There are a few reasons to read this novel from South African author Kerstin Hall. One of them is the exquisite worldbuilding because this feels unlike any other fantasy novel I've read. Another is the characters, because they're even more exquisitely drawn, especially the two leads, Karys Eska and Ferain Taliade, who become perhaps inextricably entwined early on and follow quite the path to the ending. That ending is probably the one reason not to read this novel, because it's a brutal ending that demands a sequel; which, fortunately, Hall is writing. It's so tough that I'm tempted to suggest that you wait for that second book before diving into both together.

I'll tackle the worldbuilding first because that's what caught me first. The primary characters are human but hail from different countries who don't have good history. Ferain is from Varesli which occupied Mercia for twenty years, though forty more have elapsed since and a Sovereignty Accord is holding. Karys is from Miresse but lives in Psikamit, the capital of Mercia. While that sounds like routine history with the obvious conflict between the two leads, Hall goes much deeper than that.

When the Vareslians invaded Mercia, the Bhatuma did absolutely nothing about it, which wasn't a popular move with the Mercian people because the Bhatuma were their gods, physically present in their world and their lives. It's hard to imagine what it must be like when you know the gods are real but your worship isn't reciprocated by help when it's needed the most. So the New Favour did something serious: they brought in Ephirites who slaughtered the Bhatuma. After the Slaughter, the Ephirites rule with equal disdain for the people. I saw them more as demons than gods but it's still a "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" situation.

Karys has a personal relationship with an Ephirite, though not in the way that suggests. Sabaster, Prince of Scales, an eight-foot-tall demon with multiple faces and myriad wings, holds her compact and that means that she must do his bidding until the day he chooses to take her, in return for the special ability to talk with the dead. It's that ability that sets up the story, because she's using it to work a job for Marishka, the so-called Second Mayor of Psikamit, a sort of godfather who leads the smugglers who bring in necrat, a drug made from Bhatuma remains.

The opening chapters are delightfully original, with Karys following Coren Oselaw into a Bhatuma sanctum that's now used as a smuggler's base to find out what happened to a particular ship. She does solve that mystery and it raises serious political concerns but what's more urgent is that he's exploded by Constructs and she's rescued by Ferain, the sole survivor, who's secreting himself in a magical split lapse that keeps him in a pocket of time three days in the past, which works but isn't at all sustainable. He'll die without her help, so for the princely sum of fifteen thousand cred, she binds him to her to keep him alive. Unfortunately, she soon finds out that this may be permanent.

And that leaves Ferain as Karys's shadow, able to communicate only with her and anyone that he can stretch to touch. He's seriously sought, the extremist saints of New Favour especially keen to locate and destroy him and, by extension, her. After a failed attempt to pass on his information to the Vareslian Embassy in Psikamit, which those saints blow up, they head for Varesli itself, a long and perilous quest that unfolds relatively episodically but with a constant deepening of the myth and lore that pervades this worldbuilding.

As I mentioned, it's this worldbuilding that grabbed me first. I found the Bhatuma and Ephirites a heady mixture of applied theology and the magic they govern a rich and deep structure. I adored the fact that they wield different magic, Bhatuma workings stable and built on authorisation like computer security but Ephirite workings wild and built on metaphor, rearranging the formula that govern reality, almost like esoteric mathematics. Hall explains things but it all remains obscure in a way that doesn't feel like a cheat. Somehow we ought to reach magus level before grasping this sort of thing fully.

Of course, there's much that's far more accessible because it's already been applied and seems to be entirely accepted by the people of this world even if it might feel outrageously imaginative to us. I'm thinking here of the cruise liners that exist inside the hundred-foot-long dimension phasing spiders Ephirites harnessed to schedules or the prismatic trains that ride light almost like ghosts. The Grateful Society may serve as a distraction to the quest, but they're a welcome one, using the magic in this world for a particularly selfish purpose.

There are a slew of other characters I haven't mentioned, some of whom join Karys and Ferain on their quest, both human and Bhatuma, especially during another distraction that takes Karys to a home she recognises but wants nothing to do with. I call these distractions because they often feel that way but they each serve to add something more to what we know about Karys and Ferain and their bond as they seek to remove it. This book is therefore four-hundred pages of careful plotting and that makes the ending all the more jarring.

Now, it's jarring because of what it does and what it doesn't do, given that we're fully immersed at that point and seriously invested in the ever-evolving relationship between Karys and Ferain. The ending we're given isn't the ending we want or indeed the ending we think we're going to get. It's disappointing because of that, a disappointment only tempered by the revelation that it isn't the end of this story, just the end of this book. I want that sequel now, dammit. However, I have to say that it's also a disappointment because it seems that it could have happened at any time. Why did Hall wait until this moment to make it happen? Hopefully that's in the sequel too. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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