By 1:00 A.M. her work was done: three chickens sacrificed, one each on altars of silver, iron, and stone; a stack of profit and loss statements dispatched by nightmare telegraph; a prayer litany chanted balancing on one foot; a proposal drafted, suggesting an Iskari family shift their faith from the high-risk personal resurrection market to dependable grain-focused fertility.
Ever since I read Max Gladstone’s first book Three Parts Dead I wanted to hear everything I could about the world he’s created, where gargoyles and vampires are part of everyday life, deathless skeleton sorcerers walk down the street for a cup of coffee, incredibly powerful magic is managed with paperwork, and magicians and priests have to be good at economics.
Gladstone’s second book, Two Serpents Rise, was fun, but somehow the ending didn’t thrill me as much as the first.
He’s more than made up for it with Full Fathom Five.
On this trip to Gladstone’s incredibly complex world, we get to see the island of Kavekana. There are rich (and often alien) tourists all over, but the main business of the island is Idols. Not the celebrity kind, the kind you pray to.
While Craftspeople can manipulate the energies around them directly (gradually losing their humanity in the process) most people deal directly or indirectly with gods. Gods can give small benefits to individuals, or huge benefits when they have a contract with a corporation. It’s religion by accounting, basically. The heat and power of a whole city can be fueled by the carefully-managed worship to a god of fire or steam.
On the island, though, the gods left to fight in the God Wars years ago, and never came back. So the islanders created Idols, and the trend became popular. Idols are stand-ins for gods. They have no sentience, no intelligence of their own, and maybe only a few worshipers each. “Myth machines,” someone called them.
But there are thousands of them, and they can give benefits (grace, inspiration, luck in business, good harvests, you name it) to their people the same as real gods, they just don’t demand as much. No sacrifices, no extreme loyalty, it’s just a business transaction. There’s not even much worship involved, because the priests are contracted to do all the worship themselves. The priesthood will custom-make an Idol for anyone who has the money, and invest pieces of people’s soul in a spiritual stock-market that drives the economy of the whole planet.
In Gladstone’s world, you pay for things with bits of your soul. It’s not that far-fetched an idea. In our own world we spend our days working at a job that we may like or dislike, but we have to be there when we might rather be doing something else. So we give up a tiny bit of our soul, and are paid so that we can do other things later to get some of our soul back. It’s the same in Gladstone’s world, people are just more blatant about it.
The story follows Kai, a successful priestess (but really, think high-powered accountant or lawyer) and Izza, a young thief and an accidental priestess herself (but not like a lawyer, she’s much closer to the traditional kind of priestess.) Their stories take a long time to merge together.
Kai tried to save a dying Idol: stocks had fallen, bad financial decisions made, and the market wasn’t going to support the Idol’s investments anymore; when that happens they die. It wasn’t Kai’s responsibility, and Idols aren’t like people, they don’t have personalities or feelings or enough intelligence to know what’s happening. Its death shouldn’t have bothered her, but it did.
In trying to save the Idol everything went wrong, Kai ended up in the hospital, and the Idol’s primary investors are out for blood. None of that bothers Kai nearly so much as the fact that when she was in the ceremonial pool with the Idol, she swore she heard it talk.
Izza has been on the streets of Kavekana for a long time, since she escaped the death of her entire village in the God Wars. She doesn’t have enough money to get off the island, but she has to, because she’s almost old enough to be tried and punished as an adult, and in Kavekana that means the Penitents.
The Penitents remind me a lot of the Remade in China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. Both forms of punishment are brutal and horrific, turning convicts into walking reminders of why it’s very very important not to get caught. Mieville’s Remade are people who have been grafted to animals, machinery, or other people, using surgery and magic, to lug around pieces of metal or dead animals for the rest of their life. “Creative” methods are admired by lawmakers, so the more awful and humiliating, the better.
On Kavekana the punishment is standard, no creativity needed. Penitents are huge stone statues, and convicts are buried inside them, for however long it takes to reform them. The Penitents then become part of the police force, as they’re bigger, stronger, and much faster than humans. Their will is directed by the regular humans running the police force, not by the convicts inside them, who are basically along for the ride.
The problem is that the human body isn’t meant to move the way the Penitents do. So these huge, impersonal, frightening statues stomp all over town capturing lawbreakers, and any time you’re close to them you can hear the people trapped inside them screaming.
There’s deliciously horrifying imagery like this all throughout the book: the nightmare interrogation where people sit on glass furniture with edges so sharp the slightest movement against anything slices something open; a Craftsman so old and powerful he’s no more than a skeleton, sunning himself by the hotel pool; a Penitent thundering like an earthquake down the street as the person inside it howls.
A stack of papers in one corner had proved impossibly dense: seven hirelings strained to lift a single sheet. The papers had to be burned in place, and the resulting stink – of burnt hair and melted flesh and not of paper at all – lingered in the volcano’s executive levels for a week.
The rest of the story reads like a mystery and, like many mysteries in fantasy or science-fiction worlds, it’s very impressive when the author can pull it off. If it’s done wrong, the solution to a problem ends up being some magical item or future tech, and it feels like a cheat. The trick is to have the magic exist, but have an internal logic that makes sense, so when you find out the solution it turns out you’d been given pieces of the answer all along.
Gladstone pulls it off. There were clues all along at what was going on, and even a twist that I hadn’t quite seen coming, but on a re-read I found very clever bits of dialog that had hinted at it since the first couple of chapters.
The wrap-up of the book is very satisfying, with some wonderful action scenes and confrontations that were very fun to read.
We even get to see some familiar figures from the first two books, though maybe not the ones you’d expect. I would’ve liked to have seen the vampire pirate captain show up, but maybe we’ll see him again in the next book.
And there will be more books; Gladstone said in an online question-and-answer session that he figures the number of books in the series to be in the “low teens.” I can’t wait.