The Serpent Sea

[sawyl]

Catching up with Martha Wells' novels, I find myself at The Serpent Sea, the second in her Books of the Raksura series. Set shortly after the events of the first book, it follows Moon, Stone, Jade and the other members of the Indigo Cloud clan as they deal with aftermath of their battle with the Fell.

Having decided to follow through on their plan to relocate, Indigo Cloud have asked for the assistance of Niran, a trader from the Golden Islands, and the use of his flying boats to help move the court to a new home. Following advice from Stone, the clan's ancient line-grandfather, they manage to locate a vast tree carved and shaped by their forebears into a near perfect home for flying shape-shifters. But all does not go smoothly and the clan find themselves faced with a problem they can't solve on their own.

Forced to turn to the powerful neighbouring court of Emerald Twilight, they dispatch a delegation that includes the senior members of the court: Jade, the sister queen; Moon, the first consort; Stone, the grandfather; and Flower, the head mentor. Although the two clans don't exactly hit it off — Moon inadvertently breaks protocol and challenges Ash, one of the junior queens, to a duel — Emerald Twilight are able to help Flower carry out an augury that tells them to travel to the coast and to search for a metal ship.

After dispatching a report back to Pearl, the clan's ruling queen, Jade and her delegation continue on the coast to follow up on Flower's discoveries. They eventually locate a mysterious and hard to reach city of groundlings, which seems to hold the key to their quest. Moon and Stone, as the two members of the clan with the greatest experience of groundling life, are dispatched ahead of the main party to gather clues and to question the local population. In the course of their investigations, they find themselves caught up in the machinations of a powerful local magician who seems to be just as interested in collecting people as he is in collecting artifacts.

The Serpent Sea expands the Three Worlds setting established in the previous book and enlarges the scope of Raksuran society by giving the members of Indigo Cloud a chance to interact with a more established and normal — by Raksuran standards — court. This makes it clear why the queens and their consorts are so bound by rules and protocols of behaviour: because if they weren't they'd wipe each other out in no time.

Seeing Moon and Stone in the context of another court underlines just how different they are from most consorts. In Stone's case his eccentric behaviour is tolerated because of his age and his size & strength, both of which mean that no-one is really in a position to stop him doing almost exactly what he wants. Moon, on the other hand, is odd because his isolated upbringing means that he has never been a position where he has been able to rely on anyone else for anything, so he has been forced to take on a more aggressive and assertive attitude than his fellow consorts.

The quest plot, too, is interesting in that although Indigo Cloud find themselves facing an existential threat, it isn't the sort of threat that is immediately amenable to the application of force and fangs and teeth. Instead, they're forced to rely on the detective skills of the two consorts, who, for despite Stone's age and strength, doen't really seem to be taken terribly seriously in Raksuran society. That's not to say that there is any shortage of brute force — once the goal is in sight, it's a fight to the finish — but it's not the Raksurans primary method method of problem solving this time around.