Though shared responsibility is, at present, the most generally advantageous method for decision-making, for a group, in a time of peace, other, more authoritarian resources must be marshalled in a time of war. Democratic ideals, which serve society so well in relatively tranquil moments, become slow and inefficient when time is short, when the stress of the group's survival is pressing upon every possible course of action. At such pivotal junctures, the wisdom or strength of an individual can often rise above the confusion of egalitarianism, imposing decisiveness and focus upon a problem that requires swift action. We need only glance at the history of the Roman Republic to be awash in examples of the efficiencies of dictatorial power.
But what if the chosen dictator is not ready for that power? What if, having been selected because of talent and necessity, the individual is ill-prepared for the crisis to come? Is the individual's natural talent, combined with his will to survive, enough to obliterate doubt, the fear of choosing badly? Or is unreadiness a fatal flaw that will be the dictator's downfall before the virtues for which he was chosen can be properly brought to bear? This is the intriguing question that occupies the heart of Mr. Palmatier's dark, competent trilogy. It serves the series well.
Perched at the edge of a western sea, Amenkor is a powerful city state that, for 1,500 years, has been governed by the Skewed Throne. The gestalt of now mostly forgotten magics, the throne is a metaphysical construct that harbors the personalities, and perhaps even the souls, of all of the Mistresses who have, over the centuries, claimed it. Bestowing its occupier with the power to see and know all within the city limits of Amenkor, the throne, and the women who have sat upon it, has slowly transformed the city state into a dictatorship in which all the powers of law and order rest in the hands of the Mistress, her first advisor and the Seekers, trained assassins who are the violent manifestation of the Mistress' will.
Despite the omniscience bestowed upon the Mistress by the Skewed Throne, Amenkorian society is still riven by injustice and inequity. The city state has drawn its financial nourishment from a guild of powerful merchants whose profits have elevated the men and women of this class far above the lowly drudges, Amenkorians forced to live and labor under the most impoverished conditions. The Mistresses, who have possessed the influence to amend this injustice, have refused to act against the merchants, no doubt buoyed by the goods they provide the city and its leadership. This fateful decision, however, has effectively divided Amenkor into a city of haves and have nots, the latter of which are invariably abandoned to short, brutal lives.
In The Skewed Throne, the trilogy's first instalment, we meet one such hopeless wretch. Fourteen and orphaned, undernourished and forgotten by the world where people matter, Varis is a shadow, a ragged bundle of anger animated by little more than the will to survive. Given aid by no one, she wouldn't have even lived this long if it weren't for the strange, white fire that, years earlier, washed in from the western sea and momentarily blanketed the coast, imprisoning everyone it touched within nightmares of their own making. About to be raped by a guardsmen, the fire was a blessing for Varis, giving her both the time to escape her attacker and the strength to kill him, taking from him the knife she'd use to keep her alive in the years to come.
When the white fire soon receded, it left devastating change in its wake. While Varis slowly began to explore her new powers, Amenkor's Mistress went swiftly and decisively mad, a reality which has plagued Amenkor ever since. For where the Mistress once sent her Seekers out into the Amenkorian night to bring justice to the beleaguered, now, she lays her mark upon the innocent as often as the guilty. This, for the city's movers and shakers, is an untennible injustice. The resulting struggle for power will position Varis, a here-to-for unconditioned force, at the heart of world-changing events, events which will bring her uncomfortably close to the dangerous, enigmatic throne.
In The Cracked Throne, the second entry in the trilogy, Amenkor has a new Mistress. Hampered by youth but energized by her rare blend of powers, Varis has elevated herself from the dredges to become the ruler of the city who, but weeks ago, didn't even know her name. Forgotten and neglected no longer, she seeks to reform the city's leadership and steer it through a winter made all the more devastating by the recent upheaval that put her upon the throne. And if all these challenges are insufficiently troublesome for a girl who still does not know how to read, let alone rule, an old enemy has left its chain of oceanic islands, searching for a new, more hospitable home. The arrival of these blue-skinned myths from the sea promises to overturn everything Varis knows as she's forced to summon every scrap of wisdom she gleaned from a life in the darkness to fight for her life and for the life of the city with which she is now bound.
In The Vacant Throne, the trilogy's concluding work, the war between the coastal city states and the invading Chorl reaches fever pitch when, having been thwarted in their attempts to claim the amenkorian throne, the blue-skinned islanders turn their attention upon a new target. Having once been home to the man who first conceived of the thrones, Venitte is an old power which still bears some of the scars from the last time it was attacked by the Chorl, an attack which claimed the lives of the wife and children of the inventor of the thrones. Now, centuries later,driven by desperation and domination, the Chorl return to this old battleground in search of a power that has been hidden for centuries, a power that could secure a home for the Chorl on this eastern coast, a power that one throbbed in Amenkor. The power of the thrones...
Though Mr. Palmatier fails to weave together all the disparate threads of his narrative, The Throne of Amenkor is pleasingly realistic Fantasy fiction. Drawing inspiration from Mediterranean geography and mixing in some inventive magic, the author successfully generates an engaging, blood-spattered world hobbled by social inequities and cutthroat politics. What's more, by embedding the narrative in the first person, never allowing the reader to depart from the ultra-pragmatic mind of his heroine, he vividly and disturbingly conveys the life of an orphan abandoned by this society, how her harsh experiences have shaped her into a creature that can only claim to be halfway civilized. Watching the rich and the powerful react to her, seeing their prejudice through her eyes, provides the trilogy some of its best emotional punch.
. But for as much as Varis' journey from forgotten wretch to Mistress of Amenkor entertains, while honoring the rags-to-riches trope, very little of the story's promise is actually realized. The enigmatic White Fire which is used teasingly to ignite the main drama is little more than an afterthought, a weapon shown to the audience in act I that is not fired in act III. Furthermore, the magic that underpins the plot here appears to have been poorly thought through. Feats thought impossible in the first novel are commonplace in the third, even though little time has past and little knowledge acquired to justify such advancements. This gives rise to the strong impression that the author constructed an enemy too powerful for his protagonists, hence the expansion of their talents. These underutilized and inexplicable plot threads prevent this icy trilogy from truly taking flight.
The Throne of Amenkor is inventive work. Its action sequences are as apocalyptic as its social criticism is unsparing. But Varis herself is not strong enough to carry what is otherwise an underperforming plot. Interesting but flawed. 93/5 Stars)
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