Redemption's Blade by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The war is over… Isn’t it?” Imagine starting The Lord of the Rings after the war has ended, and Eowyn (shieldmaiden of Rohan) has taken up with two huge orcs (one of whom is her lover!), so they have to tell everyone they meet that 1) Sauron is dead, 2) the war is over, and 3) the orcs are with her. That’s a little like Redemption’s Blade: After the War (2018) by Adrian Tchaikovsky. In Tchaikovsky’s novel, the Grand Alliance of free peoples was fighting a losing war against the semi-divine Kinslayer and his monstrous armies, when a small band of heroes sneaked into his fortress and, with some timely help from a couple turncoat torturers, killed the immortal being. After the enemy of the world is dead, what happens to his leaderless armies, minions, and monsters? What happens to the human Grand Alliance after the enemy who united it is gone? What happens to the damaged and displaced war refugees? As the novel begins, Celestaine, the hero who killed the Kinslayer (with plenty of help, she wants to stress), is on a quest to try to right wrongs in the aftermath of the war. And her family/friends/comrades are two members of the Kinslayer’s most terrible minion race the Yorughan: Nedlam, an 8’+ tall female bruiser-fighter, and Heno, a 7’ heart-taker blood-magus, most feared and hated of all the Yorughan. Celestaine wants to find a way to restore flight to the Aethani people, whose wings the Kinslayer cut off. But how can she negotiate with former enemies or former allies bent on vengeance? The quest centers on the rumored Crown of the Kinslayer, which combines various powerful magical jewels in a potent artifact of making and unmaking. Like Tolkien’s ring, it may not have a salubrious effect on the person who carries it or uses it even for good purposes. A merciless mysterious figure seems to have taken it and is leading Celestaine and co. into increasingly dangerous places and situations. Is he setting a trap for them or testing them? The characters are interesting and convincing: Celestaine can’t be sure if she's trying to be a hero from guilt over having failed to save people during the war or from the need to stay relevant; her Yorughan lover Heno is a former magician torturer who freed Celestaine from the rack and helped her kill the Kinslayer and became her lover but is still eaten by anger and guilt; their Yorughan friend and companion Nedlam is a free spirit so puissant but so disobedient that her generals kept moving her from one army to another until she finally ended up in the Kinslayer’s fortress as an interrogator and now just wants to enjoy living; Amkulyah is a young Prince of the Aethani whose wings were amputated so young that he never actually flew but can use his excellent eyesight to be a formidable archer; Ralas is a bard who was repeatedly tortured, killed, and resurrected by the Kinslayer such that it's impossible for him to die or to heal; the Undefeated is a semi-divine Guardian who fled in fear from the Kinslayer and his armies during the war and who now wants to get a good reputation; and Doctors Catt and Fisher are clever, comical, and ethically ambiguous partners whose business is collecting, repairing, and trading magical artifacts and religious relics. Tchaikovsky explores the psychology of heroes and villains and figures falling in between, economically creates a convincing and interesting world with Gods, Guardians, humans, and non-humans and their fraught history, and stretches the boundaries of what very different kinds of beings can accept in each other. He runs a science fiction angle through his epic fantasy, in the great variety of races and species of mortals, including some fishlike river people, some spiderlike forest people, and some unhappy and ever hungry denizens of other worlds whom the kinslayer transported to earth, not to mention the little four-armed Grenishmen and giant Yorughan, peoples who never had Guardians to guide and advise them. Tchaikovsky obviously knows and likes Tolkienesque epic fantasy so that he can revivify genre tropes like motley fellowships, quests, and wizards. His depiction of Celestaine’s “infinitely sharp” sword is prime, as it too dangerously easily cuts through steel, stone, wood, and bone and even wears out dragon scale scabbards. He writes plenty of exciting genre action scenes, from small-scale skirmishes to a big boss fight. His characters’ personalities and interactions are pointed, entertaining, and moving. He writes nice lines of dialogue: “Little bastards will always follow a bigger one.” “I like you. You can shoot someone in the eye in the middle of a fight in the dark.” “I don't want to put you where you’d do things you're ashamed of.” “The best lesson of life… only give power to those who don't want it.” He does just enough description to make scenes vivid without overwriting. The following description is as fancy as he gets: “Night came on swiftly in the Forinthi valleys, the sun clipping the edge of the hills and then vanishing, like a drowning man, leaving only the stars. The last streaks of gold were just dying as she walked up the slope to him, a dark shape on a dark hillside, enlivened only by the silvery flash of his hair and beard.” The thrust of the book is towards tolerance, communication, and mercy against self-righteous justice and discrimination and hate. Perhaps the Kinslayer's most devastating action before he was killed was to separate the gods from mortals so that they have stopped communicating. But at one point in the novel, the gods may give a long-distance message like, “Now that it's only you, you must treat each other with kindness.” (Of course, that may be a con perpetrated by a roguish collector.) The appealing characters, like Celestaine, let go of grudges and prejudices and try to do something good in the world, while the least appealing ones, like the Liberator running a slave mine and some Templars performing public burnings, are out to pacify the world to suit their own intolerant visions. Nicola Barber enhances the story while giving different voices for the male/female and human/nonhuman and young/old characters without straining. I love her voice for the giant Yorughan warrior Nedlam, sounding like a good-natured, simple, and wise girl. Readers who like Tchaikovsky’s science fiction, like The Children of Time, or who like fresh, concise, standalone epic fantasy novels should like Redemption’s Blade. View all my reviews
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