The Iron Ghost

[sawyl]

Having enjoyed Jen Williams' debut novel, I was obviously ripe for The Iron Ghost, the second book in a trilogy set in the same world. It features the same principal characters — conflicted mage Aaron Frith, fallen knight Sebastian Carverson, and easy-going rogue Wydrin Threefellows — some little time after the first novel, during which they've started to accrue a collective reputation as the adventuring group the Black Feather Three.

The book starts with a prologue which introduces Siano, a young member of the House of Patience, as she walks a golden chain strung high above the city of Apua. The House of Patience turns out to be a semi-monastic order of assassins and Siano finds herself hired by a severed head to exsanguinate three entire family lines. Being a highly trained little sociopath, Siano doesn't balk at the prospect of killing children and promptly leaves Apua in pursuit of her marks.

The Blackfeather Three, meanwhile, are halfway round the world, making their slow way up river to the town of Skaldshallow, where they've been hired to recover the magical stone the locals use to create animated statues. The stone, it transpires has been taken by the mountain dwelling Narhl who view the Skalds' practice of creating werken as little better than blasphemy. After mooching around town for a few days, during which they're shown the tomb of the millennia-dead mage Joah Demonsworn, the trio set off up the mountain accompanied by the werken Wydrin has requested in lieu of her payment. The raid doesn't exactly go according to play and they soon find themselves at the mercy of the Narhl king and his rather more reasonable and liberal son Dallen.

While the Three are trying to extract themselves from the Narhl and Prince Dallen is trying to decide how to resolve the situation, Siano arrives in town with her bottles of blood and suddenly Joah Demonsworn finds himself back among the ranks of the living. Prompted by the demon Bezcavar, Joah picks up where he left off and sets about trashing Skaldshallow in the politest possible way imaginable, which is a large part of his creepiness. When he comes up against Frith, Joah is thrown into totally confusion when he discovers his only fellow mage. Recovering he abducts Frith and takes him to his laboratory where he begins an extremely one-sided attempt to befriend his sole remaining brother. Seb and Wydrin refuse to accept Frith's disappearance and set about tracking him down using any and all means at their disposal — means that include Wydrin's link to the mountain spirit infusing her werken and a unique scrying location hidden beneath the lair of a group of giant centipedes. Lovely.

From this point on, the plot rapidly complicates with Joah's laboratory transforming itself into a machine called the Rivener — an appalling merger of human and demon magic — capable of travelling the landscape, causing havoc and destruction wherever it settles. The Blackfeather Three, in the intermittent company of Prince Dallen and a Skald called Nuava Nox, set about coming up with a way to oppose the rogue mage. To do so they take in abandoned undersea cities, desert towns, and finally Skallshollow, which has been turned into a ruin of its former self. Along the way Wydrin and Frith finally start to realise that their feelings for each other might actually be mutual, Sebastian has time to ponder his time with the Brood Sisters, a species of lizard women created from his blood by the fallen god Y'Ruen, his past as a Ynnsmouth knight, and his unsuccessful attempts to revisit his childhood home.

The Iron Ghost, as befits its status as the middle book in a series, is darker than The Copper Promise and the adventurers see and experience truly terrible things. There is something particularly awful about the ingeniousness of Joah's torture chambers, made all the worse when Frith challenges him and Joah frankly admits he is completely uninterested in torture and that he has only created his engines of suffering merely in response to Bezcavar's desire to experience the torment of others. The development of Sebastian's character and his complex relationship with his children, the Brood Sisters, as they become more emotionally mature leading some to move away from his causing and bringing others closer than ever to his attempts to teach them to be proper knights. Even Frith gets to do a bit of brooding, trying to decide between the suitable aristocratic neighbour his family would've wanted him to marry — if they hadn't all been tortured to death in the first book — and between his growing feelings for the deeply unsuitable Wydrin.

Having come to love Williams' cast of characters — even the horrific demon Bezcavar is enjoyably nuanced and unpleasant — I'm definitely looking forward to the next novel — because if nothing else, I really want to know just what the wily Frith has stashed in his family's secret vault as a hedge against future crises...