The Cipher

[sawyl]

Catching up on my post-university novel reading, I've just finished Diana Pharaoh Francis' fantasy novel, The Cipher, which I very much enjoyed.

Lucy Trenton, customs official and minor royal, is generally thought to be reliable and pretty straight laced. But Lucy has an unfortunate secret: she collects true ciphers, cursed — and very illegal — magical objects that generally attach to a person and try to kill them. When Lucy encounters a new cipher during a customs operation to salvage the cargo of a wreaked ship, something goes wrong and the accursed thing attaches to her.

Marten Thorpe, a captain and a notorious gambler, has other concerns: his debts are starting to press and he has reached the point where he needs to do something to prevent himself from being sold into slavery. When his brother offers to pay off his creditors, in return for a set of customs seal on various documents, Marten decides that the only course of action is to seduce Lucy and obtain her stamp of approval. After all, what could be the harm, given his brother's assurances that the seals will not be used for anything.

Needless to say, the combination of Lucy's curse and Marten's frantic need for money do not play well together. When they eventually discover that they've become caught up in an intrigue that threatens the existence of their home, the island of Crosspointe, they realise that their own actions and decisions have made them powerless to act.

The Cipher has a lot of things going for it. The setting, the Island of Crosspointe, is particularly well imagined as an early industrial society with magic filling the role of engineering and science, giving society an interesting, blended feel. The island is protected by a trackless sea filled both with pelagic horrors and with a magical substance called sylveth, which transforms everything it touches into fresh monstrosities for the mill. These horrors are particularly well evoked by a scene early on in the book where Lucy and a group of sailors attempt to capture some sylveth-spawn who are threatening the harbour with genuinely nasty results.

I also liked the characters very much. I thought that Lucy an excellent protagonist, initially convincingly restrained and level headed despite her dark secret, but becoming more impulsive as the cipher's curse starts to take hold. She's clever, determined, sharp-tongued, likable and not the sort of woman who's willing to sit back and wait for her hero to come and rescue her. Which is probably just as well, because although he's pretty reliable when it comes to most things, Marten is so hopeless when it comes to resisting the temptation to gamble and is very much his own enemy. Worse, he's acutely aware of his own failing, despite his initial attempts to shrug it off as something essentially harmless, and eventually realising how his weakness has come to be his own, and Lucy's, undoing.

Best of all, The Black Ship, the next novel in the sequence is due out in a couple of days and it's definitely going on my to-read list.