It’s not easy serving Chernobog, the God of Destruction, Darkness and Death…especially during the holidays; and especially when you’re out of eggnog and one of your pesky, freeloading mythic creatures has eaten your last cookie.
Roman would like nothing more than to be left alone, but when a wounded boy stumbles into his yard and begs for sanctuary, Roman takes him in. Now elite mercenaries are camped out on his property, combat mages are dousing the house with fire, and strange priests are unleashing arcane magic. They thought Roman was easy pickings, just a hermit in the woods, but they chose the wrong dark priest to annoy. For while Roman might be patient, he is the Black Volhv, filled with the love of his terrible god. For his adversaries, it’s a fight to the death, but for him, it’s just another day in the neighborhood.

Well, Ilona Andrews has done it again, taken a man from the Kate Daniels universe for whom I had an instinctive dislike and made him into a (sort of) hero. The last time she did this was with ‘Iron And Magic‘ when she made Hugh d’Ambray, Preceptor of the Iron Dogs, Warlord of the Builder of Towers, a violent, amoral, narcissistic killer, into a person rather than a monster. This time she’s taken Roman Semionovich, Black Volhv, servant of Chernoblog, God of Destruction, Darkness and Death, made him into a protector of the innocent and shown him to be a man labouring under an over-heavy burden of guilt-ridden duty.

‘Sanctuary‘ is an entertaining novella, heavy on magical fights, family history and Slavic mythology (which is not as dark as it seems and sometimes is almost cute – if a two-headed vulture with one dead head can be cute), As always, the magical fights are vivid and convincing, escalating from the confrontational standoff to high body count epic conflict.

Roman is surprisingly soft-hearted: a sort of dark shadow of Saint Francis in his treatment of darkling creatures; kind to children and puppies and reluctant to kill the bad guys invading his land unless he absolutely has to (of course, he DOES absolutely have to – in surprisingly large numbers an with great ingenuity).

All the Slavic myths were new to me (I didn’t even know how to pronounce most of the names) but Ilona Andrews brought it to life a little at a time without making me feel that I was being lectured.

‘Sanctuary’ is an alternative Christmas story, that supplants to Christian myths with older Slavic ones and celebrates Koliada but kinda sorta keeps the Christmas spirit. There was even a point, when Roman was in The Glades Of Remembrance, that the story almost hit an ‘It’s A Wonderful Life‘ note. As well as being an action-packed story of a lone Volhv standing against a group of magical mercenaries looking to abduct a child, ‘Sanctuary’ is about duty and guilt and family and foregiveness. That’s an impressive achievement in a 130 page novella.