Suns and skeletons

I decided to bridge the small gap between finishing the Eternal Sky series and picking up Stone Mad at the Speculative Boston event--which, unfortunately, I could not do, because the entire print run is sold out, which is a pretty rad reason--by reading Elizabeth Bear's Book of Iron, a novella from Subterranean Press that appears to be the prequel to another novella that I haven't read, and which seems to take place in the Eternal Sky universe several centuries (?) later. 

 

Book of Iron is a fun little 1920's-inflected adventure into the poisonous ruins of Old Erem. The adventurers in this case are a trio of wizards from the desert kingdom of Messaline, the country that Erem is located within (it's clear that it's not really part of it, both from its sky and because nobody goes there), and another trio of wizards from a rainy island country called Avalon where all the people are white and that is definitely not based off England. The traveling trio of wizards are following a precisionist--a very rare and powerful type of wizard with what is basically order magic--who has snuck into ancient Erem to find a magic anvil that will let her acquire the Book of Iron, a powerful artifact that is currently living inside one of the three wizards chasing the precisionist. Does this sound like a trap? Obviously. To keep thing interesting, the precisionist is one of the other traveling wizards' mom. (The third traveling wizard is dead but reanimated; they're a weird group.) 

 

Our viewpoint character here is Bijou, an artificer, who basically reanimates skeletons and sometimes also dresses them up pretty with wire and jewels. She has a pet bone centipede thing made of a ferret skull, a spine, and a lot of cat ribs; it sounds adorable and I want one. Bijou is in a not particularly healthy relationship with one of the other wizards in her trio, a necromancer; she doesn't even like him, which is quite understandable since he's not especially likeable. The third member of their party is one of the younger princes of Messaline, who is good with weapons and likes cars, as you do when you are a prince who is also a professional adventurer. Bijou has a lot of thoughts about camaraderie and friendship and the like over the course of this story, in between reanimating horse skeletons for them to ride and trying not to get incinerated by the Erem suns. 

 

In addition to being a pretty good story, the physical book is gorgeous--beautiful cover art with a lovely matte finish, nice thick creamy paper, all that good stuff. I can't drop $20 on a novella with any kind of regularity, but I definitely don't regret doing so for this one.