The Tamuli

About The Tamuli

The Tamuli reunites Sparhawk's found family a short time after the Elenium ends, when Ehlana -- now restored and ruling as queen -- receives an urgent plea from the empress of Tamuli, a vast eastern empire, whose own god-figures are under attack and whose empire is fraying under a magical assault with implications for Sparhawk's homeland too. The trilogy widens the Elenium's scope the way the Malloreon widened the Belgariad's: new cultures, a new set of gods and their earthly representatives, and a political crisis layered over the original magical one, as an ancient enemy Sparhawk's allies barely survived in the previous trilogy turns out to have a Tamuli-based counterpart with its own agenda. The established cast -- Sparhawk, Sephrenia, Ehlana, Kalten, Ulath, Tynian -- carries the story's charm as before, their banter and long friendships doing as much work as the plot itself, while Eddings uses the imperial Tamuli setting to explore succession politics and court intrigue that the more knightly, martial Elenium mostly skipped. It's the concluding half of a single six-book arc rather than a fully independent trilogy, resolving threats and character threads the Elenium leaves open, and by this point Leigh Eddings' formal co-author credit (beginning with the following year's Belgarath the Sorcerer) reflects a collaboration that had, by most accounts, shaped David Eddings' fiction from well before it was acknowledged on the cover.