House of Open Wounds, Days of Shattered Faith, Lives of Bitter Rain by Adrian Tchaikovsky

After I published my effusive review of Adrian Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances, I received a comment from Tchaikovsky on twitter noting that he intended to continue writing in the novel's world without continuing directly from its story. This made sense to me, both because the breadth and complexity of the world revealed in City could clearly support many different stories in many different settings, and because the novel that City most reminded me of, Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, had similarly spawned standalone sequels in separate settings. Two years later, we are four books deep into what has become known as the Tyrant Philosophers sequence (with a fifth book coming next year), and the project that seems to be emerging from this series feels more complex than what I had originally imagined. While each of the novels in this series stands alone and has a different setting and protagonist to the others, there are progressions that become clear when you read them together, and a story building in the background that seems to be approaching a climax.

This is perhaps not so easy to discern when you pick up House of Open Wounds, which is in many ways City of Last Chances's polar opposite. City was expansive and wide-ranging, venturing high and low in its setting of the fantasy city of Ilmar, exploring its social strata, its storied and often irrational history, its various types of magical residents and refugee communities, and how they all respond to the city's invasion and takeover by the fascistic Palleseen, who seek to "perfect" the world by imposing not only correct thought and social ordering, but by eliminating all magic, folklore, and religion. House narrows its focus to a single Pal battalion, and really to a single field hospital within that battalion. Ruled over by a gigantic man known as the Butcher, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of alchemy and chemistry as well as a dark past, the experimental hospital at Forthright Battalion is one of a few places where foreigners—particularly those possessed of magic or still practicing religion—can hold on to a modicum of safety in the very heart of the Palleseen war machine. 

As the novel opens, the hospital's complement—which includes a former fire priestess who uses the last remnants of her god's power to cauterize wounds, a worshiper of a god of filth who captures infection and disease, as well as a handful of misfit orderlies and stretcher-bearers—is increased by the arrival of a new forced recruit, dubbed Maric Jack. Readers of City of Last Chances will quickly recognize Jack as the priest Yasnic, sole remaining worshipper of God, a reduced, crotchety divinity who repeatedly rails against humanity's depravity and corruption—a topic on which his and Jack's presence in the Palleseen camp as the army pursues a campaign against the Loruthi mercantile empire, former allies of the Pals whom they have now decided to conquer, provides much fodder. Despite City ending with Jack in a place of relative safety, caring for the abandoned gods of Ilmar, by the time House opens he has been captured by the Palleseen for engaging in actions contrary to perfection, sentenced to death, and then relegated to the field hospital through what passes for pragmatism among the Pals, a willingness to—temporarily—accept proscribed technologies and traditions if it advances the war effort.

As Jack finds his feet in the hospital and regiment, learning about his fellow misfits, befriending other outsiders in the camp, earning the enmity of officers who believe he'd be of more use as fodder for their experiments, and experiencing several battles from within the chaotic, horror-tinged confines of the hospital tent, the narrative also ventures outward, giving us a glimpse of the workings of the Palleseen army. Switching the focus of his story from the subjects of forced conquest to its perpetrators gives Tchaikovsky the opportunity to delve into a topic that has occupied much of his recent fiction, the inner workings and psychological underpinnings of fascistic, totalitarian systems. 

Despite their abhorrence of magic and religion, the Palleseen do not deny these forces' existence or their usefulness. A key component of their war machine is their ability to "decant" power from magical artifacts, creatures, or gods and use it to fuel their guns and bombs. Tchaikovsky expands on this concept in House by revealing the ways in which the Palleseen adopt religious and cultural practices they claim to abhor for the sake of more effectively pursuing their aims, such as the necromantic revival of deceased soldiers to be used in clearing minefields. Often, this involves co-opting and corrupting cherished religious practices, such as the sacred bell-ringing automatons of a now-conquered people who have been turned into war machines. Or an escapee from a divine city of elf-like beings who practices the holy art of taking others' catastrophic injuries onto herself, and who, when she teaches Palleseen officers this skill, is immediately asked: why can't they pass these injuries on to someone else, such as a lower-ranking soldier, or a captured enemy?

