Promise of Blood

I was lured into reading Brian McClellan's impressive debut novel, Promise of Blood (Orbit, 2013, no editor listed), by McClellan's "Big Idea" post on John Scalzi's blog, Whatever.  Napoleonic technology and an alternate-French Revolution setting with magic works for me.  It turned out to be a bit more alternate than I was expecting, but I liked it quite a bit.  A book trailer video is available on McClellan's website.

Below: no spoilers past the first eighty pages or so of the five hundred and forty-five McClellan gifts us with.

McClellan alternates between four viewpoint characters: Field Marshal Tamas, who starts thing off with a bang by staging a military coup against the king and nobility of the country Adro; his son Taniel; Nila, a laundry maid for a noble family that falls victim to the coup; and the investigator Adamat, who has a magically perfect memory and a knack for ferreting out secrets.  The book's tagline, spoken by Tamas, is "The age of kings is dead, and I have killed it."  Though set in a fantasy world, the book takes place in the equivalent of the circa-1800 era of history when reason is fighting superstition and the ideals of the American and French revolutions are in the air.

Tamas and Taniel are both powder mages, a new order of sorcerer whose existence challenges the mages of the nobility, known as the Privileged, whose power is elemental in nature.  Powder mages have all kinds of nifty tricks, like steering bullets and exploding gunpowder at a distance.  Ingesting gunpowder gives them energy, which means there are potential problems with addiction and overdosing.  Gold in their bloodstream takes away their power.  It's an interesting way to literalize the way firearms effectively ended the age of the sword and (implicitly) irrationality yielded to science.  But instead of just the technological developments, we get a parallel form of magic which challenges the age of elemental magic.  Clever.  That said, the whole thing seemed a little arbitrary.  Why gunpowder?  Why gold?  I found it best to just let the lack of logic slide for the sake of the story.

Privileged vs. powder mage is not an unequal contest, however.  Powder mages can deliver a speedy bullet, but Privileged can vaporize you with a fireball.  And the militaries of the various countries have developed air rifles to avoid the problem of powder mages blowing up their firearms.

If this all sounds vaguely like Paula Volsky's magnificent Illusion, well, yeah, I noticed that myself.  Exalted/Privileged, French Revolution-like coup, clashing forms of magic, etc.  There are definite similarities in premise, but the plot unfolds very differently.  I highly recommend Illusion, by the way.

The story: when the powder mages kill off most of the Privileged of the royal cabal, Tamas is disturbed by their last words: "You can't break Kresimir's Promise."  Kresimir is a legendary creator-god, and while Tamas is not a believer in gods, he doesn't think the Privileged were fools, either.  So he hires Adamat to find out what Kresimir's Promise is.  Meanwhile, Taniel and his companion, Ka-poel, a mute servant from a faraway land ("savage" is tossed around to describe her, but she doesn't seem especially savage) who has mysterious powers of her own, are tasked with hunting down a powerful Privileged who escaped Tamas' purge.  Frustration ensues all around: A royalist faction takes over part of the city.  The fleeing Privileged is ridiculously difficult to kill.  All the library books that might pertain to Kresimir's Promise have been mutilated or stolen.  Oh, and the treasury is empty, Adamat is about to lose his house to an underworld figure who bought up his loans, and one of Tamas's supporters is trying to assassinate him.  Separately from this, Nila is a secret royalist, and laundry maids get to go everywhere...

Hovering over all of this is the threat of invasion from the neighboring country of Kez, where they have used dark magic to create the almost-invulnerable Wardens and are preparing to attack Adro.  Everyone is having a very bad day for much of the book.  Bad for them, but good for the story, which unfolds at an unhurried pace but is compelling enough for me to have lost some sleep in finishing it.

One note: while Nila gets a lot less time than the male viewpoint characters, and I am not thrilled that Tamas's wife got fridged prior to the book's beginning or that two (!!) women get depicted as losing their intelligence and judgment over seductive men, we do get a trio of interesting female secondary characters in the mute but eloquent Ka-poel; Julene, a Privileged assassin with whom Taniel is forced to work in order to pursue his quarry; and the mysterious quarry herself.  These three may well be the most powerful characters in the books.  Does having three powerful female mages try to destroy each other at regular intervals count as passing the Bechdel test?

This is the first of a trilogy, and the overall story is clearly not complete, but McClellan brings all the immediate problems to a workable resolution.  I can see where the next book is going, but I was not left frustrated by the dangling ends.  I'm rather looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy, in fact, and I recommend this novel to anyone interested in a doorstopper fantasy with a nicely multifaceted plot and a setting that is not the overused quasi-medieval Europe.

Read for yourself: