Grave Empire is the first novel in Richard Swan’s second trilogy, The Great Silence, which takes place in the same continuity as his first, albeit separated by some several generations.
Peter is a young lieutenant in the army of the Sovan Empire. His posting takes him to an isolated frontier, in an area filled with recalcitrant tribes and near a contested border with the empire’s nearest rival, with whom they’re engaged in a hot war. Breveted captain and in charge of a light company in a frontier fort garrisoned by only two companies, Peter feels inadequate to his new responsibilities. This is before the nightly screaming and peculiar hallucinations: The fort is haunted, and patrols that go into the forest have ended up disembowelled and dismembered. When the major commanding the outpost receives a dispatch that the empire’s rival power Casimir is constructing a border fort a couple of weeks’ travel away, he dispatches Peter and the light company to take and destroy it. And with verbal orders only, to investigate the cause of the haunting, the screams, and the deaths.
Things don’t go wrong until after Peter’s company successfully take the enemy fort and he leads a smaller force deeper into the wilderness. Then things go horribly wrong indeed: The force behind the nightly screaming and the peculiarly vicious deaths is a bizarre tribe of uncanny nonhuman nonverbal beings, who sacrifice their captives in bloody ritual in order to make more of themselves. (It’s even more horrifying than it sounds: Body horror and identity horror combine with a quasi-eldritch sense of pure wrongness.)
This is one strand of Grave Empire‘s plot, a horror strand, to pair with the main thrust of the fantasy-diplomatic-thriller that provides the central pillar: Renata is Secretary to the Ambassador to the Stygion mermen, essentially the substitute ambassador in a diplomatic role that’s seldom called on. The Sovan Empire cares very little about the merpeople. Both polities have little that the other wants, although the merpeople would prefer the Sovan Empire to not be viciously destructive in their general direction. Renata and her mentor-boss Didacus Maruska are seldom called upon, but nonetheless a useful tool to have within the imperial bureaucracy, though given their area of specialisation, they’re not high-status functionaries.
But when a pair of monks from an order performing proscribed rituals involving the afterlife shows up in the capital, claiming that the afterlife—and soon, perhaps, the living world—is experiencing a phenomenon warned about in prophecy, the “Great Silence,” a magical catastrophe of some sort, Renata and her mentor finally have a chance to be useful. The merpeople, unlike the empire, retain an active interest in magical affairs, and control an artefact of great power and significance related to the afterlife. Renata and her mentor are ordered by an influential colonel to accompany the monks (and a couple of others) on a road trip. There are two places where more answers may be sought: one among the allied Kyarai, whose magical specialists are currently in a city near the front lines of a war they’re currently losing, and one among the Stygions. But even before the imperial roadtrip sets out, it’s plain that someone doesn’t want it to succeed: Renata is the subject of an assassination attempt that leaves her sister badly wounded before they’re so much as ready to leave the city.
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The third strand of the plot involves a wicked nobleman (your classic aristocratic sociopath) from the Sovan Empire. Count Lamprecht von Oldenburg has magical obsessions and political ambitions. He takes a jaunt to investigate a plague and a magical secret society, and finds that the plague is actually wiping out people’s consciousnesses, leaving their bodies only with the impulse to transmit this magico-spiritual affliction. Since he’s your basic sociopath with megalomaniac tendencies (fantasy Elon Musk, anyone?), his first thought is how he can turn this to his own ends. Where he goes from here horrifies the woman who’s his magical consultant/sometime lover (and probably spying on him for a third party, though he’s too arrogant to consider this until quite late in the game): experimentation on his own servants, and the ambition to create a zombie army subordinate to his own will but in circumstances which all but guarantees the contagion will escape and spread like wildfire.
This is related to the Great Silence, it’s plain. And also potentially world-endingly bad.
As in music, there are shared motifs in epic fantasy. Swan is writing in a vein that recognisably draws from high and low: low, in its focus on functionaries with limited power in constrained and viciously self-sustaining systems of imperial dominion; high, in its presentation of traditional world-ending fantasy threat. It partakes of the quest narrative: All of Swan’s viewpoint characters go on journeys, and their journeys take place in landscapes that possess both physical presence and political history. The two young functionaries, Peter and Renata, have an engaging combination of personal naivety, vulnerability, and competence, though neither of them leave a very striking impression as characters in and of themselves. To me, at least, they are peculiarly frictionless, screens for a reader’s projection sliding down the greased-smooth familiar path of the fantasy narrative. Von Oldenburg sticks more in the memory: He is, at least, internally motivated and driven in his selfishness, appalling as it is.
The Sovan empire looms large as a character in its own right—perhaps the novel’s most complex character. And yet Grave Empire seems to want to have its cake and eat it, when it comes to its perspective on empire and its discontents. Peter is a young lieutenant, possessed of a sort of patriotism-by-default: He doesn’t enjoy his current employment, but he doesn’t personally question his place in the order of things. He is the disciplinarian, rather than the disciplined: someone to whom atrocity is committed and not (as many frontier soldiers have been throughout history) someone who commits atrocities himself or turns a blind eye while they are done. Renata, on the other hand, is fascinated by Stygion culture. She possesses income independent of her work in the imperial diplomatic service. She’s aware that the imperial project causes disproportionate suffering to non-imperial peoples. She disapproves of this, in a mild sort of way, without ever acting on her objections—much as in the nineteenth century a monied British intellectual might have deplored the slave trade in theory while still buying slave-produced sugar. Thus the reader is offered the viewpoint of characters belonging to the imperial centre—the imperial metropole, if you will—who are by their actions engaged in the production and reproduction of imperial power. One of these characters is horrifyingly selfish. The other two—well, it is easy to sympathise with educated members of an elite who disapprove of the structures that support their privilege, isn’t it? Especially if they never do anything personally horrific.
Perhaps this hypocrisy is itself part of Swan’s overall thematic argument. (Though the thematic argument of the first volume of a trilogy is always an unfinished sort of thing.) Or perhaps a milquetoast recognition that colonialism and empire isn’t great for the colonised and those subject to imperial power, while never subjecting the protagonists to the sharp end of imperial power themselves, is as far as that shall ever go.
Swan’s prose is readable, and Grave Empire keeps a decent forward pace. As a reading experience, I found it distinctly middling and I’m feeling no urgency to read the next installment.
Grave Empire is published by Orbit.
