Category Archives: Night Shade Books

A Nerve-Wracking Journey Across the Mountains

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The Whitefire Crossing
Courtney Schafer
Nightshade Books
Trade pbk, $14.99, ebook $5.99, 300 p.

In the acknowledgements to this first novel, the author states that the first draft of the book was written during NaNoWriMo 2007.  That’s encouraging because I’m participating in NaNoWriMo this year, and I can only hope to write something half this good.

This is a dark, at times disturbing, adventure story with villains who are deliciously evil, yet have believable motivations.  The heroes are young, flawed, make mistakes, grow, and learn about themselves and the world.

The suspense is intense at times, and the passage across the mountains, especially after the blood mage attacks, is downright nerve wracking.

The story opens in the country (city state?, kingdom?, the political structure isn’t clear) of Ninavel, a haven for mages.  There is no restriction on the type of magic a mage can practice in Ninavel.  All are allowed, including blood mages, whose magic requires human sacrifice.  The neighboring kingdom is Alathia, where just the opposite situation exists.  Magic is strictly proscribed, and only government sanctioned (and controlled) mages are allowed to practice, and then only in the service of the country.  Most forms of magic are illegal and practitioners strictly punished.  This is especially true of blood mages.  Neither is a place I would particularly want to live, for totally different reasons.

The story opens when Dev, a young smuggler, is told by the man who gives him his commissions that on his next trip into Alathia he’ll be smuggling in a young man named Kerin, who is trying to escape from some of the local banking houses due to certain poor financial decisions.  Dev is suspicious but needs the money.  He promised his dying mentor he would buy the man’s daughter from the crime lord who owns her before she changes.  It seems a common trait among children in Ninavel is the Taint, which is basically telekinesis.  Slavery is commonplace, and there are a number of crime rings which use children as thieves.  The Taint goes away at puberty, and the children are sold to whoever wants them, no questions asked.  Dev was a slave to the same crime lord until he changed.  When this girl changes, she’ll be sold to a brothel with a really nasty reputation.  Dev is doing everything possible to raise money so he can to buy her first.  And so he takes a job against his better judgment.

Dev is right to be wary.  Kiran isn’t running from a banking house.  He’s running from a blood mage, one he happens to be indentured to.  Kiran has no stomach for the torture and murder that are a part of being a blood mage.  Did I mention most mages in Ninavel regard those without magical ability to be little more than animals?  This is especially true of blood mages, who tend to be possessive, vindictive, and ruthless.

Kiran and Dev travel with the first caravan over the mountains.  Dev is a regular guide on these treks, and Kiran is posing as his apprentice.  It doesn’t take long before trouble follows after them.  They don’t trust each other, but soon they have to flee the caravan and depend on each other for survival.  Dev is one of the most experienced guides around, but he can’t fight magic.  Even if they make it across the mountains and pass the border crossing, their troubles will be far from over.  Just being in Alathia is enough to earn Kiran a death sentence.

Courtney Schafer is a rock climber, a passionate one.  It shows in her writing.  She brings the passage across the mountains alive.  The suspense, not just from the pursuit of the villains, but from trying to survive against the elements, gets intense.  Maybe I’d had too much coffee and not enough food, but I found that whole segment of the book to be one of the most nerve wracking things I’d read in quite a while.

This book has some serious themes running through it.  Betrayal, conflicting commitments, situations in which there are no choices that won’t leave innocent people dead.  Both Dev and Kiran have to learn about trust.  Both have to decide what kind of man they want to be and then pay the (excruciatingly high) price to be that type of man.  In many ways, this novel is a coming of age story, albeit a grim and bloody one.

I recommend it highly and am eagerly waiting for the sequel.

Blown Away by the Winds of Khalakovo

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The Winds of Khalakovo
Bradley P. Beaulieu
Nightshade Books

If there is any justice in this world whatsoever, this book will be short-listed on next year’s Hugo ballot.

This one has it all:  flying ships, magic, mystery, dark secrets, buckets of intrigue (both familial and political), honor, revenge, sea serpents, selfless sacrifice, a wedding dance that’s just short of combat, assassinations, ship eating squids, and after a fashion, unrequited love. Lifelong friends will become bitter enemies; bitter enemies will become staunch allies.  And for all involved, everything will change.