In several pulse-pounding battle sequences, Tchaikovsky reveals how the ability to break down cherished traditions and holy precepts into their component parts, to detach faith from the practical workings of a magical power, is at the heart of the Palleseen's success as an empire. Every time an enemy appears to have turned the tables on the Pals, they reveal a new weapon system or battlefield tactic developed from the components of a defeated enemy's religion and folklore. This inevitably produces a kind of queasy admiration in the reader. As much as we might want the Palleseen to lose, as much as we might recoil from the atrocities they're willing to commit, it's also hard not to admire their inventiveness, their ability to turn the most hopeless situation into a victory through the simple expedient of thinking through the problem at hand and the tools at their disposal. Their greatest power turns out to be the willingness to consider nothing sacred—not the traditions they are dismantling, nor basic human values that might stop someone from, say, lobbing a necromantic bomb into the middle of the enemy's camp. 

This attempt to absorb and remake the abilities and practices of other cultures flounders when it encounters Jack, who was conscripted to the hospital because of past incidents in which he healed fatal injuries. But as Jack keeps trying to explain, this healing is actually the work of God, who only dispenses his beneficence in exchange for adherence to his strictures—including an absolute prohibition on causing any harm—and who will withdraw his healing, and return the healed injuries, if his subjects so much as lift a hand against another person. 

Despite a quick prohibition against Jack proselytizing among the Palleseen soldiers—and despite Jack's fractured relationship with God, who has sunk into a depression after millennia of watching his adherents fail to live up to his demands—a healing cult quickly spreads through the camp. Here, too, we see the Palleseen's impulse to remake the powers they encounter in their own image. An enterprising early convert quickly compiles a list of loopholes to God's demands which will allow her to continue to function as something resembling a soldier, and even invents a form of insurance, a provisional conversion against catastrophic injury, until which time the subject is still free to commit murder and mayhem. To Jack's surprise, God seems willing to accept this sort of worship, and as the two's relationship grows more fractured (and as Jack begins to explore other ways of being outside of the religious belief that has defined him since childhood), a twisted sort of pacifism begins spreading through the Palleseen camp.

By the novel's end, the cult of pacifism—combined with several other plot strands, such as a hospital orderly who discovers that he was once a royal heir, abducted by the Palleseen as part of a geopolitical plot and then forgotten about, and a happy-go-lucky, demotion-prone soldier who learns that she was unwittingly consecrated to a forgotten god—provides our heroes with the means of escape from life under the Palleseen thumb. It's a thrilling, heist-like conclusion, in which the Pals' arrogance, as well as their willingness to put old tools to new uses, is turned back against them, forcing them into a inescapable logical trap. And yet, as the next novel in the sequence, Days of Shattered Faith, opens, we learn that once again, the Pals have incorporated this temporary setback into their plans, and achieved a greater victory. 

Days takes us to Usmai, an ancient and powerful nation that still lies outside the Palleseens' sphere of influence. The representative Pal officer in this setting, therefore, is not a colonial administrator or a soldier, but a diplomat. Angilly is the Palleseen Resident in the capital city of Alkhalend. Officially her job is protect the interests of visiting Pal citizens and merchants, forge connections with the local leadership and aristocracy, and represent her government's interests. Unofficially, she is an officer of the department of Outreach, with more leeway to engage in unorthodox practices and immerse herself in the world's imperfection—the better to serve her mission, and test the ground. To see what weaknesses can be exploited, and what influence can be exerted, to bring Usmai into the scope of Palleseen perfection, willingly or by force.

Taken together, the three books show a very obvious progression. We have gone from the Palleseen as distant, implacable invaders in City of Last Chances, to a Palleseen protagonist in Days of Shattered Faith. From Pals who are an insurmountable occupation force, to a single Pal who is a definite underdog. And yet this is a progression backwards in time. As Angilly—or "Gil", as we are quickly encouraged to think of her—ruefully acknowledges, the kind of Palleseen occupation that readers observed in Ilmar is the desired end goal of her presence in Usmai. Once again, the novel places us in a queasy sort of tension. We have no choice but to respect Gil's hustle—she is smart, creative, bold, and refreshingly appreciative of sort of things that the Palleseen tend to trample over or appropriate. But we are also constantly aware that what she is working towards is appalling.

