He investigates and remembers; she analyzes, evaluates, and spies hidden truths in all he witnessed.
Together, they bring justice to the Empire.
Congratulations are in order for Robert Jackson Bennett! Bennett’s novel The Tainted Cup won a Hugo award this year for Best Novel. And as luck would have it we have a sequel this year, continuing the adventures of the unparalleled (and unhinged) detective Ana Dolabra, and her supernaturally capable assistant Dinios Kol.
We start with a good old-fashioned detective story trope: a locked-room mystery. The body (well, parts of it, anyway) of an Imperial Treasury representative has been found floating in the canals of Yarrowdale, five days after he disappeared from his room. His room who’s door and windows were locked from the inside, surrounded by guards, in one of the upper floors of the building where he was staying with the rest of his delegation.
It’s a strange enough situation to call for an investigation by Ana and Din all on its own. But then the murder reveals a heist that couldn’t have been possible, and the potential sabotage of a project that the saboteur shouldn’t have known about, tied to an Imperial negotiation that is not going well, and leading to fears of an attack that could wipe out a city. And chances are that everything is being controlled by a single person who’s clever and daring and ruthless enough to even make Ana throw up her hands in disgust.
“I feel we needn’t bother looking at faces to find this man, Din! Just keep an eye out for the fellow with testicles large enough to cause back deformities, and we shall have our culprit!”
It feels appropriate to have a detective who’s a bit of an homage to Sherlock Holmes also be a representative of a sprawling empire. Although the Empire of Khanum’s version of colonialism is slightly different from the British Empire. Khanum isn’t concerned as much with things like land, or wealth. What the Empire needs are the Leviathans. Specifically their blood. The monsters that swarm from the sea every year are only held back by the innovations that the Apoths can create from the monsters themselves. So the Empire’s main priority is a quiet port where they drag the monsters after killing them, and most importantly a place where the work can be done on substances so dangerous that even exposure to dust floating in the air can kill an entire workforce. Hence, the Shroud.
“That’s the Shroud?” I asked quietly.
“It is. Perhaps the most valuable thing in all of Yarrowdale, and the thing people fear most. And who can blame them? We are taught to fear the leviathans as children. It is only natural to fear their graveyard.”
I mentioned in the review of Book 1 that I hoped the next book would give us more information about the titanic monsters that attack the great seawall of Khanum. And it does! Sort of. Not so much about the monsters, but about their corpses. And their blood. What can be made out of it – weapons, medical treatments, augmented humans like Din known as Sublimes – and just how mindbogglingly dangerous it is to work with. And how valuable it is to have a place to work on it that doesn’t have a one hundred percent chance of death. A small backwater kingdom like Yarrowdale can become the entire focus of the Empire’s work just because of its convenient geography, and the readers can see all the political machinations of colonization here: backroom deals, people moved around like chess pieces, and a polite agreement to not meddle in the horrific exploitation of an entire stratum of the king’s society because, hey, it’s their country, right?
“…it is not our purpose to wade into the affairs of other cultures and scold them into decency.”
The author keeps coming up with fascinating new innovations for a civilization that has learned how to do things like grow buildings, heal any injury, even tailor a carnivorous fungus into something that keeps corpses fresh. But what Ana and Din run into here is on a completely different level. The murders in Book 1 with people being torn apart by a growing tree are nothing compared to what can happen when you have a toxic substance that can remake things at a cellular level, and someone willing to throw it into a crowd and run.
…I wished to scream until my lungs would break.
As you’ve probably picked up by now, this book is a bit more gruesome than the previous one, and Bennett excels at painting beautiful, terrifying images of warped humanity, mutated jungles, and living laboratories. Din is in something of a worse place emotionally here as well. His financial problems have suddenly escalated, he’s using his talent for perfect recall to fine-tune his nightly hunts for a willing bedmate so he can wear himself out and sleep for a few hours, and he’s questioning whether his job (which exposes him to horrible images which his augmented brain can never forget) is actually accomplishing anything.
“…when we come, the deed is already done. The body is cold, the blood cleaned away. We often find the killer, but that heals nothing, as far as I can see. It only leads to a rope, or a cage, and many more tears.”
It’s not all doom and despair. Ana still insists on wearing a red blindfold everywhere to avoid over stimulation, so Din is now accompanied in his investigations by a wise-cracking Warden who can track anyone by scent and can tell you what you had for breakfast and whether it’s going to agree with you or not. Ana herself is still an unpredictable live-wire of a character, even more verbally abusive to Din then she was in the previous book (don’t look for the trope of the assistant and the detective falling for each other; Ana is viciously impatient, repeatedly calls Din “boy”, and has zero filter on her mouth so she can practically scandalize him into an early grave by shouting about his habits of having SEX when she TOLD him he was supposed to be RESTING. DIN.) She’s also begun a new habit of learning about a location by tasting it, so you get bizarre scenes like Ana terrorizing the hotel staff by filling a patio with sacks of rotting sea life and aggressively eating oysters at them.
“Oh I’m not actually hungry, Din. Really, it’s that each oyster is different. You can taste in each one which reef they came from, which side they grew upon, which waters they flourished within. They are like melodies of the ocean itself rendered in flesh.”
Off-putting eating habits, transitory obsessions, and just generally being weird enough to frighten people doesn’t stop Ana from chasing down a mystery that’s quite a lot more complicated than “Mr Mustard in the parlor with a candlestick.” Barrett threads the intricacies of imperial and royal politics with the very strange science of the Apoths and how people have to be changed to work in the Shroud, and mixes in several of my favorite kinds of scenes, the “It all started this way…” storytelling. We get some information about why Din’s outlook is as bleak as it is, but we learn a tiny bit more about Ana herself. It’s pretty obvious that she’s some kind of augmented human, even if she’s pretty cagey with Din about what kinds of augmentations she’s gotten. But there’s still a very complicated mystery about what kind of human she started out as in the first place.