Ship Of Smoke And Steel - Django Wexler

Ship of Smoke and Steel  is the first in the Wells of Sorcery series by Django Wexler. I’ve always got on with Wexler’s work, and I still encourage anyone who wants a blend of the Napoleonic Wars and a hard-edged military fantasy to check out his Thousand Names series. This book is something a little different - focused on a tighter cast of characters, and pitched at the YA market, with a dash of sapphic romance in between some adrenaline-packed magical action. 

Isoka is our protagonist, and Isoka is a killer. She’s young, but she grew up with nothing, and she’s determined to make something for herself, and for her younger sister. And Isoka does that, at least at the start of the tale, by being a ward boss for her city’s organised crime syndicate. She’s ruthless, focused, and disinclined to think of people outside of their benefit as leverage.Except for the aforementioned sister, who doesn’t know that her sister uses extortion, blackmail and more than a soupcon of violence to keep her in a decent lifestyle. Isoka gets to do this because she is, ha, magical. The kind of magic that lets you spring crackling blades out of your hands with a thought, or shield yourself with eldritch armour. Always a convenient thing for someone who needs to break a few heads. Unfortunately for Isoka, being an unregistered magic user is quite, quite criminal - and being a registered magic user probably wouldn’t end well for her, assuming she wasn’t executed on the spot. So she has to keep her magical light under a bushel. This makes for an interesting tension, as she works to resolve issues with the minimum amount of fuss, but has a penchant to shift quickly into a tide of lethal violence when things don’t go the way she’d prefer. Isoka is smart, funny, and, over the course of the story, begins to shift away from being quite such a utilitarian personality. But you can see where she’s coming from, and empathise, if not sympathise, with her in the many odd situations that she ends up in.

Speaking of situations - Isoka, for her many and varied sins, finds herself exiled to the magical ship Soliton, a mysterious ancient wreck that appears at various city ports, accepting a tithe of magical youth. It’s also huge, and presumably very powerful, and Isoka’s city government would rather like to take hold of it, so they can use it to, you know, conquer the world. The world…well, the world is largely the city and the ship, for the purposes of this book. We do get some quiet hints as to the nature of other places when we meet ancillary players and hear some of their background, but much of the wider space is names and traits. That doesn’t mean they aren’t interesting - I’d definitely like to hear more.  But the ship. Oh, that, Wexler describes perfectly. A towering edifice, filled with mysterious systems which are, in partial decay, swarmed by semi-aquatic monsters which serve as food source and threat all at once, run by a council of ne-er-do-well youth with the power to move faster than thought or incinerate their enemies with a ball of fire. It’s a complex, living breathing place, and every level of it that we move into feels different, differently dangerous, differently wonderful. The Soliton is something special beneath all the rust and wrack and ruin and…monsters, but quite what that is, remains rather open to question. Still, it’s a grounded, physical sort of place, and the visceral violence of monster hunts and duels serves as a backstop on how much like civilisation it is not. 

The story…well, we won’t spoil that. But Isoka, stuck on a boat from hell, due to crimes she absolutely did commit, has to think fast in order to build herself a power base, build herself a life, and avoid getting eaten by monstrous crabs. And she may even manage to find love along the way, or something like it. And it’s an adventure; much like Treasure Island, Isoka is always managing to get herself into and mostly out of trouble, struggling to build alliances with unworthy associates, and a friendship or two, which may or may not be something real. This is fast paced fantasy, always with a hook to get you to the next page, never lettoing go - and it’s fun. I’d say if you’re on the lookout for a new series, this one is worth a try.

A Sword of Gold and Ruin - Anna Smith Spark

I've been a fan of Anna Smith Spark's for years, ever since her Court of Broken Knives , which I hand-sell as "Kind of like if a heavy metal album was also a fantasy series". But she's kept going since then, and A Sword of Bronze and Ashes, a liminal, dreamlike, murderous, epic work about a woman stepping away from heroism and villainy, such as they were, and diving back in to save her family, was a surprise hit for me. This sequel, A Sword of Gold and Ruin takes the best of that story and crafts something new and beautiful and terrible with it. This is a book that wants to talk about people, about characters and stories, the stories we tell each other and ourselves which also happen to be the stories of us, and it wants to do so while looking at heroism, at blood-on-the-dirt villainy, and at how choices can make us mix one in with the other.

Our protagonist, you see...well, now she's Kanda. Mother of several girls, of varying ages. Wife to a man who is, well, stolid and good and delighted to be with her. But Kanda has been a few other things as well. She's been one of the six swords of Roven, a Camelot-esque dream that is revealed in flashbacks across the course of the narrative. They were made by and did the bidding of their Lord, fighting monsters and unseating tyrants and being general do-gooders. And she was also something else - a hardened killer at the front of an army that tore down cities, that burned for the sake of burning, killed for the sake of killing, built their own monsters and set them free. Until she wasn't, any more. Until the freedom to be a monster felt like a prison cell, and Kanda walked away, to make something else, a different life, a different love, a different family, neither gods nor monsters therein. Well, not right now anyway. And I don't think I can giuve much away by saying this is a very character driven book. We're in Kanda's head, while she examines herself, her preconceptions. What she wants. And what she wants for her children. Whether one is too gentle or another too keen to pick up the sword. Whether Kanda herself can feel pride in the works of her children, even as they step outside her, perhaps step beyond her. Whether that pride is tainted by her history or enhanced by it, and whether her daughters mistakes are their own to make. Kanda is a woman filled with broken panes of glass, looking back over a history that blurs into myth, trying to unpick fact from fiction in her own life, even as a new story builds itself around her and before he (and, whisper it, perhaps, without her). Kanda is a mother and a wife and a hero and a killer, and wrestles with her needs and those of others in a world still holding to the boundaries of the unreal - where a buried skull beneath the door of a new home can keep evil away, and a new hall built around the bones of a hanged man can exert malevolent power. What the truth is, is difficult to unpick, but in a sense it doesn't matter. Because Smith-Spark's prose carries that story directly into your brain. It has a precise, lyrical quality we see in Greek myth, and it rolls off the tongue as if it should be spoken or sung aloud. It's a tale in form as well as function, harking back to old traditions, built in a new way.

It is, as I say, rather tightly focused on Kanda, her family, and how they manage to get along in the face of what they survived in the first book in the series, and what they plan to do next. Things Do Happen, but to me it feels like these are events meant to let out a little more of our characters, show us a little more of who they are under pressure or under arms or in each others arms. Which isn't to say that those Things aren't ,momentous in their own right, don't tell us a tale that is likely to draw a gasp or a smile or a wry chuckle. This is a story of blended together worlds, where dragons and knights and killers and daughters walk hand in hand, and are sometimes the same thing. There's a lot going on. It just also serves the characters, gives us ways to see these people as they build their own palaces, or their own graves. It's thoughtful, incisive prose, wrapped in an elaborate, heady style that makes everything feel like a saga or a fireside tale. And it's compelling stuff - I couldn't put it down. I suspect if you enjoyed the first book in this series, you won't be able to put this one down either, and so...yes, highly recommended.