As Days opens, Gil's position is precarious but full of potential. A recent upheaval at court has seen Dekamran, the younger, bookish son of the city's autocratic ruler, named heir over his older, warlike brother Gorbudan. Educated abroad, Dekamran has some sympathy for the Palleseens' ideas about science and social progress (a sympathy that makes sense the more we learn about Usmai's restrictive traditions and stratified social order). He dismisses Gorbudan's warnings about their plans for Usmai. After all, he argues, the Palleseen are so far away, and Usmai is so powerful. What harm is there in tolerating their ideas, and even their representatives? But when the Loruthi, with whom Usmai had been aligned, lose the war, and the princes' father disappears, the city's leadership is unbalanced, and Gil suddenly has an opportunity to advance her objectives.

Before that happens, we spend a lot of time in Alkhalend and its surrounding regions, learning about Usmai's complex culture, a patchwork of cults, secret societies, and leftover bits of dead empires that have somehow been woven together into a functional, powerful political entity. Usmai's power is rooted in its ability to accept and absorb newcomers into its systems of power, in what feels almost like a twisted reflection of the Palleseen's tendency to appropriate useful bits from the cultures they conquer. There's the warrior tribe who wandered over from a parallel dimension and have become the royal family's bodyguards. The house where ghosts are trapped for all eternity that is used as the city's prison. An order of lizard people who ride giant war elephants who are the lynchpin of the nation's army. When escapees from City and House appear in the novel, it is unsurprising that they have chosen to pause their flight in Alkhalend. The city feels so much like its own thing, so concerned with its own problems and long-simmering conflicts, that the Palleseen seem almost beside the point.

This is, of course, what Gil and her fellow Outreach officers are counting on. Just as House took us through the Palleseen war machine's exploitation of captured technology and magic users to its own ends, Days shows us how its forces of infiltration and diplomacy take advantage of the existing landscape to drive in a wedge. Across the Usmai border, Gil's counterparts recruit among the farmers and working classes, who resent both the Usmai, who have been making war on them for generations, and their own leaders, who periodically press-gang them into a fight they have no chance of winning. Joining the Pal army offers this underclass an opportunity to strike back at their oppressors on both sides of the border, and it elegantly places the Palleseen in a position of power that the region's leaders are unable to perceive or anticipate. When Gorbudan deposes Dekamran, Gil is able to offer the prince these troops to help him retake his throne. Using the same sort of outside the box thinking we saw in House, they are able to dismantle forces that have kept Usmai powerful and independent for centuries—which means that, even as he restores his leadership, Dekamran is undermining the logic that it rests upon.

For much of the novel, both Gil and Dekamran are suspended in a state of cognitive dissonance. By virtue of her role, Gil is not the perfect Palleseen officer. She's supposed to immerse herself in outside values, to open herself up to new ideas. The reaction that other characters, as well as the readers, are encouraged to have to her is that this is a reasonable Pal. Someone you can be friends with without worrying that they're planning to subjugate your people and burn down your temples. And yet every time we are tempted to see Gil as sympathetic, she reminds us that her reasonableness is a guise, a means of seeking out weakness. That her ultimate goal—a goal that she continues to pursue despite her growing sympathy towards Usmai and Dekamran—is to flatten and eliminate all the things that make Usmai itself. 

Dekamran, meanwhile, is both full of a sense of his own importance, and disturbingly willing to allow the Palleseen to trample on cherished traditions. When they unearth demons whom his ancestors imprisoned and recruit them to their army, it is, according to the values of his culture, an abomination—so does the fact that he accepts these troops make him a forward thinking progressive, or an opportunist who is selling out his country for a soon-to-be-worthless throne? Complicating matters is the fact that Gil and Dekamran are deeply in love, which plays on our sympathies—their mutual yearning and self-denial are finely crafted, and even at the moments when we're most disgusted with them, it's hard not to wish that they could be together—and makes their motivations murky. Is Gil helping Dekamran because he's her best shot at winning Usmai for the Pals, or because she wants to save his life? Is Dekamran going along with her plans because they make sense to him, or because he doesn't want her to leave town?

