A Daisy Crossed With a Razor: Tanith Lee’s Cyrion by Bill Ward “A young man, tall and slender, with much of the lynx and the panther about him, a face like that of the Fiend at his most irresistibly prepossessing, long-lidded eyes like half-sheathed blades…” – from “Cyrion in Stone” Neither hulking powerhouse nor doomed cursling nor irrepressible rogue – Tanith Lee’s Cyrion is less archetype than he is cipher, less adventurer than he is perfectly fitting puzzle piece in Lee’s series of sword-and-sorcery inflected dark fantasy romances. And by romance I’m not speaking of the modern, bodice-ripping definition of the term – though, Lee being Lee, love, longing, and lust are as familiar a component of her fantasy as bloody blades or clinking coins are to other exemplars of the field – but the classic, medieval meaning of the term: a story in which heroism and poetry are fused, in which adventure itself is both beautiful and mysterious and unburdened by the mundane. Cyrion is such a romantic hero. And, hero he is. In the eight stories contained in Cyrion (1982), our protagonist-cipher is shown to move in mysterious ways. Despite his aloofness and cynicism, Cyrion, “hybrid of Heaven and the Pit,” performs selfless, heroic acts almost as a byproduct of his own disinterest. “[H]andsome as the Arch-Demon himself,” tall, elegant, effete, Cyrion possess a sinister silver-haired beauty and deadly sword-arm. He is repeatedly framed in dichotomous terms, divine and damned, his face that of an angel, “though whether of the heavenly variety or one of the descended sort. It was somehow hard to be sure.” While it is, indeed, hard to be sure of Cyrion’s motives, his results are unambiguous. While some of his adventures are pure matters of survival, quite often he is risking his life simply to see the right thing be done. In much of the manner of Sherlock Holmes taking cases that interest him rather than those that pay well, Cyrion entangles himself in affairs that suit his sense of . . . fair play? Dramatic irony? Cosmic justice? He doesn’t really say, and it doesn’t really matter, for he is but one element in a series of lush, surprising, confident tales that manage to do the unexpected with sword-and-sorcery in a way that elevates and enhances the genre. Comparison with Sherlock Holmes...