Shattered Pillars

[sawyl]

To prepare myself for the final book in the series, I've just re-read the first two of Elizabeth Bear's excellent Eternal Sky novels. And since I don't seem to have written up Shattered Pillars now feels like a good moment to correct my mistake.

Range of Ghosts having ended with Temur, Samarkar, Hsiung and Hrahima arriving in Asitaneh to seek the help of Temur's grandfather, the wizard Ato Tesefahun. Edene, meanwhile, having spent the first book as a prisoner of Mukhtar ai-Idoj, Al-Sephr of the Nameless, has rescued herself by stealing a green ring with power to make her invisible. But nothing is quite as it seems an Edene's apparent escape is just another aspect of Al-Sephr's plan to use the curse of a dead emperor to draw all the nations of the steppe into a great war.

With his grandfather's help, Temur secures an audience with Uthman Caliph in the hope of securing recognition for his claim to be Khan of Qersnyk. But court politics are murky, not least because Al-Sephr seems to have thrown his support behind Kara Mehmed, Uthman's rival, and group are forced to flee the city through a dramatic fire. Elsewhere, Edene has discovered that the Green Ring has granted her more than simple invisibility: after meeting a ghul, she learns that she has become the Queen of the Ruins, the mistress of all poisonous creatures and the ruler of the dead city of Erem whose blue day-sun brings death to anyone who walks beneath it.

With Temur somewhat out of his depth in the Caliphate, Samarkar, who was raised as the heir apparent to the Razan empire, comes to the fore with her status as a wizard giving the Caliph a reason to meet with her, while her gender make it possible for the negotiations to be conducted under the cover of a romantic tryst. Samarkar also comes to realise Yongten-la's prediction concerning her abilities: while she may not be a wizard of the greatest power, she has the intelligence and subtlety to apply her power in a way that allows her to achieve things that are far beyond the abilities of someone gifted with mere brute force.

Edene, too, comes into greater focus as Queen of the Ruins. The Green Ring, is both like and unlike Tolkien's great ring, combining practical powers — invisibility, resistance to fires of Erem's sun, the ability to command the world's poisonous creatures — with a whispering, insidious voice of corruption constantly nagging at her to dominate and rule. I particularly like the way that Bear treats Edene's temptation: not as a moral event horizon but as a subtle pull that plays on the best parts of her personality in an attempt to bring out her worst behaviour whilst allowing her sufficient free will to try to resist its blandishments — because, pace JRRT, if merely putting on a ring makes you irredeemably evil regardless of a character's own will, it's hard to see how this can be counted as a moral fall from grace.

Meanwhile, high in the mountain city of Tsarepheth, the wizards Hong and Tsering find themselves facing their own difficulties. Not only has the Dowager Empress Regent been murdered, possibly by one of her sons — who also happen to be Samarker's brothers — but someone has breached the magical wards surrounding the city, allowing a terrible plague to strike the population. The Emperor, angry at the wizards role in the escape of his brother's wife and fearful of seeming weak, refuses to give the order to despite the pestilence, the political unrest, and the coming winter, despite the wizards' attempts to convince him that it is the only sensible course of action.

Revisiting Tsarepheth in the absence of Samarkar allows Bear to expand the cast, brining in some of the characters previously seen in supporting roles as new points of view. Thus we get to see the Hong, a powerful wizard and exile from Song, gradually unravelling the politics of the imperial family; we see the Empress Yangchen, driven by the ruthlessness of her dead father gradually coming to question her goals; and we see my particular favourite, the wizard Tsering, who, despite her profound knowledge of magic, failed to find any power of her own during her vigil, but who more than compensates for this supposed shortcoming through her intelligence and insight.

In addition, one of the highlights — although I'm not entirely sure this is the right term — of the scenes set in Tsarepheth is the handling of the plague itself. The build-up, as Hong and Tsering struggle to try to help the sick and to understand the transmission vector, cranks up the tension nastily. Then, just as you're anticipating the very worst as the disease comes to term in its patient zero, Bear manages to cap it making it much worse, much more viscerally horrible than I'd imagined.

I'm not even going to try and be objective about this one: it pushes every one of my buttons and I adored it. I love the characters, the setting, the writing, the intelligence, everything, especially now that I can see how it all fits with the rest of the story...