually though, he gets better.
  • Don't forget that Rojer's master is a non-functional alcoholic who may have turned to drink in order to cope with the memory of surviving when everyone else in Rojer's hometown died.
• Advanced Ancient Acropolis - Anoch Sun, buried beneath the sands, is location of Kaji's (The First Deliver) tomb, crown, and spear.
• Affably Evil - Ahmann Jardir lays on the "affable" extra-thick when he visits Deliverer's Hollow.
• And Man Grew Proud - After the Deliverer helped mankind defeat the corelings, man went to war with himself and the corelings rose up again to destroy civilization.
• Exclusively Evil - The corelings.
  • To be fair, the drone corelings appear to have the same level of intelligence (and personality) as a rabid wild animal - they're smart enough to figure things out ( they can find weaknesses in wards, through experimentation, but they either can't or don't just look at ward-nets and see where the best spot to attack is) but they'll attack anything that seems weaker than themselves - including nominal "allies", like other demons.
• Blood Brothers - Jardir and Arlen are described as being this by one character. It didn't end well.
• Christmas Cake - Leesha constantly has to tell people that she's not too old. Of course when you consider that one of her childhood friends (who's not much older) has a daughter who's about to be married...
  • And their culture - due to a scarcity of women - encouraged women to start trying for children as soon as they started menstruating, just so that the corelings don't wipe humanity out. Given that Leesha's in her...late 20s, early 30s, she * is* old by their standards - at least for someone who hasn't had any kids yet; even she mentions that she's starting to get to the point where "[her] best childbearing years are more behind [her] than ahead".
• Church Militant - Krasia's entire society is one.
• Cool Horse - Twilight Dancer, the Warded Man's warhorse. His horseshoes and the horns on his barding are warded enabling him to fight corelings.
• Crapsack World - The two people with the power to fight the demons are a borderline Anti-Hero and an out-an-out villain. The villain is the one the demons are truly afraid of.
• Dangerously Genre Savvy - Jardir is smart enough to avert most of the Evil Overlord tropes that might have left his army dangerously unprepared for its invasion, due in great part to his willingness to listen to a lower-caste advisor that most of his inner circle see as beneath them all.
• Darker and Edgier - ...than The Runelords, which the plot shares a number of similarities with. See Follow the Leader, below.
• The Dragon - In the second book, Arlen, Jardir and the two mind demons each have one.
• First Girl Wins - As of the end of the second book, it's not Leesha who finally captures Arlen's heart. As part of Arlen dealing with his past, he goes back to the place of his brith and ends up saving Renna. They end up renewing their Childhood Marriage Promise. Oddly enough Arlen's dad is married to, and has children by, her older sister.
  • I think this is the only First Girl Wins Chekhov's Gun ever written.
• Follow the Leader: Man's enemy, a sinister, implacable Hive Mind consisting of several different sub-races, is emerging from deep underground, bent on wiping out humankind. The only defenses against them are magical symbols based on the enemy's own power. As the attacks grow worse, a hero emerges with the power to fight back effectively. Unfortunately, his quest is hampered by an evil warlord from a desert kingdom, engaged in a war of conquest with the aim of "uniting" (enslaving) all of mankind so he can lead them to victory and win great glory for himself. Sound familiar?
• Geometric Magic - The wards. In the backstory mankind had access to both offensive and defensive wards to battle the corelings. The offensive wards were lost. Until Arlen finds them again.
• He Who Fights Monsters - The Warded Man, big time. To the extent that he frightens most people who meet him and he questions whether or not he's human any longer. In the end he begins to get better... maybe
  • The Krasians devote their entire society to waging war on the corelings. Consequently everyone but warriors and priests are treated as sub-human.
• Human Notepad - The Warded Man himself. The wards tattooed on his body allow him to fight and kill corelings with his bare hands.
• Implacable Man - The rock demon from the first book. After Arlen took its arm, it followed him for years, all the way to Krasia, until he finally killed it.
• Lady Macbeth - Inevera from the second book, so very much.
