Congratulations to Brian Niemeier. His novel, Souldancer, the sequel to Nethereal,
won the first Dragon Award for
Best Horror Novel.
***
Chapter 7: The Shibboleth follows Shan’s coordinates through an asteroid field in search of the
weapons cache. Using clues carved into
the landscape by the theurg, they arrive at a complex bearing Thera icons. Jaren and Navkin lead a recovery team through
the site, but the site has been picked clean.
Dejected, the pirates leave the asteroid, sped along by an attack from a
bat-like stone monster.
Ships in Nethereal
require the use of a Wheel, a device that allows a Guild steersman to link his
awareness to the ship to control the vessel.
As this is an alien experience to a human mind, discipline and will are
required to maintain one’s sanity.
I’m having a hard time not thinking of space-elves whenever
the Gen are mentioned.
***
Chapter 8: The Guild
attacks the pirate’s den. After improvising
an explosive trap, he makes his escape, harried by Guild Enforcers. The Shibboleth arrives to pick up the survivors and almost kills Teg while providing
close air support. On board, Teg and
Jaren confront the gunner, who had been swept up in the emotions of the
fight. Teg attacks the gunner, but is
subdued by a scratch from Navkin’s envenomed blade.
Between the empty vault and the Guild raid, Jaren’s plans
for a Tharis independent from Guild rule have died.
***
Chapter 9: The Shibboleth arrives at Ambassador’s Island after a long flight from Tharis and the
Guild. Jaren intends to use his contacts
on the asteroid base to revive his rebellion.
While at a station bar waiting for their contact, the pirates and the
patrons are sedated by gas. Only Navkin
remains awake. The assailants enter the
bar. To protect herself, Navkin summons
a wolf the size of the bull. It devours
her attackers. Before it can continue
its rampage and sate itself upon the sleeping pirates, Navkin commands the
beast to leave. For the first time, the
wolf listens to her.
***
Chapter 10: After the crew wakes up, Jaren browbeats his
contact, who sold him out after blackmail from the minister of Tharis, Marshal Malachi. The minister has masterminded the Guild’s
pursuit of Jaren as well as the empty cache.
Learning that the Guild has arrived in the asteroid’s hanger, Jaren
leaves immediately. On their way out, a
thin man in black offers them a job to salvage a missing ship. As a sign of good faith, the thin man,
Fallon, has already massacred the Guild Enforcers in the hangar. The Shibboleth leaves the station, pursued in
a running firefight by four corvettes.
Within the ether, an explosive version of hyperspace, the Shibboleth flies
too close to an exploding corvette.
This chapter ties together all the previous plot threads
with the exception of Mordechai’s.
In structure, I am seeing potential influence from Chinese
storytelling and long form Japanese anime.
At the same time, Jaren’s decision to accept the salvage mission is
clearly an inciting action in the five act
formula. As this could be an essay
of its own, let me summarize by saying that Chinese works, from literature to Shaw Brothers
cinema, tend to follow a plot event-exploration of consequences-new plot
event structure. Longer anime series would often devote the first 2-6 episodes to
a hook adventure before developing the main plot arc. I will likely develop the five act formula in
a post devoted to it. At this point in
the formula, though, the protagonist makes a decision from which all conflicts
in the story flow.
The crew discusses the urban legend of the Byport Gouger, a
face-slashing monster akin to Jack the Ripper.
While not of the Theran mythology, keep this urban myth in mind for the
future.
***
Chapter 11: Marshal Malachi reviews the progress of the
Peregrine chase. He deems the losses in
personnel and ships acceptable. After a
discussion of philosophy and Guild magic, he puts further plans in motion.
For such a spiritual universe as Nethereal’s, Malachi is a hardcore materialist. Magic is technology, complete with equations not
found in the hardest of Sanderson’s magic systems. Clinging to the certainty of determinism, if
he thinks of the gods, he thinks of them in similar terms as the wind-up
watchmaker of Deism, content
to let the universe run according to its own laws without so much as a thumb on
the scales of its workings. As a member
of the Guild, this makes him a materialist and a magician. It will be interesting to see if his characterization
follows that of C. S. Lewis’s materialist magician of the Screwtape
Letters, “the man, not
using, but veritably worshiping, what he vaguely calls ‘Forces’ while denying
the existence of ‘spirits’”. Right now, though, Malachi worships power
and
competence, like a proper Machiavellian.
***
Chapter 12: The Shibboleth assess their damage. Their
Wheel is beyond repair, but the ship can limp along on backup systems. Worried by strange dreams of an unknown
temple, Jaren resolves to complete the salvage.
The Shibboleth finds the
freighter, locked in an embrace with a derelict Guild corvette. They recover a strange cargo of living stone
cubes from the hold.
Could this be Mordechai’s freighter?
For once, Jaren dreams of more than the mission and revenge. A golden city with architecture unlike
anything seen in the universe haunts him.
Despite its splendor, the city is empty, similar to another
city of vacant halls and strange temples.
In Guild magic, inanimate objects are worked, while living
objects receive glamers. This
distinction is important, as the strange stones in the freighter’s hold only
accept glamers.
***
Chapter 13: Marshal Malachi tours the shipyards where
the lead vessel of a new class of warships, the Serapis, is under construction.
Meanwhile, the Shibboleth
limps into the port of Concordia. After
great difficulty in selling the salvaged stones, a fat broker approaches Jaren with
a million guilder offer for the cargo…and continued employment.
The Nethereal
universe is in dire straits. Not only
have the gods abandoned it, mass extinctions and desertification of worlds run
rampant. Despite the Guild’s
reassurances, many link the loss of life to the continued emptying of the White
Well, a reservoir of magical energy called prana,
which the Guild uses to fuel both space travel and Workings. The Gen worshipped the White Well as a
god. How this dying god may or may not
be linked to the dying and transforming gods of Zadok and Thera is yet unknown.
Speaking of the Gen, the Guild rated them as better mages
than humans. Marshal Malachi states that
this was reason enough to kill off the Gen.
The Serapis immediately
recalls the
naval duel with Captain John Paul Jones, of “I have not yet begun to fight”
fame. After capture, the original Serapis was converted into a privateer
and later lost. Serapis is also the name
of a Greek and Egyptian god of the underworld. We’ll see how
significant a naming choice this may be.
***
I am impressed on how Nethereal
avoids the dreaded exposition
dump. Other authors have spent
entire chapters setting up worldbuilding, or worse, brought the plot to a
screening halt to provide key information to the reader. Nethereal
uses a more metered approach, by stretching out explanations over the course of
chapters, introducing new facts only when pertinent to the story without
disrupting the action. And, in a tale
that has already had thievery, murder, assassinations, dungeon crawls, police
raids, running gun fights between ships, and kidnapping attempts before the
main plot kicks into gear, there’s a lot of action. And the metered approach only adds to the
mystery of the tale.
