Where there was hunger, there was desperation, and eventually, the belly cried louder than the children, or the elderly, or the dead.
For a series that stars a gender-neutral cleric and their sassy neixin companion (bird-shaped, but most definitely not a bird, don’t be rude), Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills series can get surprisingly dark. The previous book featured magic and revenge and a terrible feast. By contrast, A Mouthful of Dust features magic and revenge and famine. And that famine exists both as a years-long failure of crops and as a demon stalking the land, devouring the helpless and demanding payment in order to leave someone alive.
Cleric Chih and Almost Brilliant travel to the town of Baolin following reports of a famine demon that nested in the valley eighteen years ago. Baolin is famous for its pork dish, cooked with a method that’s a carefully-guarded secret which few are willing to share. What the townspeople are willing to share are stories about trying to survive on cookies made from clay and books boiled for their glue. The stories are a sharp contrast to the delicious food Chih is given on his first night in the town; there’s a similar contrast between the friendly restaurant owner and the magistrate of Baolin who requests (not a request) that Chih visit (possibly permanently) his house where he and his bitter wife abstain from meat of any kind and seem very interested in making sure Chih doesn’t learn…something.
Laughing bottles of rice and dust cookies. It was like getting a picture of a thing by angling mirrors around corners rather than looking at is straight on.
Chih and Almost Brilliant have had dangerous adventures before, but this one feels a lot more perilous. There’s an overwhelming sense of dread and danger in the magistrate’s house that starts to infect Chih. Some kind of presence other than the famine demon is lurking just out of sight, and something’s being left out of the stories he hears from the servants, and even the magistrate’s wife.
If that is what she is willing to tell me, what are she and her husband actually hiding?
Chih has the sense of a horrible secret from the days of the famine, and when he finds out what it is it’s…not what I was expecting. Nghi Vo leads up to some of the revelations in such a way that it’s not quite as shocking as you’d think, and in many cases feels almost natural. Humanity is built to do whatever it can to survive, but there’s survival and then there’s a step beyond that, the willingness to do something unnatural if it means getting to live just a little bit longer. And it’s hard to imagine that it was even worth it, since it leads years later to a revenge that’s so horrible that we don’t even get to see all of it, just what Chih hears as he’s running for his life.