Marlowe has seen more of that menace than most. He’s seen the shifting madness of transhuman technophiles, whose consciousness, skipping from body to body, seems to have lost something of its humanity in the process. He’s seen the raw tentacles of ancient, caged AI, lashing against the bars, speaking in a thousand tongues of the future and the past. He’s seen the shadow government of his own Empire, the inquuisition that seeks to cut out corruption, alien or human, brutally and swiftly, often in ignorance.And he’s seen the beasts that stalk the stars, the alien, the Cielcin.
*** Potential spoilers past this point ***
The Cielcin are the focus of a lot of this book, and, fair warning, it is a big book. Marlowe explores both Cielcin society and his own limits. Brought into the depths of their world as a captive, he’s tortured, abandoned, experimented on, tortured again. In suffering their may be some measure of truth, and that’s doubly true for the reader. We can see Marlowe pared down to his core, stripped of rank, position and indeed clothes. Left to die, or not, left to live, or not. To go mad, to decide his own fate, or settle on his own sacrifice.
The Cielcin are not gentle on prisoners, no. Mostly, they eat prisoners. But Marlowe, him they have other plans for. The society we see painted out before us is one that is uncompromising, brutal and ancient. It has ritual and faith in its own fashion, and within their own lights, the Cielcin are in the right in their struggle to, well, eliminate humanity and use them as food.
The author shows us that society in all its grotesque, near-human horror - from the military parades and processions, to the vicious dance of lethal politics, to the banquets on the flesh of men, and back around again, to the cultured leader who can sit and hold a nuanced dialogue, and break a subordinate with a word, can order atrocities without a qualm. This is a society that feels genuinely alien, off kilter, different to our understanding - it exists slightly outside our frame of reference in its strange familiarity. And the writer has made this work, in its magnificence and horror - so kudos. You really do feel dipped, all unwilling, into a ferocious and alien society, one which operates by its own rules, and doesn’t look on humanity as potential partners as much as threats or a food source. This is a universe with a dark mysticism and a strangeness, laced through with the baroque terrors and wonders and fragility of humanity.
The world building, in other words, is superb.
The character work is of a similar quality. I’ve touched on the alienness, the uncanny-seeming nature of the Cielcin. But we also spend a lot of time with Marlowe, inside his head, as he slowly breaks down, breaks away from the trappings of himself. In his suffering, depression, possible madness over years of Cielcin captivity, he gains something in self knowledge, something in understanding of the world and himself. He also gets quite a comprehensive journey through pain, desolation and suffering. But the journey, from Hadrian the knight, the killer, the once-hero of the Empire, down to Had the man, the person at the core of the outer whirl of values and worries, what remains in extremis, that journey is a long and sometimes insightful one. But it’s also a dark one filled with blood and tears and truly wretched horrors, and so I say be warned - but also, that in terms of characterisation, this is pitch-perfect, this gives us a chance to sit with Hadrian, to see him as he is and as he sees himself change, and we wrench and fall and sympathise and empathise with him as he struggles against his own desecration and diminution. Will things get better? You’ll have to read the book to see, but Hadrian, him came to know right well.
The story, well, in many places it’s meditatively paced, slowly steeping the reader in the gentle and pervasive atrocity of horror in which Hadrian finds himself immersed. But there are moments of pure joy here too, moments of glinting starships trading fire, glimpses of heroism and personal sacrifice to make you weep. There’s snappily-drawn, uncompromising combat, both the tactical surge of laser fire, and the razor-edged, bloody tear of blade on blade. There’s time for love, too, and the kind of friendship and comradeship that can make your chest ache with it. Basically, this is a damn good story, hitting all the right notes - and one that will reward long time readers and leave them asking for more.
It’s a very good book, an excellent addition to the series, and you should definitely go and pick it up
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