All that ambiguity comes crashing to a halt as soon as Gil's success in Usmai crosses a certain, probably mathematically-determined threshold. Suddenly, Outreach's mission in the city is concluded, and more forceful departments show up to take over the job. The delicate dance between respect for local traditions and the insistent encroachment of Palleseen power and influence is shown to be the farce it always was. The novel, which has been teaching us to understand, respect, and fear the complicated forces and currents running through Usmai—feelings that have often found their grudging reflection in Gil herself—suddenly reminds us that the Palleseen's power is derived from their total lack of respect for anything that does not come from them. That Usmai's cherished religious traditions, the centuries-old martial orders that have kept it safe and powerful, even Dekamran's position as leader, are, when seen from the perspective of the city's new overlords, simply so much fodder for the decanters, and powerless figureheads who will be tolerated if they cooperate, and trampled to dust if they slow progress even a little.

As in the previous two novels, there's a rising climax at the end of Days that undercuts this encroachment of Palleseen power, but by this point we have been reading this series for too long to trust the sense of triumph that its installments end on. Dekamran may come to his senses and rouse his city against the invaders, but it's hard to hope that when the next novel in the series opens, we will not learn that this triumph was a temporary one. If there's hope to be found in Days, it is perhaps in a subplot about Gil's new aide Loret, who is clearly not who she claims to be, and who eventually reveals that there is a rot spreading through Palleseen society that all its rational, problem-solving methods may be incapable of addressing.

The full extent of this infestation has yet to be revealed, but there's a tantalizing hint of what's driving it in the novella Lives of Bitter Rain. As Tchaikovsky writes in his afterword, this story started its life as an exercise in drafting Gil's backstory. From there it ballooned into a hundred pages of prequel, which touch on several other previously-seen locations and characters in the Tyrant Philosophers universe. Tchaikovsky advises readers that Lives may be read either before or after Days, and in the series's official reading order it appears before the novel. Personally, I think knowing and caring about Gil makes her backstory more impactful, but it's possible I'm just saying that because that is the order in which I experienced the two books. Either way, Lives offers a glimpse—a relatively rare one, so far—of life at the heart of the Pal empire, and of the process that makes a loyal (if not thoughtless) officer like Gil. It is also the most succinct expression of how that upbringing both provides Palleseen citizens with a totalizing worldview, and leaves something out that makes them—as we have seen repeatedly throughout the previous three novels—uniquely vulnerable.

Angilly had felt a tension in the air and known it to be Mystery. That numinous baggage that certain gods and traditions bring with them, that strikes awe from the souls of men and women like sparks from flint. The thing the Pals are dedicated to obliterating from the world, because to be perfect means to be fully known and understood, hence mystery by its very nature is imperfection.

The power of the Palleseen colonial machine is rooted in its ability to take wonder and mystery and turn them into the mundane tools of conquest. But even as it does this, certain individuals find themselves overcome by those forces. Again and again in the Tyrant Philosopher novels, we encounter characters who have found something to care about that is greater, and that strikes them more deeply, than the Palleseens' mission to perfect the world. Who have been given a chance to opt out of a war machine that does not care for them; who have been asked to commit one atrocity too many; who have forged bonds of loyalty and camaraderie that they are now being told to betray; who have fallen in love. Not all of these characters make what we would consider the right choice, but it is the very fact that the choice keeps coming up that reveals, I think, the fundamental failure of the Palleseen project. How, no matter how hard it tries to perfect people, they remain human. There are still any number of directions that the Tyrant Philosophers series could go in—in his afterword to Lives, Tchaikovsky says that he has no definitive plan for the series. As the works we've already gotten reveal, however, this is undeniably the richest and most complete exploration of the theme of totalitarianism and its inherent contradictions in all of Tchaikovsky's recent work.