The Cloud Roads

[sawyl]

Reading my way through Martha Wells' back catalogue, I've arrived at The Cloud Roads the first in her The Books of the Raksura series. The action take place in the Three Worlds, a complex fantasy setting featuring large numbers of different sentient species where magic is mixed with a wide range of different levels of technology. As the series name suggests, the book is principally concerned with the Raksura, a people with the ability to shift between a human form and a large, winged, heavily armed and armoured shape.

The story opens with Moon, a lone young Raksura, living among a people called the Cordan and trying to pass himself off as a regular human. When one of the villagers claims to have seen a Fell, a flying predator inimical to other sentient life, Moon feels obliged to investigate only to be chased off by a large skyling. Returning to the village, Moon discovers that he has betrayed his secret and been condemned as a Fell. Rescued by the skyling, who turns out to be a fellow shapeshifter called Stone, Moon learns for the first time that he is a Raksura and that almost everything he thought he knew about his dead family wasn't true.

With nowhere to go, Moon throws in his lot with the taciturn, eccentric Stone and head for the next point on Stone's itinerary: the small colony of Sky Copper. Here they have an unpleasantly close encounter with a flight of Fell and are forced to flee back to Stone's home court of Indigo Cloud. But here Moon discovers that he is a consort, a rare fertile male Aeriat Raksura, and that this imposes all sorts of complex social and political burdens on him that his lone upbringing has left him ill-prepared to accept. The situation at Indigo Cloud is further complicated by the constant threat of the Fell and the animosity between Pearl, the colony's older ruling queen, and Jade, the much younger sister queen.

Although the opening chapter set in the Cordans' village feels a rather slight, the book really comes alive when Moon meets Stone for the first time and begins to learn about his heritage. Moon's ignorance of his background, one of the consequences of losing his family so young he has no knowledge of his home court, allows him to ask the questions the reader needs in order to learn about Raksura society without making the whole thing too forced. Likewise Moon's wide experience of the groundling world, relative to the more sheltered members of Indigo Cloud, reverses the trick and brings much of the rest of the Three Worlds into focus.

As with Wells' other novels, the world building is vivid and well drawn. There are mountain cities built on giant water wheels that rotate slowly to crush a strange mineral — uranium? — to obtain heat to keep the city from freezing. There are flying islands and flying boats that somehow have the power to deny gravity. There are strange abandoned structures, their origins lost in time, that suggest that the world has a much older history than anyone seems to realise — something that reminded me of Ursula Le Guin's Hain. But most of all, the Three Worlds abounds with life and, especially sentient life. There are groundlings of all sorts, from the Cordan whose appearance implies a ocean-bound ancestry, through the almost completely human Golden Islanders to the insectile Dwei, to the Fell and the Raksura themselves.

The Raksura's complex, eusocial society is particularly well realised. Composed of two subgroups, the wingless Arbora and the winged Aeriat, each of which has is composed of a handful of castes, the Raksura's social roles are largely determined by birth. In the case of the Arbora, this is a matter of aptitude because only those with a talent for magic are able to become mentors, but generally it is a matter of genetics. Because while both male and female Arbora are fertile and able produce to Aeriat warriors and other Arbora, all warriors are sterile, leaving queens and consorts responsible for both the Aeriat's share of warrior births and the next generations of queens and consorts.

Raksura society has something of a bee-like feel to it: the queen at the centre, assisted by sister and daughter queens; warriors to defend the air around the colony; soldiers to protect the ground; hunters to provide; teachers to raise the next generation; and mentors to advise and keep the clan's knowledge. And consorts, a bit like drones, are expected to live a sheltered life at the core of the court.

If the Raksurans are bees, their mortal enemy the Fell are more like wasps. Where the Raksura produce their own arts, crafts and disciplines, the Fell are only interested in consuming the products of others. Where the Raksurans are able to empathise with others and are able to exist on good terms with other groundlings, the Fell are only able to manage a psychopathic emulation of emotional states and only then inasmuch as it gets them closer to their prey. However the two species share some superficial similarities: both are able to shape-change; both are split into different castes; and there are superficial physical similarities between Fell rulers and Raksuran consorts when both are in their shifted forms.

The book does a good job of making the potentially alien Raksura interesting and engaging. Moon, whose previously solitary existence makes him the most human-like of the characters, constantly struggles with others' expectations that he he be shy and retiring when everything about being forced to fend for himself makes him want to be forthright and self-sufficient. This attitude is pushed further by his problems with trust. Used to living a precarious existence where those closest to him have turned on him at a moment's notice — he is sleeping with the Cordan woman who sells him out — Moon can never quite convince himself that those around him don't have ulterior motive for their actions and won't try to get rid of him as soon as something better comes along.

The rest of the cast are similarly engaging. Stone is cranky and difficult, making him a less-than-ideal mentor for Moon, but genuinely seems to care for his stray charge. Jade and Pearl, Indigo Cloud's two queens are both strong willed and prone to domineering, but where Jade is young and certain, Pearl is arbitrary and in the middle of a long standing depression that hasn't done great things to her judgement — although she sometimes seems willing to play up to this when it serves her cause. Chime, Moon's best friend in Indigo Cloud, is a fellow outsider: having been born as an Arboral mentor, he found his body changed into an Aeriat warrior when the numbers of warriors in the colony fell to a critically low level. This cost him his role as mentor and robbed him of many of the skills he cared for most, leaving him playing catch up to learn the skills and rules of his new position, making him a good match for Moon.

In case it isn't obvious, I really liked The Cloud Roads, loved the setting of the Three Worlds, and felt motivated to zip through the rest of the novels in the series in short order. And as I did so I noticed some things I'd missed in my reading of the first book, but I think they're better discussed in the context of the later books.