The First Novel in a New Trilogy in a Beloved World

A Sword Named Truth by Sherwood Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I wanted to read this one slowly, because there's so much to savor, so much detail, so many things that link to other books in the same 'verse. But I'd borrowed it from the library, and there were two more people waiting to read it, so I had to hurry through it so it could go back for the next person in the hold queue.

I'm in an unusual position reading this, because I've read some parts of the overarching storyline in various stages from the earliest rough drafts through various rewrites over the years, including material that has yet to see print and may never. So I know some characters by other (nick)names than the ones used in this novel, and some backstory to certain characters and magical objects that I'm not sure I want to mention, lest I snerk something important in an upcoming book.

The book itself starts with a sudden and dramatic political shakeup, the removal of a rotten dark-magic king to the mysterious place outside of time known as Norsunder, a sort of artificial Hell created as a base and bolthole by the aggressors in a long-ago war known as the Fall of Old Sartor. Suddenly there's a power void in Chwahirsland, but nobody wants to move lest Wan-Edhe (literally, The King, reminiscent of several 20th-century dictators whose titles translated into The Leader) should return and be displeased. Jilo, formerly the heir-apparent to the bad king's brother Prince Kwenz, steps into the breach, trying to maintain some sort of forward motion in a land that has lain far too long under dark-magic spells.

Chwahirsland was not a well-liked country back in Banner of the Damned (events of which are referred to several times in this book), but now it has become a dark-magic horror. The comparison to North Korea is rather apt, although magic enables some horrors that even the worst Primary World police state can't manage (paralleling something I contemplated a couple of years ago when I was writing a story based on a bit of backstory and realized that my villain could hardly be distinguished from any of several Rotten Dictators of History, and I needed to think about just what a tyrant could do in a world with Functional Magic). Things like the energy-sucking spell and time-bindings cast over the palace, or the book that traces the movements of people whose names are written in it.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world of Sartorias-deles, other leaders are responding to the sudden change in the balance of power as a result of Norsunder's decapitation strike on Chwahirsland. It's becoming obvious that, after millennia of waiting and occasionally playing cat-and-mouse games with various countries, Norsunder is on the move, sending its minions wholesale rather than retail. While the older rulers struggle with the concept that the status quo is being upended, a group of youngsters who came to thrones extraordinarily young are forming their own network to defend against these new threats.

And then Norsunder moves, and it's horrifying how fast carefully-laid light-magic defenses are swept away. It's a fight that leaps all over the world of Sartorais-deles, and even to its sister-world of Geth-deles (the two planets are in each other's L3 position relative to their primary, known as Erhal but generally just called "the sun"), where the Norsundrians are trying to steal a different type of transfer-magic after having their old methods forcibly blocked.

And this doesn't even get into the fascinating discussions of morals and ethics, and particularly the ethics of the use of power, or the hint that the original foundation of Norsunder was some kind of eldritch entity of pure hunger for life-energy that came from Outside, and that may have been why the Fall didn't get humanity kicked off Sartorias-deles by its mysterious indigenous inhabitants, who had been ready to do that for far less in the first centuries after humans first settled.

I'm hoping to get it back out once there's no longer a hold queue and read it more slowly and carefully, then write a longer and more analytical review on my book reviewing site.

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A Story of Magic and Peril

Banner of the Damned by Sherwood Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This novel forms a bridge between the Inda tetralogy and the era of Crown Duel and the CJ Notebooks. In Crown Duel, there was a reference to the ties between Remalna and Marloven Hess, going back to when a Marloven princess married into the old royal family. There have also been references in the later books to Indevan's ride into Norsunder with his First Lancers. This is the story of those events.

In the Inda books we saw the Marlovens through their own eyes, but in this, we see them through the eyes of the Colendi, a cultured people reminiscent of Heian Japan or the court of the Sun King at Versailles, but with magic. And by this point magic has become far more common than it was in Inda's era, although not to the near-ubiquity of CJ's notebooks.

It is also the story of a woman on trial: Emras the Scribe, who became royal scribe to Princess Lasva, and who accompanied her to Marloven Hesea (as the country was known at the time) when she weds Prince Ivandred, who rescued her from the Chwair king. Officially, Emras went as a scribe, but the Queen gave her a secret mission: protect Princess Lasva from dark magic, which both the Chwair and the Marlovens had a reputation for using.

A very open-ended mission, with almost no instruction on how to go about it. So Emras does so as best she knows how, trying to learn how magic works. And her very diligence and determination lead her down a path she might not have, had she been given better instruction and been less easily led astray.

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