Skullsworn By Brian Staveley

 Skullsworn

By Brian Staveley

Skullsworn is the fourth novel set in the world of The Emperor's Blades and is honestly a fairly stand-alone book. I've only read Emperor's Blades but I was able to follow everything in this novel fairly easily. It's set before the other three novels and features Pyrre Lakatur, an acolyte of the god of death; a fairly talented assassin, but not yet a priestess. To become a priestess she must complete the final test, killing a specific collection of people that satisfy the lines in an old hymn. The last line being killing the love of your life (Yeesh.). 

She has 14 days to do it once she starts killing and has to do it while being watched by witnesses sent by her order to prevent any cheating. If she fails, she dies as the witnesses, themselves incredibly skilled assassins, will kill her. Now Pyrre is an incredibly talented murderess, able to kill with poison, bare hands, blades, and your standard array of household goods as we expect from such characters at this point. So the killing part is not a problem. The problem is that Pyrre has never been in love before and is wrestling very hard with love as a concept. I'll admit when you're not sure what love is and are pretty sure you've never been in love, it's damn hard to find the love of your life and murder them (I don’t know, seems like it just gives some room for fudging…{You also have to convince two senior assassins that you’re not fudging, if you don’t, they kill you.  Also, the god is real and might rat you out.} Fuck.). 

Pyrre is a smart and ambitious girl with a lot of drive, however, so she has a solution! She'll find the one guy who so arrested her attention and emotions that she remembers him years later as vividly as the first night they fought bare-knuckled in a ring. Then she'll force him to love her and she'll love him, in 14 days. Then she'll kill him. It's a simple plan! Well, it would be, except for the fact that this guy is a champion bare-knuckle fighter who is not only capable of knocking out men three times his size with his bare hands. He was also able to defeat her in combat, back before hitting his peak level of skill, fame, and lethality. He's also an empire-wide known soldier and knife fighter. Due to being a combat veteran of several campaigns, he's also the commander of a large garrison force of really effective soldiers and peacekeepers preventing the city of Dombang from rising up by the near-pure force of will and personality. He's also a paranoid bastard who is as intelligent and canny as such a commander has to be. 

There's also the tiny, little bitty fact that she kind of abandoned him without a word in the dark of the night. SHe did this years ago and never bothered to write him so much as a Dear John letter since. So he might have complicated feelings upon seeing her face again. The kind of feelings that might lead him to decide he doesn't want anything to do with her, instead of throwing himself headlong into her embrace and not incidentally her knife (I mean, it occurs to me that, up until this point in her life, this guy has been the love of her life. {I mean, I think so but she disagrees saying that she’s never been in love} Ugh.  An earnest and forthright assassin…). Considering that we know that they fought each other for money and fun the first time around, it's actually very possible that his reaction will be to try and plant his fist in her eye or his knife in her chest, assuming that she's back as part of a plot to kill him. Which he would be entirely correct in! 

That's not the only wrinkle here, see there's also the city of Dombang itself. Dombang is a trade city built in a vast river delta. That river delta is a deadly, vibrant green hell teeming with snakes, spiders, carnivorous fish swarms, large cats, and of course crocodiles as well as a wide variety of plants, all seemingly designed to make anything but the shortest of stays in the delta an incredibly painful suicide (I must do Science in this delta!  Harcourt, bring me my insect repellant and waders! {And the biologist was never seen again}). Even the native fishermen of Dombang regard being trapped in the delta on foot as an inhumane death sentence. Of course, the outlawed native religion practiced human sacrifice by casting out people into the delta. The empire of Annur outlawed this, partly because the gods that the Annurians worship declared those gods to be false divinity and partly because the city of Dombang practices offended the Annurians on certain levels as they often set out unwanted children (Before reliable abortifacients, infanticide by exposure or ritual sacrifice was pretty common in the ancient world.{These aren’t infants, children, usually around 8 to 10 from what’s shown in the book}  Oh.  That’s… fucked.  Still, not that much different from the Carthaginians, they’d sacrifice kids that old sometimes if I recall properly.)

 There's also the native people of the delta, the ones who abandoned the city thousands of years ago to embrace the screaming verdant death swamp (See! People can live there!  It can’t be that bad! {It’s pretty bad}). They of course hold the city in contempt and openly continue the traditional religion while claiming that the city was doing it all wrong and that the old gods don't want children or weak sacrifices at all. They want strong warriors and killers. They also claim that every generation the gods send back one of the sacrifices to maintain the faith and rituals. Which leads to the question, what are they worshiping if they're not worshiping real gods? If they're not real, what's killing the warriors who've lived their entire lives in the hell-swamp, and what's sending back survivors who are utterly convinced they had contact with the divine? (Look, polytheism, or at least some kind of animism, is probably the most intuitive system of faith for humans.  They might very well be worshiping real gods, just, you know…their gods.{Yes but in-universe a bunch of gods showed up in physical form and gave a list of who was a real god and who wasn’t, guess who wasn’t on it.} And clearly, Gods within a polytheistic system never lie? {You gonna call the god of death a liar?})

Under the surface of Annurian occupation and control the native religion seethes and discontent boils. I'll admit I'm not sure what concrete complaints the Dombangians have besides, they won't let us abandon children to the swamp to feed the snakes and gators. No one complains about the taxes and the Annurians don't seem that cruel or oppressive as far as foreign imperialists go (The Romans weren’t THAT oppressive in Judea either.  We endured worse, like the Assyrians. But the Romans offended Jews enough on religious grounds that Massada happened.). The guy in charge of the city is a native-born son! The majority of the elites are all locals! Of course, it has to be admitted that sometimes being a foreign imperialist is simply enough to stir revolt and resentment. I mean, if Arizona was under a Chinese boot, it's likely that it just wouldn't matter how nice and kind the Chinese were, I'd be annoyed by it. Let this be a lesson on the futility of direct imperialism kids, sometimes it's better to leave people independent and take advantage of them via a rigged economic/geopolitical system (Yeah, it is far easier to use structural adjustment loans to extract all the natural resources and leave them dependent on you for subsistence.). 

