WARNING - CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE PAINTED (WARDED) MAN
RATING: FIVE STARS
One of the key events in the The Painted Man is when Arlen Bales, a young and daring messenger, finds an ancient spear in the ruins of Anoch Sun that has been marked with the fabled 'attack' wards. These wards are needed in order to kill the hordes of demons that rise from the Core each night and have been lost for centuries, meaning that all mankind has been able to do to resist them is to repel the demons from our homes and scant remaining cities using lesser wards that cannot harm or kill them.
As Arlen explores Anoch Sun in The Painted Man, Peter V. Brett reveals that the Messenger had found the city using an old and extremely rare map that he bought from his friend, Abban, who is a common merchant in Fort Krasia. How Abban acquired this map however, is a mystery, as Brett picks up Arlen's adventure after a brief hiatus where he jumped ahead by a few years so that Arlen had matured from a teenager (when he last appeared) into a young man and fully-trained Messenger.
The Great Bazaar then, is a short story set in this hiatus and tells of how Arlen and Abban came to possess this map, describing how the pair developed a daring plan to steal it from Krasia's elite religious caste - taking it from under their very noses!
My Thoughts
I really enjoyed reading the The Great Bazaar and found it to be a valuable and insightful companion to the story told in The Painted Man, one of my favourite books ever! Due to this, I would recommend reading the story to any fan of the Demon Cycle - saying that it is an excellent warm-up before reading the second book in the series, The Desert Spear.
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