The Invisible Ring by Anne Bishop

Here’s the next book in my series about my favorite books. The Invisible Ring by Anne Bishop. It’s set in a world the author has written about before, in a series of books. I haven’t read them yet, for various reasons. This book that isn’t part of the series is well worth reading.’

The world it’s set in, comes across as pretty dark. There are two ‘species’ of people. Blood – that lives for a very long time, at least several centuries – and ‘ordinary’ people. If I understood the book correctly, both types can have magical powers.

There’s a whole interesting ‘mythology’ – or something – about this world. A young woman needs to have something called a virgin night – when she loses her virginity to a more experienced man, who preferably should be of a higher magical level than she is. It helps him ‘hold her back’ somehow. That might sound a bit anti-feminist, but actually it isn’t. After her virgin night, the young woman has achieved her true adult magical level, usually higher than the man who helped her.

If this man, who’s supposed to help a young woman, makes a mistake and fails to hold her back properly, she might end up being ‘broken’. Her entire life is ruined and her magical powers are weakened. This might be done purposely by ruthless men.

Those with magical powers have a sort of ‘inventory’ – a way to carry around things invisibly – something that computer game players will recognize.

The book starts out with a young man being sold as a slave at an auction. It’s supposed to be a sort of punishment for him. Ten years ago, he was trapped by an evil, but sexy woman and turned into a pleasure slave – a sort of sex slave. She put a ring on him (guess where…), which forced him to obey her.

Finally, he had enough of the humiliation his owner and her lover put him through and he killed them. That means he’s about to be sold to a new owner.

He’s bought by a notorious witch, who buys up slaves and takes them through the wilderness back to her own land. All those slaves then vanish without a trace and it’s assumed they are killed in some gruesome way. As soon as she pickes out the main character, she removes his slave ring, which is capaple of inflicting horrible pain, and replaces it with another one, this time invisible. That’s the ring from the title.

But the witch is neither the person he thinks she is, or evil. There is however another witch, who definitely is evil. She’s got a pleasure slave of her own, who is Blood, which means he lives for a very long time. He’s called the Sadist, because he hates women (aristocratic women, like his owner, not servants and other slaves). Actually, he’s a healer – some sort of doctor. He too wears a slave ring, in the same place the main character does. His owner is the enemy of the other characters and she chases after them throughout the whole book.

This other pleasure slave comes into the plot a little later, but from the start you know that he and the main character know each other. The one who’s Blood has trained the other guy, so that he’d be able to put up with the life of a pleasure slave.

The witch who has bought the pleasure slave, has bought other slaves too and they all set out together to get to her country, through the dangerous wilderness. Throughout this journey, the main characters find out many things. Among other things, he falls in love with the witch, who isn’t as old as he thought she was. Apparently, witches can disguise themselves to look younger and more beautiful.

Like I mentioned earlier, she’s not evil at all. She just wants to save as many slaves and animals as possible.

If you’ve read my blog before, you’ll see that I like this world a lot, even though it can be a bit dark. I won’t go into what happens next, but there are many dangers threatening the main characters on their way through the wilderness.

This is an interesting, but at times, quite gruesome book, with many memorable characters. Read it, but only if you like this type of fantasy. If you like the same old type of story, with girls being raped and enslaved, you might as well forget it.