So what’s the book really about, you say?  I’m glad you asked that.

Here’s the situation and the principle players:

Dark times have fallen on the Grand Duchy of Anuskaya.  The blight is moving through the Duchy, resulting in fewer catches, blighted crops, a disease called the wasting, and death.  The duchies are scattered on archipelagos.  Sea travel is rather dangerous due to the aforementioned sea serpents and squid.  Travel of any distance is conducted by air.

And that’s where the magic system comes in.  There are five types of spirits which can be controlled:  earth, fire, air, water, and the spirit of life.  This is done through different stones.  Controlling spirits of air is essentially how the ships fly, although it’s a little more complicated than that.  Also, the women of the duchies, some of them at least, can travel through a type of astral projection.  They are losing this ability because of the blight.

There are two main cultures in conflict here.  First the Landed, clearly patterned after Imperial Russia.  The others are the Arahman, essentially gypsies, who are somewhat oppressed by the Landed.  A subgroup of the Arahman are the Maharraht, who feel they’re really oppressed by the Landed and have taken up arms against them.  Essentially, they’re terrorists.

The key players in this drama are Prince Nikandr, the youngest son of the Duke and Duchess of Khalakovo.  He’s betrothed to be wed to Princess Atiana, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Vostroma.  There are two problems with this.  First, he and Atiana have known each from childhood, when she and her sisters played tricks on him and their brother.  His memories do not reassure him when he thinks of his future.  Second, he’s in love with an Arahman woman named Rehada.  The course of true love never did run smooth.

Atiana isn’t any more thrilled with the marriage than Nikandr is.  It’s a marriage of political convenience, to seal an agreement between the duchies of Khalakovo and Vostroma.  Yet Atiana wants more than the marriages she sees her mother and sisters having.  She wants to stand with Nikandr, and it doesn’t take long before she begins to genuinely love him.  The course of true love, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Then there’s Rehada, who is secretly Maharraht.  Her mission is to get close to the Landed, particularly Prince Nikandr, and gain information that will be useful in the coming uprising.  Only she never planned on falling in love with Nikandr.  The course of true love…you know the rest.

Add to this mix Ashan, an Aramahn who is one of the rare masters of all magical disciplines and a young boy named Nasim who is much more than he seems, along with the leader of the Maharraht and father of Rehada’s deceased daughter, Soroush, and you have an explosive mix.

And explode it does.  Literally in places.  The book moves at a breakneck pace, even when Beaulieu is setting up things to come.  He made a dance at one of the wedding events seem suspenseful, which is a real trick since that type of thing tends to be what I skip over.  The characters are multi-layered and deep.  They change and grow, not always for the better, but no one is the same person at the end of the book as they were at the beginning.  I’m speaking of those who survive, of course.  Not everyone will, which makes the suspense more real.

Lest you think I’m in the employ of Mr. Beaulieu, there are a few places where the first novel aspect of this book shows.  Only one was of major consequence.  Early in the story, after Nikandr and Atiana have danced, they go for a moonlit ride away from the castle, where he tells her he has the wasting.  Offended that he had kept such an important thing secret, she returns to the castle in a huff.  He tethers his horse to a tree (he’s on foot at this point), walks a short distance away, and then dismounts.  Without ever getting back on his horse.  A minor thing, but it threw me completely out of the story.  Fortunately, what happened next pulled me right back in.  Read it for yourself cause I’m not gonna tell ya.

If I had to pick a theme for the novel, I’d say it’s the damage that pride causes.  There’s a scene where Nikandr, Ashan, and Nasim are exploring a city on an island that was destroyed centuries before.  When Kikandr asks Ashan what caused the destruction, he replies:  “Hubris”.  That’s the driving force in almost all the conflict right there.  Most of the dukes and their offspring have hubris to spare.  In buckets.

And not just the men.  The women are just as guilty.  This society is somewhat matriarchal in that only the women can do the astral projection thing.  They can communicate with each other and see what’s happening great distances away.  They don’t always have the same goals as the men, and even when they do, their methods are often quite different.  Only Nikandr’s sister-in-law Yvanna shows any sign of being a weeping wallflower, and even that’s only partial.  All the rest of the women are tough, smart, strong, and not to be trifled with.

