So that was it, then.  Did it meet my expectations?  Well, mostly, yes.  It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever read… as I said, I know what the worst thing I’ve ever read is, and Beale can’t match it.  (I’d be hard pressed to name a favourite book – there are too many books I like for completely different reasons – but I know exactly what my least favourite is.)

Reading back over what I’ve written, it’s interesting to note the places where I was wrong – made wrong assumptions, or whatever – and why I got them wrong.  Like saying that Severus wasn’t going to be allowed to put his own case in his own voice, I was wrong about that.  Of course, I also said that if he did, he would end up sounding more credible than Corvus, and I was dead on the money there, wasn’t I?

In some respects, I was disappointed.  I was expecting it to be a bit more sound on the basic mechanics of writing.  I suppose I’m still being misled (despite all my bitter experience) by the Puppy propaganda – they say they want, above all, good storytelling, and I am still naïve enough to believe they know how to deliver that.  But, by and large, they don’t.  Beale certainly doesn’t.  This book is, from the ground up, a big, sloppy, slovenly mess.

Kinder critics than me have suggested that Beale has a genuine blind spot when it comes to writing – that he honestly believes, if you like, that it’s all just a matter of putting black marks on a white page, and his marks are as black as John Scalzi’s or N.K. Jemisin’s or Tolkien’s or Shakespeare’s for that matter, so where’s his awards, huh? Personally, I don’t think so.  I think, to put things crudely, that writing is hard work, and writing well is harder, and that Beale is a lazy so-and-so who doesn’t like hard work, so he just does the absolute minimum required to get those black marks on those white pages.

(Beale writes, in fact, like I hand-write.  At primary school, I quickly mastered the arcane art of Making Letters, and the next step was doing Joined-Up Writing, where I realized at once that the trick was to make little connecting lines between the Letters while I was Making them, thereby Joining Them Up.  There we are, I thought, job done.  And for many years, my handwriting looked like, well, that of a primary school child who’d just learned how to join letters together – legible, just about, but completely devoid of grace or artistry.  [Today, my handwriting looks like that of a primary school child who has let his handwriting skills fall into disuse, while also acquiring a few mild neurological disorders affecting his hands.  Never mind.])

So, well, on the basic sentence level, Beale’s prose (mostly) does the basic job of saying who did what, when and where and to whom.  But the overall style – well, I have complained about it several times; it’s a chore to read.  It’s clunky, graceless, sometimes confused, always over-long, repetitive, and dull.  It’s given to few men to be turgid and flaccid at the same time, but Beale manages it.

This sort of thing can, of course, be fixed.  If Beale were to put enough time and effort into it, he could learn how to express himself concisely and fluently; how to vary the tone of his writing to convey humour, or drama, or excitement; how to show an individual and distinctive voice for his viewpoint characters (no, giving some of them comedy accents does not count.)  Perhaps someone could sit down with him and really work at it, down at individual sentence level, helping him say what he really means with each phrase.  (That sound you hear, as of rapidly receding footsteps?  That is the sound of me emphatically not volunteering.)

So, on the very basic level of making sentences, Beale is doing a bare-minimum sort of job, and it shows – the results are sloppy and ugly.  This bare-minimum approach shows at higher levels in the book, too – I’ve highlighted several of the world-building inconsistencies, like the way the timeline wanders loosely around, or the terminology keeps varying (the festival that turned from Hivernalia to Invernalia and back again, the way there’s no consistent adjective for “people or things from Savondir”, and so on.)  A competent sub-editor would catch many of these things, but there’s no reason Beale couldn’t do it himself – as I said, some time ago, there are teenagers doing NaNoWriMo who know how to put their made-up words into the spellchecker lexicon; there’s simply no excuse for Beale not to do the same.  I can only ascribe it to plain laziness.

And of course it applies at the level of the overall plot, too.  There’s no getting around it, this is a book that doesn’t even know what it’s about until more than half-way through.  A major villain is mentioned in the prologue and then ignored until nearly the end of the book.  The storyline flounders vaguely from incident to disconnected incident, characters like Saturnius or the Red Prince appear and start to look important, and then get abruptly written out, other characters like Brynjolf hang around without doing anything much – and, of course, somewhere in the background, a lost dwarf carries a magic hubcap around for no visible reason.  (I don’t care if it’s the last component of the Great Chariot of Deusexmachina that will trundle out in the last scene of the last volume and squish all the Watchers flat.  It serves no useful purpose in the plot of this book.)  Even when a consistent story does start to appear, it’s weak, disjointed, and depends too much on implausible action (sometimes involving tunnels) to hold it together.  And, of course, it doesn’t come to an end, it just stops, with everything important still up in the air.

It’s especially frustrating, of course, because there are actual shreds of a possibly interesting story in here somewhere.  As we’ve been saying in various comments threads, the “Tragical Historie of Sextus Valerius Corvus”, and how his pig-headedness and moral cowardice brought about the ruin of the state he believed he loved, is potentially a very good psychological drama, albeit with one hell of a downer ending.  But you’d have to dig it out of all the irrelevant claptrap, first.  Seriously, if I were editing this thing – and someone sure as hell should have edited this thing – I would say: ditch the Watchers and their “shadow door”, ditch the lost dwarf with the hubcap – hell, ditch Savondir and the Dalarns and the rubbish werewolves and the elves, ditch all the generic Dungeons and Dragons junk trappings for that matter – and concentrate on the political drama and the human drama of the situation in Amorr.  Because that’s where the story is.  OK, so it’s the story of a blundering dimwit who murders his country’s last hope for peace, and ultimately destroys everything he genuinely cares about – but what the hell, at least it’s a story.