Pyrre is deeply aware of this because like the man she is here to seduce and murder, she was born and raised in this city. Unlike him, she has no love for this place. Her plan to overcome his natural aversion to her appearing out of nowhere? Incite a mass rebellion that will force him to accept her help in putting it down (This plan is… Super Genius level.  No chance it will backfire like an ACME rocket at all, no!). After already being a very capable killer and then receiving years of training from people who worship a god of death and think murder is the second-highest level of devotion (Wait, what is the highest? {Suicide}) is the kind of help you need in this situation. She's also gambling that the high-stress situation will inflame her own emotional response and help her break through her own mental and emotional barriers to love and attachment. Which, say what you will, is a plan that has the audacity and pure break-into-your-home-while-you're-there-and-steal-your-dog gall going for it. 

It's the kind of all-or-nothing plan you would expect from someone in their 20s who is still half-convinced that they're immortal. What really tickles me is that both of her Witnesses are very aware of this plan so that means at some point she briefed her superiors and got approval for this madness (“Well you see, I not only want to please the God of Death via the prescribed murders, but a city-wide blood orgy!”  At which point, they nod sagely.). I'm left wondering, was this plan A? Plan B? Plan 127? Did she workshop this plan? Were there plans that got rejected? If so, what was the plan that was so lunatic that this seemed like the sensible option? Were they excited by the sheer scope of this? Because her plan does boil down to “let me cause a revolution that will at least get tens of thousands killed over several years so I can become a full-fledged priestess.” I mean considering she's worshiping a god of death, I suppose no one can doubt her piety after something like that. Her sanity, sense of the appropriate, and desire to live may all be up for discussion but not her piety (Yes, but this is a Death God.  A desire to live is a theological liability.  Instead, she embraces the spirit of Wile E. Coyote, for death! {It also helps that she is so serious about it, just like Wile E Coyote}). 

This may be the point, as Pyrre starts her trial and the clock starts ticking down, she is forced to confront her ideas on life, death, love, and hate. She was also forced to do so with an intensity and depth that would be hard to reach under any other circumstance. She is forced to feel whether she wants to or not. She is forced to think about what she is doing and why she is doing it. She is also forced to confront her own origins and actions in a way that will either leave her with catharsis or dead. Either way, she will have broken through to a new level of self-understanding and control. Which seems important to her order. 

We see this in the Witnesses that are sent to observe and advise her. Also to kill her if she fails. We have Ela, a priestess of death who revels in life. In every scene, she seems to just be wringing out as much sensation and pleasure in the moment as she can. At the same time she doesn't come across as a shallow or empty hedonist but someone who has decided that life and death should both be treated without any degree of fear or trepidation. It likely helps that she's a woman in her prime instead of someone who has barely hit adulthood. On the flip side we have Kossal, a grumpy old man in his 70s, who veers between the extremely grumpy old man, kindly teacher, and grandfather figure and terrifying, ice-cold avatar of death itself. Their play with each other, with Pyrre and the other characters that show up in this novel, is a very layered and interesting thing to read. These are adults with complex but straightforward relationships, who understand and love each other and themselves. It's an interesting thing to see in a pair of people who will also kill absolute strangers because they felt their god told them to. 

This book manages to pack in a tense romantic plot with a perfectly sensible but out-of-left-field answer, a coming of age story dripping with blood and action, and a lot of skulduggeries and underhanded intrigue. There's a political/religious plot running through the book as well but it really feels a bit bare bones. Part of that is we're told this story completely through Pyrre's eyes and she doesn't care about that plot. Now, normally I would complain that this reduces the tension because if Pyrre is our narrator then we know she'll survive. That said, given the twists and turns, it's way more interesting to see just what her answer is to the questions of what love is, what life means, what death is, and her place in all of it than whether or not she lives or dies. Honestly, Pyrre would likely tell us that the answers people come up with to those questions are way more important than some trivia over how and when they finally die. After all, she would argue, you're gonna die sooner or later anyway so why fret over it so much? I can also understand why the 'bigger' political plotline was kinda pushed to the background, the book is barely over 300 pages and is tackling some big storylines as it is. It does a good job with the plots it chooses to focus on and the setting of Dombang and the river delta are incredibly well built. Providing a good setting for what I found to be interesting characters. Skullsworn by Brian Staveley gets an A- from me. 

I hope you enjoyed this week’s review which was voted for by our ever-wise patrons.  If you’d like a voice in our upcoming reviews, or discussions about future content, you should join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads  For as little as a dollar a month you can show your support for this work and get a vote on what you’ll see in the future! The poll for April is still up and if you join before April fools day you can vote on next month’s reviews!   Next week, I’ll be looking at volume I of the Magnus of the Library!  Hope to see you there and until then, stay safe and keep reading! 

Red text is our editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is our reviewer Garvin Anders