The Adventures of Elfboot and Hellstallion: Roger Zelazny’s Dilvish, the Damned by Bill Ward When Dilvish the Damned came down from Portaroy they tried to stop him at Qaran, and again at Tugado, then again at Maestar, Mycar, and Bildesh. Five horsemen had waited for him along the route to Dilfar; and when one flagged, a new rider with a fresh horse would replace him. But none could keep the pace of Black, the horse out of steel, for whom it was said the Colonel of the East had bartered a part of his soul. – “The Passage to Dilfar” “Traveler, draw reign!” the man shouted. “I’ll have your purse!” Dilvish glanced quickly to both sides of the trail. The man appeared to be without companions. “Up yours!” he said then, and he drew his own weapon. – “Dilvish, the Damned” Roger Zelazny’s Dilvish, the Damned is a collection of short stories that includes both some of his earliest work, and later stories written with the established authorial voice familiar to fans of his Amber Series. One might say that in tone and style Dilvish, the Damned is as odd and unpredictable as the titular character’s adventures. Beginning with some of Zelazny’s earliest writing, two pieces that originally appeared in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination in the mid-60s written in the mode of a Dunsany or E.R. Eddison, and ending with work from the late seventies and early eighties, much of which was written to expand the story cycle to book length, Dilvish, the Damned is as much a fun romp through sword-and-sorcery fields as it is a snapshot of Zelazny’s evolution as a writer. The initial pieces in Dilvish, the Damned introduce us to our two protagonists in a Malorian cascade of mythic bombast – in “A Passage to Dilfar” Dilvish, Colonel of the East, scion of both a human and an elvish house, commander of a freshly annihilated army, races to outrun his pursuers and warn the city of Dilfar of their enemy’s advance. He is only able to do this because of Black, his metal steed, an impervious, spell-casting, fire-breathing hell creature in horse form. Zelazny’s experiment with the kind of faux archaic diction found in the fantasy of a William Morris or, more profoundly, Lord Dunsany, is counterbalanced by his characteristic rapid – one could...