The Weavers of Saramyr
Book 1 of The Braided Path
Chris Wooding
Gollancz, 375 pages
Order this book Prolific young adult author Chris Wooding turns his hand to adult-market fiction in this, the first installment of The Braided Path trilogy.
In a single night of violence, young noblewoman Kaiku tu Makaima loses everything:
home, family, her place in the world. Fleeing from the terrifying shin-shin
demons that have attacked her family’s estates, Kaiku takes refuge in the
forest, together with her handmaiden Asara, who has saved her life. But Asara
isn’t the loyal servant she pretends to be, and has reasons other than altruism
for rescuing Kaiku--as Kaiku discovers when a hitherto unsuspected power wakes
in her, manifesting itself as a blast of fire that incinerates all around
her...including (apparently) Asara. Devastated, Kaiku wanders the woods until
she’s found by Tane, a young priest who brings her to his monastery and nurses
her back to health. But Kaiku can think only of revenge for her family, and
she’s certain that their deaths are somehow connected to the strange, forbidding
mask her father had recently brought back from his travels. As soon as she’s
well enough she slips away, bound for Axekami, Saramyr’s capital, to seek
help from her clever and wealthy friend Mishani.
But trouble is brewing in Axekami. For eight years Anais, Blood Empress of
Saramyr, has kept her only child and Heir hidden from the eyes of the court--for
little Lucia is an Aberrant, born with strange extrasensory powers. Aberrants
are feared and hated by the people of Saramyr; for two centuries they’ve
been ruthlessly hunted down and killed by the Weavers, a secretive order
of magicians who serve as advisers to the nobility, and whose power stems
from the witchstone-infused Masks they wear. Now, somehow, the truth about
Lucia has been discovered. Saramyr is thrown into turmoil, for neither the
nobles nor the common people can tolerate the thought of an Aberrant on the
throne. But Anais--who knows that Lucia isn’t the monster of popular imagination
but a beautiful child whose mysterious powers appear to be entirely benign--is
determined that her daughter must succeed her.
Divided by the question of succession, Saramyr slips toward civil war. Meanwhile,
the amoral and perverted Weavers (who pretend loyalty to their masters but
in reality serve no masters but themselves) secretly pursue a convoluted
political agenda, and a mysterious group of Aberrants, who’ve managed to elude
the Weavers’ genocidal efforts, plot revolution. And Kaiku, guided by the Mask her
father found and assisted by Tane, Mishani, and Asara (who didn’t die after
all, saved by abilities as strange as Kaiku’s own), embarks upon a quest
that will carry her to Adderach, the Weavers’ secret monastery, and reveal
the unimaginable evil that lies behind the extermination of Aberrants.
Wooding spins a fast-paced tale of adventure and intrigue, with convincing
plot turns and plenty of action (sometimes a bit too much, as in a scene
where Kaiku and her companions come under an anime-style demon attack for
no apparent reason other than to place them in jeopardy for a little while).
The complex political maneuverings that surround Anais’s efforts to win support
for Lucia’s Heirship are credibly portrayed, as is Saramyr’s descent into
civil war. The characters, while not always entirely likeable (Asara, whose
strange powers set her apart even among Aberrants; Anais, whose love for
her daughter doesn’t excuse her pigheaded stubbornness), are all distinct
individuals with believable strengths and failings, who grow and change as
a result of their experiences.
As in some of his young adult fiction, Wooding has created an oriental-themed
world, drawing mainly on Japanese influences, with an intricate social structure
and an interesting mythology. The magic system is intriguingly unconventional,
with the Weavers practicing a sort of extra-dimensional manipulation of reality
through their Mask-sourced access to the wondrous Weave, a network of energy
that lies behind or beyond the visible world, and binds all living and unliving
things together. It’s perhaps not totally plausible that the nobles who employ
them would tolerate such repulsive creatures, even for the sake of the long-distance
communication that’s the ostensible reason for their presence--but perhaps
that’s the point, for the Weavers can manipulate all kinds of things through
the Weave, including human minds, and may well be the authors of their own
ubiquity. We learn a lot about the Weavers in this volume, thanks to Kaiku’s
quest, but much more remains mysterious, including the true purpose behind
their desire for political dominance--presumably an area of exploration for
future installments of the trilogy, along with the repercussions of Lucia’s
Aberrancy and the real nature of the Aberrants themselves.
The novel does suffer from uneven writing, especially in the first few chapters,
where the author’s tendency toward stilted phrasing and excessive description,
as well as his jarring habit of switching viewpoints in the middle of a scene,
all but overwhelm the narrative. There’s also a fair bit of infodumping; and
I found the naming annoyingly inconsistent, with Japanese-sounding names like
Kaiku mixed randomly with Celtic-sounding names like Adderach and generic-fantasy-sounding
names like Saramyr--and then there’s French Anais and Italian Lucia (yes,
I know this seems like a nitpick, but part of the point of epic fantasy is
elaborate world building; consistent naming is an important aspect of that,
and anything less looks suspiciously like sloppiness). There are also some
lapses in character depiction, as toward the end, when Kaiku suffers a traumatic
loss but barely seems to think about it afterward.
Overall, though, this is an entertaining tale, with enough originality in
its setting and premise, and enough mystery in the denouement of Volume 1,
to make it worth following. I’ll be interested to see where Wooding takes
his story in upcoming volumes.
Copyright © 2003 Victoria Strauss
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