Captain Kornelius Báthory, a swordsman, knight and poet, has proven his military qualities many times. As a man, however, he failed when, after his wife's death, he turned his back on his son and chose a military career instead.
Today, with Michal Báthory now twelve years old, Kornel wants to make amends and be a father to him again.
But fate has decreed that he must prove the sincerity of his repentance through great sacrifices and undergo unprecedented hardships. Michal is captured by marauding Martolos and, before his father can recover from his severe injuries, all traces of the boy are swallowed up by the Ottoman Empire. Did he end up in slavery, or in one of the Janissary training camps? There is only one person who knows exactly where Michal was taken. And he has just joined the Turkish invasion of Transylvania. Kornel sets out on a journey to the Transylvanian fortress of Varadín, against which a vastly superior Turkish force is already advancing.
Juraj (Ďuro) Červenák, pseudonym Thorleif Larssen (born 16 June 1974, Žiar nad Hronom, Czechoslovakia) is a Slovak writer. He is known as a successful author of fantasy works, a film reviewer and an editor of the magazines Fantázia, Pevnost and DVD mag, and often appears at various conventions. He is famous mainly for his books about Conan the Barbarian, Rogan the Warlock, the bogatyr Ilya Muromets, and the legendary Czech hero Bivoj. For commercial reasons, practically all of his books have been published in Czech. After the successful series The Adventures of Captain Báthory, his serialised novel Rattlesnake Callahan and the Gate of Spirits began to be published in Pevnost. He currently lives in the eastern Slovakian metropolis of Košice, where he works as a freelance writer and publicist.
EUROMEDIA GROUP a.s., Nádražní 762/32, Praha 5-Smíchov 15000, Česká republika, www.euromedia.cz