In Dark Service
Ordinary families torn apart by powers they barely understand — survival becomes rebellion, truth becomes a weapon.
About this book
A great raiding fleet falls on the frontier town of Northhaven, and a pastor with a past he tried to bury watches the world he built come apart in a single morning. The road to bring his son back will run further than any map of the Kingdom of Weyland has bothered to draw — across the endless world of Pellas, into the iron heart of an empire that turns its captives into mine-fodder.
Northhaven sits at the northern edge of the constitutional Kingdom of Weyland — a market town with a rail line, a wheat harvest and a Circlist church whose pastor, Jacob Carnehan, is fonder than he might like to admit of the quiet life. He should perhaps have been more alert to the warning signs.
When a great fleet of raiders descends, the world Jacob built dies in a few hours. His son Carter is taken; so is Willow Landor, daughter of the town's wealthiest merchant; so are scores of others — bound for the slave-mines of the Vandian Imperium, an empire on the other side of the world that no Weylander has ever properly seen.
What follows is a long journey eastward through wilderness and quarrelling nation-states, alongside a steppe horde whose blue-skinned warriors do not feel the cold, and in the company of an ancient trickster of a sorcerer who keeps insisting he is harmless and is plainly nothing of the kind. Meanwhile Carter and Willow learn what it costs to survive a slave-mine hung above an active volcano — and a Vandian princess discovers that being valuable to one's relatives is far more dangerous than being expendable.
In Dark Service is the entry point and the foundation. Every major arc that runs through the next two books — the war in Weyland, the politics of Vandia, the gathering of the ancient powers — is set up here, and the character bonds the series leans on are made in this book. It is also a fine novel in its own right, with the shape of a classic epic in a setting that is doing nothing classical.
- you want a fantasy with an actual world to walk across, not a pre-mapped quest;
- you like a protagonist whose competence keeps surprising the people who thought they knew him;
- you want the engine of a slaver empire treated as the obscenity it is, without the book grinning about it;
- you want a first book that is a first book — clear of the worst spoilers, built to make the next two better.