The Shadow Throne

[sawyl]

Time to finish this week's run through Django Wexler with The Shadow Throne, the second novel in his Shadow Campaigns series, which follows Colonel Janus bet Vhalnich, Captain Marcus d'Ivoire, and Lieutenant Winter Ihernglass back to Vordan City where the king is on the bring of death, the commoners are on the verge of revolt, and Duke Orlanko, the head of the secret police, is looking forward to seeing the tractable Princess Raesinia on the throne.

Events open with the introduction of a new narrator, in the form of Crown Princess Raesinia. Through her eyes we get to see Janus' return to the capital, where he assumes the post of Minister of Justice at behest of the king and immediately appoints Marcus as head of the Armsmen, the city's militia. It is immediately apparent that Raesinia isn't the biddable fool Orlanko has taken her for; rather she is acutely aware of likely political consequences of her father's death and, with the help of a double identity, she is involved with a radical group of students who aim to undermine the Last Duke by returning power to an assembly of people's deputies. When the princess and their friends chance across Danton Aurenne, a mild-mannered man whose words can sway any crowd, they immediately set about using him to recruit people to their cause.

Marcus, in one of his first acts as Captain of Armsmen, finds himself following up a tip which leads to a cell of Sworn Church fanatics. In the process of taking prisoners he captures Adam Ionkovo, who admits to being a Priest of the Black even though the order was supposed to have been disbanded a century before, and, through Adam's insinuations, starts to realise that the fire that killed his entire family twenty years before might not have been the accident he's always assumed it was. Winter, meanwhile, finds herself assigned to a tricky undercover mission. Janus has learnt about an influential dockside gang called the Leatherbacks whose inner council is entirely composed of women, and suggests that this makes Winter a perfect infiltrator. Having spent the last few years perfecting male facade that sustained her through the war in Khandar Winter is extremely reluctant to switch back to behaving like a woman. She accepts the mission and, after a couple of false starts, makes an unexpected breakthrough just as Danton's oratory brings the political situation to the boil.

With the mob on the verge of revolt Duke Orlanko demands that Danton be arrested only to use the Ministry of Justice's actions as cover for his own savage purge, which he hopes will terrify the city's population back into line. The move backfires spectacularly when the population, led by the Leatherbacks and Raesinia's student factions, rises up and storms Vendre Prison. Caught up in the siege, Marcus and his deputy Alek Giforte, who have notional authority over the prison's guards — although practically they're actually the Last Duke's men — find themselves working hard to limit the bloodshed in favour of negotiations with the mob.

When the siege is finally lifted, thanks to a certain amount of derring-do on the parts of Winter and Raesinia, Raesinia, now queen following her father's death, accedes to calls for an assembly of the deputies general in the city's decaying cathedral. Backed into a corner by his backers and with his own authority badly damaged, Orlanko makes one more attempt at covert action before abandoning restraint entirely in favour of something close to a full-on coup. The city finds itself in an extremely uncertain situation, with a new queen whose grip on power has been eroded by the existence of the deputies general — ironically Raesinia was the one who first called for the assembly while working undercover as a student activist — while the deputies themselves seem more interested in arguing among themselves than dealing with the external threat.

Where The Thousand Names had clear echoes of the Peninsular War, The Shadow Throne is essentially a novel of the French Revolution — although Wexler says in his afterword that events in the novel don't necessarily match up exactly with those of history — whose events are driven by an on-going financial crisis — particularly the Finance Minister's decision to allow tax farming and the prominent involvement of Borelgai bankers in the process — and by a desire to smash the machinery of the oppressive police state.

Using the conceit that Janus must return to the capital before King Farus dies in order to secure the Justice Ministry, Wexler allows the three principal characters of the first book to travel ahead of the bulk of the Colonials, putting them in the capital, on their own, and without their familiar support structures. This allows both Winter and Marcus to develop in new ways, albeit ones that have been carefully foreshadowed in the previous books, and the decision to have Winter abandon her trouser role adds a certain electricity to their interactions — although Marcus, in typically clueless fashion, convinces himself that Winter is a man disguised as a woman rather than a women disguised a man disguised as a woman and, rather appallingly, thinks to himself at one point that she isn't a very convincing female impersonator! Raesinia makes a solid third narrator, whose dual roles as princess and undercover activist help to put her in the right places at the right times to observe and participate in the action, and whose own magical ability

Janus, meanwhile, stays very much in the background, manipulating events like a master, pushing out his pieces to oppose Orlanko and generally acting in concert with Raesinia, but without giving away anything to suggest his ultimate aims. The decision to keep Janus at a distance from the narrators and from the reader feels like a canny one on Wexler's part: too much information would damage Janus' reputation for being all-knowing and helps keep his agenda concealed; because Janus absolutely has to have a long agenda, he's too clever and too obviously unambitious, especially when tempted by temporal authority, not to have his eyes on a much greater prize.

Of the rest of the cast, Orlanko is probably the most interesting and important. Having featured as an off-stage sinister mastermind in the first book, he appears here as narrator the prologues that open each part of the book. Rather than a scenery-chomping villain, the Duke is a calm and methodical man with a clear agenda and precise knowledge of which levers of power he needs to pull to get results — although not always, as events show, the results he actually wants. This too feels like a clever decision: Orlanko, for all his formidable reputation, is actually a mediocre and rather predictable opponent when confronted with someone of Janus' prodigious abilities. Orlanko, too, is not nearly as independent as people seem to believe and he often finds himself under pressure from his two principal backers: the Borelgai financiers, whom he knows he has to placate in order to keep Vordan solvent and independent; and the Pontifex of the Black whose penitent damned may provide occasional magically assistance to the Concordat, but who is only willing to tolerate the Last Duke insofar as he provides an efficient means to control heresy and magic in Vordan.

A very different book to its predecessor, The Shadow Campaign is extremely readable — I ripped through it in a couple of sessions — and engagingly interesting. I'm very much looking forward to seeing how Wexler turns all the teasing clues and hints dropped in the first two books into a coherent larger picture...