The Modern Classics

There is a second shelf of books that every person of consequence is expected to know. The Great Classics earned their place by age and by the institutions behind them. These novels earned theirs by getting their worlds right, and people love them for it. They are also a pleasure to read; and since Your Grace is not fond of the page, they may hold you a little longer.

Masks and Manoeuvres is set in Altomente. Alba Vetturi comes from a respectable family of modest means, known for enchanted miniature portraits. This is enough to admit them to the great masked balls, and not enough to give them any say once inside. At one such ball she meets Lord Kassian d’Orenzo, heir to the most powerful banking house in Lusia, and dislikes him at once, since he makes no effort to hide what he thinks of her family.

Over the rest of the book, through guild quarrels and her own sharp instincts, she discovers that each had judged the other wrongly, and that someone is forging magical contracts to bring the city down. Its account of masked negotiation and Lusian contract law is so exact that Altomente banned it, and it remains officially unavailable in Ferrocinto.

Angenga concerns Vikram Aaloka, a magician of great ability who is admitted to the Taprobane Magisterium and expelled almost at once for forbidden experiments. The Concordant College, which in those days was all ambition and very few rules, gives him a place to work. There he makes a living creature out of Tungolstaana ore smuggled from Ealdorfold and the raw energies of the Waste. It is immensely strong, and it slowly and strangely becomes aware of itself, and Vikram flees from it in terror.

From then on the book belongs as much to the Angenga as to Vikram, as the creature pursues its maker across the Waste, half mad with loneliness.

Tangowan Straits follows Isara, a young storyteller learning to navigate, who signs aboard the Serpent’s Tooth. Her captain is a grim man with one leg who wants nothing in the world except to kill the great Azure Dragon that sank his last ship. The voyage carries them through treacherous island chains and at last into storms the dragon itself seems to raise.

Your Grace can guess how the captain’s obsession ends for his crew. What nobody else has managed is the portrait of Tangowan and its gods as they must once have been. Read it, and consider what Daub would have to do to avoid becoming somebody’s novel.

Emmeline concerns a healer’s wife in the country borough of Aeppelthorp. Everything she knows of the world comes from the magical story-scrolls sent out from the Leohtgield, full of great enchantments and grand passions, and her small life cannot hold her. She abandons it to pursue that world through secret affairs and costly magic, all paid for by a shadowy moneylender whose contracts are enforced by equally shadowy means, and it destroys her in the manner such stories require.

It is also a detailed social history of the upheaval during the Leohtgield’s consolidation, and far better than the official histories.

Staanbyrig is set in a hard Ealdorfold mining city. Raedwulf Sceaduweard, a penniless former student, has persuaded himself that great men need not obey the law. He murders an old galdor and her apprentice, is hunted, is offered redemption, and learns over the remainder of the novel that he is not one of the great men after all.

It is a bleak book, and it may be the only account we have of how Ealdorfold justice works from within. The plot also turns upon a forged contract pushed through Valdermach, which brings in a long and accurate account of a Diet session. Whoever wrote it knew the courts of two countries from the highest bench to the lowest cell, which I find almost suspicious.

The Lion Emperor’s Courtesan follows Lady Anjalee Devi, a celebrated and gifted noblewoman held in a political marriage. She scandalizes Singhapura society by falling for Count Weerasena, a war hero. Singhapura’s customs being what they are, the affair is ended, and the whole is a tragedy from first page to last.

Alongside it runs the story of Devan, a Singhapura landowner who removes to a new estate in Wattle and must learn to live among neighbours who resent him, and slowly takes on their ways. I have mentioned this book elsewhere for its Rosantic court masque, which Rosantic diplomats have cited in their correspondence. It is also a good book on what Singhapura’s society does to people, and on how those who escape it learn to live with themselves and with people unlike them.

Blooma Daeg follows three people through a single day in Aethelburh. Leofwine Blooma, a man of mixed blood, sells small enchanted trinkets through the city’s maze of markets. His wife Mereweef sings songs said to move men further than songs ought. Staelwyrhta Daedal, a brilliant young galdorcraeftiga, crosses the same city on business of his own, in search of the lost prophecies of the last Aethelgarth oracle. Their paths cross and part throughout the day, and nothing is settled at the end. It is the best portrait I know of how ordinary people in Ealdorfold live, and what they hope for.

The Count of Marezzia follows Edmondo Alighieri, a promising young ship’s captain from a small trading family. Rivals betray him on the eve of his wedding, and he is condemned to a prison from which nobody escapes. There he befriends an aged Singhapura magician, a fellow prisoner, who reveals the location of a vast forgotten treasure and teaches him everything he knows before dying.

Alighieri escapes, grows immensely rich, names himself the Count of Marezzia, and takes his time destroying every one of his betrayers across Altomente, Septimura and Ferrocinto. It shows Lusian high society at its most treacherous, with its feuds between cities and its corrupt great families, and it shows precisely how frightening Lusian debt and contract law can be. If Your Grace has made enemies in Lusia, read it soon.

Folio XXIV · Other Records of Note

Transcribed by Victor Konara