Crucible of Chaos – Sebastien de Castell
It has been two years since the gods were murdered and now a new trouble has broken out within the walls of the cursed abbey on Isola Sombra, accessible only at low tide by a thin causeway across the stormy coastal waters, the Abbott Venia requesting one of His Majesty’s Travelling Magistrates to attend and investigate, the man appointed and duly summoned “the King’s Crucible” Estevar Valejan Duerisi Borros atop his faithful mule Imperious.
Once the holiest site in the kingdom of Tristia as well as a valuable strategic holding, Borros finds a pantheon of chaos has replaced the dead gods with three sects vying for power over the island, Brother Agneta and her Bone Rattlers, their devotions led by chance, loyal traditionalist Mother Leogado and her Trumpeters, and the tattooed hedonistic Wolf Hounds led by former monk Strigan, each of them seeking advantage even as they hide in their towers, fearful of Abbott Venia, now also dead but refusing to lie in his grave as any decent corpse should.
A return to the world of his Greatcoats, Sebastien de Castell launches a new short sequence entitled Court of Shadows with a prelude to set the grim scene, Crucible of Chaos, with Borros himself declaring that “a trial is a crucible in which facts are separated from lies so that the truth can be discerned, and from that truth a path towards justice,” and those lies, deceptions and misdeeds are indeed myriad on Isola Sombra, the cryptic warnings he received on approach an underestimation of the situation.
Borros a man of rational mind whose obligations have often required him to delve into the supernatural, along with his rapier and the greatcoat which acts as his badge of office he carries a presumptuous overconfidence that the secrets of the island will be easily discerned and the case closed, but he is greatly mistaken in both the scope and the scale of the challenge that he will find beneath the stormy skies where apparently targeted lightning strikes have torn down the very statues of those once venerated.
The tone less outrageously comedic than de Castell’s recent standalone featuring The Malevolent Seven, Borros is possessed of a possibly justified streak of conceitedness concerning his own abilities and reputation, amplified by travelling with no one save Imperious to hear his stories of triumph, but while he is a bit of a know-it-all even as he comes to accept that there is much happening beyond the scope of his books and experience his mind is as sharp as his blade, his faith not in religion but in the observational and deductive skills associated with his profession.
Assisted by a girl from the island, Caeda, she is seemingly too clever by half for one of sheltered upbringing, but in the tangled threads of the Crucible of Chaos nothing is what it seems, the true motivations and actions of the individuals and factions concealed beneath layers of misdirection and false assumptions, and often what seemed earlier to be a narrative digression or incongruity is fully accounted for or validated as Borros approaches his final arguments with de Castell’s convolutions as precisely planned and placed as the intricate demonic sigils which desecrate the flesh of the damned of the island.
Crucible of Chaos is available now from Jo Fletcher Books with Play of Shadows to follow in March
