Charlie, meanwhile, has been captured by the mysterious Sorceress who rules the Midnight Sea, which leaves Tress with no choice but to go rescue him. When the duke realizes the two teenagers are falling in love, he takes Charlie away to find a suitable wife-and returns with a different young man as his heir. Charlie is the son of the local duke, but he likes stories more than fencing. Tress is an ordinary girl with no thirst to see the world. Great fun, with nonstop action and with an escape hatch that would allow-dare we hope?-a sequel.Ī fantasy adventure with a sometimes-biting wit. The effort to do so is well worth it, though, for Bennett is a master of worldbuilding, and for all the novel’s far-fetched moments, everything seems perfectly logical on its own terms.
Bennett’s language sometimes runs blue, sometimes knotty (“The Keyship’s espringal batteries wheeled about and sprayed the night skies as the shrieker bolts descended”), and readers will be lost in its idiosyncrasies and the story’s plot turns if they haven’t read the first two books. Some of Bennett’s yarn concerns the origins of scriving, a bit of technological sorcery that, often put to bad uses itself, reveals some good sides as well and produces a happy ending-at least for the survivors. And then there’s Crasedes Magnus, who has strong skills as a shape-shifter and, mercurially, is good one minute and bad the next it’s for good reason that Clef in particular harbors deep hatred for him. It had calculated many times that, should it shed this corporeal form, its intelligence should still persist in all the various lexicons and rigs throughout its empire.” Against the bad-tempered and ill-intentioned Tevanne stand characters we’ve met in Bennett’s previous volumes, but with considerable attention given here to their backstories: We learn, for example, that the keylike creature called Clef (naturally) once took quite different form, that Berenice and Sancia are more than comrades in battle, and that Gregor Dandolo has more resources than hitherto hinted at.
The magic of scriving, which is to say, melding two objects together to form weapons, tools, and the like, has been extended to humans and even whole cities, so that the medieval-tinged metropolis of Tevanne now roams the land, searching for transubstantiation: “Tevanne did not wish to have a body anymore.
A thrills-and-spills conclusion to the adventures of Sancia Grado.īennett concludes his Founders trilogy, preceded by Foundryside (2018) and Shorefall (2020), with characteristically high-spirited mayhem.
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