Re Temur builds his army

 In a rush to finish off one more series before my next round of book club assignments, I decided to pick up Elizabeth Bear's Steles of the Sky, the third and final book in her Eternal Sky trilogy. I'd read Range of Ghosts in 2013 and Shattered Pillars in 2014, and bought Steles of the Sky also in 2014 when it was first published, but, my book-buying and -reading habits being what they are, it got buried behind some other books, even though I had really liked the first two.

 

A downside of this is that it took me a while to get into this one, because I had forgotten a lot of stuff, and it's a pretty complex story. There are a lot of different players from a lot of different cultures under several different skies, and everyone's religion and magic work differently, and the thing I'd remembered most vividly from the previous book was the demons incubating in people's lungs, which is basically the only plot point that was apparently wrapped up last volume because there aren't any more lung demons in this one. There are lots of horses and yaks, though, and I will admit that I occasionally have trouble reading anything with yaks quite seriously, for which I blame Terry Pratchett. This is entirely a fault of mine as a reader, though, as the now-Dowager Empress Yangchen's journey of self-discovery and non-uselessness as she leads a refugee caravan to Rasa is an excellent story arc, and Yangchen's faithful yak Lord Shuffle is a perfectly good animal companion, even if he is not as supernatural as Bansh. 

 

There is a lot of politicking, which I love, although various characters seem to finally be wising up and realizing how much al-Sepher is playing them off each other, which has the benefit of not making me real mad at how stupid they're all being for Plot Reasons (like... a lot of books) but on the other hand does seem to slow the pace down a bit now that it's largely Everyone vs. al-Sepher. (This slowing down is helped along by the fact that the writing is very descriptive--it's good descriptive, but there's a lot of it.) The best bits are Saadet vs. al-Sepher, considering Saadet is actually on his side, having married the now-deceased Qori Buqa and now bearing his child in order to take over the Khaganate for al-Sepher's purposes. The culture clashes between the Qersnyk and the extremely restrictive cult of the Scholar-God are quite intense. 

 

Ultimately, it is the world-building that really is the coolest thing about this series, even though the plot and characters and intrigues and stuff are all quite solid. The world feels very detailed and very old, and has all kinds of rich secrets buried in it, and by secrets I mean GODDAMN DRAGONS. The dragons are kind of assholes; it's great. 

 

This is not to undersell the number of great ladies in this series, from the Wizard Samarkar to the slave-poetess Ummuhan, Edene has truly become a queen of poisoned things, and Yangchen similarly finds herself in a position of authority over evil creatures. Saadet, as previously mentioned, comes into her own beautifully, even if she's still basically on the side of the bad guys. And those are just the viewpoint characters. 

 

Probably my biggest complaint about the series is that I really do not know shit about horses, up to and including the colors, so there was a lot of horse talk that went totally over my head. One plot point involves Temur trying to put together a Sacred Herd of the sixty-four colors of horses, and I'm sitting here like a dumbass city girl going "What the fuck is a liver bay," even though there is a drawing of one on the book's cover. (Unlike many fantasy-loving little girls, I did not go through a Horse Phase.)

 

Overall, this series is pretty stellar, but I cannot quite shake the feeling that I should dutifully plug my way through some of the Elizabeth Bear books I already own before getting the second Karen Memory book, which adds a slight feeling of obligation that makes the reading of it less fun. That's on me, though.

 

Oh, and obligatory "How well would this translate into a TV show": Were it done properly and not whitewashed, fucking FABULOUSLY.