“What do you think about everything that's going on, anyway? ... About the city. About beings coming from other planes. About monsters. About all the other weird things.”
Ehann shrugged uncomfortably. “It's Bezim. Everyone comes here, from everywhere. Why shouldn’t they? We have a lot of strange stuff — alchemy, bravi, a cliff through the middle of the city. I don't know, I've never been anywhere else, but this seems fine. Even if it's getting stranger." [p. 269]
The second in the trilogy that began with Notorious Sorcerer, this is as complex and richly imagined as Evans' debut, though the pace seemed slightly less headlong: or perhaps that's because I'm more familiar with the characters, and more invested in what happens to them next.
In the previous book, street-rat Siyon Velo became the Alchemist and the Power of the Mundane, bringing the four planes back into balance for the first time in centuries. Siyon has achieved the impossible: now he's confronting the merely inconceivable -- the reform of the laws against alchemy, and unravelling the knots of secrecy that surround the quartet of Barons who oversee Bezim's criminal underworld. Siyon is still mourning Izmirlian, the lover he sent into oblivion, and adjusting to very different ways of working as his abilities are affected by his new status.
Siyon is not the only character changing careers. Neglected wife Anahid Joddani's gambling habit brings her an unexpected prize, and a plethora of decisions about its disposal. Assuming she even wants to be rid of it: it offers her a whole new arena for her business acumen and her organisational gifts -- and a kind of freedom not previously available to her. Anahid's sister Zagiri, meanwhile, is pursuing her ambition to become one of the people with the power to make a difference: but is that the thing that matters most, when it comes to the crunch? There are new characters, too, some of them outsiders from beyond the city (I especially liked Mayar, from the Khanate), and some at the very heart of Bezim's aristocracy.
I love the atmosphere, with all the nautical metaphors to remind us that Bezim is a trading port as well as a cultural hub. And I found it massively refreshing that so much has changed, in the city and for the protagonists, since Notorious Sorcerer: I'm sure there could have been dozens of stories about Bezim set within the status quo of the previous novel, but that novel's climax has vast and tangible effects. Eagerly looking forward to the third novel (and hoping that next time I get a review PDF that's not unreadably jumbled!)
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