This was a fantastic book.  I’ve been fortunate so far in that most of the books I’ve selected to review here have been good.  There have been a few that I’ve not really liked, but over all, the past year I’ve been blogging has been one of the best for reading I’ve had in a long time.  The Winds of Khalakovo has been one of the top two or three.  Read it for yourself and you’ll understand what I mean.

The Cloud Roads

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The Cloud Roads
Martha Wells
Night Shade Books
Trade paperback, 278 p., $14.95
Various e-book formats

What’s that, you say?  You haven’t read Martha Wells?

Shame on you.

You’ve been missing out.  And The Cloud Roads is the perfect place to find out what you’ve been missing.  It’s a stand-alone, at least so far, although I hope it doesn’t stay that way.

This is a dense, complexly layered novel.  And that’s a good thing.  The story concerns Moon, an orphan who doesn’t know who or what he is.  Moon is a shape-shifter, able to take either the winged form you see on the gorgeous cover, or a humanoid shape called a groundling  because it’s wingless.  In his wanderings since his family was killed, he’s never come across any others of his kind.  The closest he’s come is a race called the Fell, who look a lot like his winged form.  Only the Fell are feared and hated by everyone.  They have the nasty tendency to move in, destroy a city, and eat the inhabitants.  Not exactly the best of neighbors; when the Fell move in, there really does go the neighborhood.

Not wanting to be mistaken for a Fell, Moon usually masquerades as a groundling, only taking to his winged form when no one is around.  Unfortunately, someone is, and he’s nearly killed before being rescued by another of his kind who has been watching him.

The other is Stone, and he’s amazed that Moon is alone.  He tells Moon he’s a Raksura.  They live in a colonies, like ants or bees, and have queens, warriors, and several other castes.  Moon is one of the consort caste.  Stone is also a consort, albeit a much older one than Moon.  Stone’s colony is dying, and he’s been searching for more consorts to come and join it.  And Moon is the only one he’s found.

And that’s when the fun really starts.  Colony politics, at least in Stone’s colony, are multi-layered, and the role Moon is expected to play is not an easy one.

And that’s all I’m going to say.  Part of the enjoyment of this novel was seeing how Wells unwrapped the culture of the colony, as well as the world, like an onion.  The further I read, the more depth there was.  There are enough characters for a Fat Fantasy.  Martha Wells does more with character development in less than 300 pages than many other writers do in twice as many pages.  Or even a thousand pages.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how I thought fantasy these days has more sense of wonder than science fiction.  This book proves my point.  This is a fascinating world, and I want to see more of it.  (Please, Martha.)  Her next book is titled The Serpent Sea, and will be coming out from Night Shade sometime next year.  I hope it’s set in this same world.  There are a number of races, not all of them humanoid, but none of the ones that were could really be called humans.  They all had slightly different traits.  Some had scales, some horns or tusks, some tails or claws.  I couldn’t help but be reminded of Larry Niven’s Ringworld and it’s sequels, in which a number of different races inhabit a huge artificial world, with different races living in different areas.  At times The Cloud Roads had that feel to it.  A vast world waiting to be explored.  We don’t see details of all the cultures, but they’re there in the ones we see up close.  We get hints of an ancient history that seems to have been forgotten by much of the population.  This was a fascinating place to visit.

I would also love to see this book filmed.  With the technology used in Avatar, this would be spectacular.  And this time the movie would actually have a story, not a plot outline of something that has been done a thousand times.  The shape-shifting would be mind-blowing.  And the aerial combat scenes….the mind boggles.

Which brings me to another point.  There’s plenty of action in this book, the majority of it in the air.  Martha Wells does action and adventure oriented fantasy like few people do.  Her plots are complex, and so are her characters.  The action and fight scenes move things along quickly, and it’s never dull.

To sum up.  The Cloud Roads was one of the most enjoyable full-length novels I’ve read in a long time.  The only other one I’ve read recently that comes close is Twelve, and that was such a different book that it’s hard to compare the two.  So buy and read The Cloud Roads.  And Martha Wells’ others if you haven’t already.  You won’t be disappointed.