title: The Wyrmling Horde: The Seventh Book of The Runelords
author:  David Farland 
description: The breathless third installment of Farland's second Runelords quartet opens with the cliffhanger from 2007's <i>Sons of the Oak</i>: flameweaver wizard Fallion Orden, son of the Earth King, is trapped by fiendish Lord Despair in a savage new world Fallion himself had made by melding two realities. Fallion has rejected endowments, transfers of power or skill that leave the donor drained of the attribute they bestow on the recipient, but his lover, Rhianna, her foster sister, warrior maiden Talon, and Talon's noble idol, the Emir Tuul Ra, accept numerous endowments, vowing to pay any price to rescue Fallion from Rugassa, where torture is an art. Oscillating between lurid depictions of blood-soaked vistas and heroic tales of noble adolescent saviors, Farland attempts to leaven the violence with enchanting parallel-world landscapes and charming minor characters, but the atmosphere overall is unrelentingly gloomy. Nonetheless, this series promises to continue as long as stalwart-stomached readers can keep turning its grisly pages. <i>(Sept.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  **Blackman's Burden**
  
   **Mack Reynolds**
  
  "Take up the white man's burden
  
  Send forth the best ye breed…"
  
  — _Kipling_
  
   **I**
  
  The two-vehicle caravan emerged from the sandy wastes of the erg and
  approached the small encampment of Taitoq Tuareg which consisted of seven goat
  leather tents. They were not unanticipated; the camp's scouts had noted the
  strange pillars of high-flung dust which were set up by the air rotors an hour
  earlier and for the past fifteen minutes they had been visible to all.
  
  Moussa-ag-Amastan, headman of the clan, awaited the newcomers at first with a
  certain trepidation in spite of his warrior blood. Although he hadn't
  expressed himself thus to his followers, his first opinion had been that the
  unprecedented pillars were djinn come out of the erg for no good purpose. It
  wasn't until they were quite close that it could be seen the vehicles bore
  resemblance