Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Downstairs was full of humans and others that might as well be humans. There was noise, and inexplicable things were done with liquids and discs of metal and the bodies of other humans.

“We must have faith,” she told them faintly, doubt leaking out between the words.

The ranger’s eyes went wide. “Beware!” he hissed. “Evil is near!” for the lodestone was glowing with an eerie greenish light, such as was known to Penthos as “ghostlight number seven,” a favorite with the magical artificers and gimickers of Ening’s Garth who so overcharged him on every visit.

Tchaikovsky makes so many great genre jokes throughout the book. This was one of my favourites.

“I can’t imagine how you found us,” Lief added sardonically. “Mostly from the inn sign,” she snapped. He frowned. “There isn’t a sign.” “There is now, and it’s changing every half-minute into something even less tasteful.”

You have to read the book to get the full impact of this joke, but it’s priceless.

Lief wondered if this would turn out to be some bizarre anti-mugging, where he would get forcibly congratulated and rewarded against his will. “Ah, well, thanks.”

Fuck the righteous.

One of the recurring themes of Spiderlight.

“Seriously?” he demanded. “I’ve seen the kit you’ve got laid out there. I’ve known priests of the blood god who would have been oohing and aahing over some of those toys, and asking who your torturer was so they could book him for parties. So honestly, who’s the one doing bad stuff and claiming to be good, exactly?”

Ethical conversations abound, but Tchaikovsky never resorts to the sort of pedantry Pullman is prone to.

“Litho of the Northern Wastes was quite specific—” Abnasio began, but Dion jumped on him, verbally at least. “Litho is a corrupted secondary source—!” “My own tutelary deacon swore by Litho—!” “Well, my tutelary deacon at least knew about the veracity of ancient Boralian texts!” “Your deacon’s a corrupted secondary source!” Abnasio spat. “How dare you denigrate the good name of Aloysius the Pure!” Dion demanded, which was apparently a name to conjure by if you were a churchgoing type, and therefore made for good ammunition.

This scene felt like a day at work...

and it was apparent that the wizard was dying to argue the case for a mass auto-da-fé of the followers of Gamograth, and was getting nowhere with it.

The fire mage Penthos is the source of many humourous moments, and this one was my fave.

Then the two of them were out and on the streets of the holiest city in the world: a man-monster and a woman who punched monks.

There were six Ghants in the kitchen now, one of them engaged in the very evil business of sweeping something up.

Who would live at the top of a tower? Have you seen how many fucking stairs there are?”

hardly the sort of complex moral quandary that would go into a seminary exam.

The moral certainty of the Light’s crusading methods was an easy thing to vouch for, when you only saw it from the side that held the sword and the disc.

“HAVE IT, YOU TURD!” the thief yelled as he struck. It was, Cyrene considered, a battle cry unlikely to make the sagas.

But the creation that he had catalogued so thoroughly had not contained a thing such as Enth.

If the Light was a lie, then that makes those people all the better for living as they have.