• Magic Music - Rojer's fiddling has the power to soothe corelings and stop them from attacking. The moment he stops playing, they'll try to kill him again. His music also has the ability to enrage them further, to the extent that they'll throw themselves against wards again and again to stop his playing.
• Master Race - The Krasians see themselves as this, with a horrifying twist: Instead of seeking to simply dominate the rest of the world, when they embark on their war of conquest they deliberately, methodically seek out and rape all the foreign women they can in the hopes of siring more children with Krasian blood.
• The Messiah - The Deliverer. The second novel sets to set up a conflict over exactly who the Deliverer actually is. Jabir betrayed Arlen in the first novel, because his manipulative wife has been grooming him to be the Deliverer, takes control of Krasia. As the descendant of the first Deliverer, everything points to his being the right man. The people of Deliverer's Hollow believe that Arlen is the Deliverer, because he taught them how to fight and brought the offensive wards. The nobility is less than enthused about allowing Arlen to call himself the Deliverer because it cuts into their power base. For his part, Arlen doesn't care and flat out tells people he's not the Deliverer; no one listens.
  • There are hints that they both could be.
    • Especially since the Deliverer is suggested to be more of a general than a Messiah.
• Mighty Whitey: Subverted in particularly mean-spirited fashion in the first book.
• My Nayme Is - Lots of unconventional spellings: Arrick, Rojer, Erny, Wonda, Benn...
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero - The Krasians, possibly. Arlen only becomes the Warded Man/the Deliverer because the Krasians - specifically a group of Krasians he thought almost considered him family - tried to kill him repeatedly after finding out that he'd returned from a trip out into some old ruins with a spear that had some of the old combat wards inscribed on it. When tossing him into a pit with a demon in it didn't work, they stripped him of everything they thought had worth (except a small emergency pack and a water-flask) and tossed him out into the desert, hoping that would kill him. It didn't. He made it to an oasis, stayed long enough to heal up and recover from the ordeal of walking across the desert without any of the proper equipment (and nearly dying from dehydration) and then painted wards on himself once he realized that no weapon he could make would really work against demons even if he did inscribe the right wards on it - a spear without a metal head would just break. So he painted the wards on his hands - and then tattooed them in place, once he realized that would work even better - and proceeded to walk across the desert, at night, taking down every demon who got in his way as he made his way back to the ruins where he'd found the spear. And all because they couldn't understand the concept of "let's share the Phlebotinum"...
• One Steve Limit - Averted: there are sure a lot of female characters whose name is a variation on "Mary".
• Our Demons Are Different - The corelings rise up out of the Core at night and are destroyed by the sun. Wards repel them and unless a weapon is warded, it has almost no effect on them. The corelings are also elementally aligned and opossing elements weaken them.
• The Paragon - Arlen is a variation on this. "Folk start looking to me to solve all their problems, they'll never learn to solve their own."
• Parental Substitute - Ragen's wife tries to become this for Arlen. He's less than thrilled about it and it damages their relationship until she finally stops. Arrick Who's at least partly responsible for allowing Rojer's mom to die tries to be one for Rojer, but his drinking and jealousy of Rojer's talent is part of what leads to his death.
• Power Tattoo - what happens when people start to tattoo wards on their flesh instead of painting them on wood or carving them in stone.
• Proud Warrior Race - The Krasian culture is based on combat, primarily against the corelings. A man is either a warrior, which includes the ranged tribes, the warders, and the clerics, or he's nothing. The khaffit (non-warrior) caste are seen as honorless and are abused and raped by the warrior caste for kicks.
• Rape as Drama - Leesha , Jardir , Reena Tanner and her sisters
• Start of Darkness - The first part of the second book is devoted to Jardir's backstory.
• Unusual Euphemism - Various forms of Core take the place of most of the typical four letter words, what with the Core being where the corelings come from and all. With demons rising in the night to kill people, telling someone to go get Cored is serious business indeed.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist - Jardir believes all the murder, enslavement and rape his army does serves a good purpose. Particularly the rape: he intentionally "breeds" any physically mature woman to his soldiers in the hopes of raising up a new generation of children of Krasian blood, which will of course make them superior to ordinary Northerners.