Again, there are very basic, well-known, methods and techniques for pruning down your plot and getting it under control.  Outlining, or the “Snowflake method” (some people I know swear by this one) – basically, anything where you look at each individual scene and see where it fits into the big picture (and, if it doesn’t fit into the big picture, you throw it out.)  And, again, we’re not talking about the hidden arcana of the writing craft here – I don’t know any hidden arcana, I’m just an enthusiastic amateur.  We’re talking about basic stuff, the ordinary groundwork that’s done by hundreds or thousands of would-be novelists every year.  The sort of ordinary groundwork that Beale, apparently, can’t be bothered with.

So, by this stage, I think there’s enough evidence to pass a verdict on A Throne of Bones: it’s a bad book.  It’s not an outstandingly bad book, or a memorably bad book, or an entertainingly bad book.  It’s just not any good.  It’s drab and slow and awkwardly constructed and generally tedious to read.  Reason enough, I think, to put it back on the bookshop shelf, and go read something fun, while the tides of history sweep this one towards well-merited oblivion.

And, you may note, there is nothing remotely political about this verdict, is there?  Everything I’ve said is wrong with it, could be fixed – and fixed apolitically.  Getting a critique group to work on your prose style won’t turn you gay.  Proofreading doesn’t count as a vote for Clinton.  You can outline a novel and edit the scenes without making a single donation to the ACLU.  If I say that Theodore Beale should have got up off his lazy backside and fixed what was wrong with his lousy novel, it doesn’t impute any political stance to his lazy backside.

But, of course, Beale does have a political stance – oh, Lord, does he have a political stance – so, does it show?  Well, it comes back to that post I did at the start, about my expectations.  (And I may have to go off on a more general rant, here, so bear with me.)

As I was expecting, A Throne of Bones doesn’t contain much in the way of overt political ranting.  Nobody takes time out from (what passes for) the action to deliver speeches on the evils of socialism or the perfidy of the lesser races.  (I can think of more than one author who does take time out for things like that, so I suppose we should be grateful that Beale isn’t like that.  Or, at least, isn’t like that in this particular book.)  What we get, instead, is simple erasure of anything Beale doesn’t like and doesn’t want to write about.  He doesn’t express negative opinions about socialists or black people or homosexuals or uppity women or insolent commoners, because there’s no need, because (apart from possibly one or two situationally gay goblins) there aren’t any of those in the book.

To demonstrate this, let’s take a look at that appendix.  It tells us, incidentally, that Severus is based on Marcus Livius Drusus (whose failed political initiative and subsequent assassination did spark the Social War, just like Severus.  But I think it’s mostly because he’s dead and therefore can’t sue.)  However, most of it’s a cast list – given Beale’s habit of sticking names on random irrelevant spear-carriers, a very long cast list.  By my count, there are 255 names on it (I may be out, just from ordinary human error – some names crop up more than once, but I think I’ve weeded out the duplicates).  Of these, 225 are human (or humanoid) males, 27 are human (or humanoid) females, and three aren’t human (I’m not sure if human concepts of gender apply to the demon Vermilignum, for example).  So, fairly heavily skewed towards men, I think you’d agree.

(“But of course it is,” some might say, “since so many of the characters come from the hierarchy of the church, or the legions of Amorr, or the Amorran Senate and the Savondir nobility, and these are all, traditionally, exclusively male.”  To which I might reply, well, that’s the author’s choice, isn’t it?  Is there some other reason why there are so few women?  Would it breach the suspension of disbelief, in a fantasy novel which has immortal Watchers and magic and dragons and demons and super-speed tunnelling, for there to be female legionaries or women priests?)

As for other minority representation, well, I said I’d sing out if I saw any, and you haven’t heard me singing much, have you?  Two goblins, Meerfin and Barkmoss, may have had a homosexual relationship, and that’s it for LGBT+ people.  As for ethnic diversity… umm… the dragon Aslaughyrna is a black dragon?  Otherwise, the people of Selenoth appear to run the gamut from Mediterranean white to Nordic white.

Let me relate this, if I may, to my own experience.  I grew up (and am now living) in a town in the Home Counties of England, the very heart of the territory that John Betjeman called “Metroland”.  It’s not very ethnically diverse.  Well, except for a thriving Pakistani/Bangladeshi community… and some other, mostly Asian, minorities… and, come to think of it, there was an interracial couple living down the other end of our street when we moved in (my mum and dad stood godparents to their youngest, in fact.)  So, although the default was pretty darn whitebread, as you might expect, there were enough other folks around for me to grow up at least aware that they existed, and that they were people and not bizarre freaks of nature.  But, bloody hell, they’d be bizarre freaks of nature in Beale’s world, wouldn’t they?  There’s as much diversity between number 8 and number 13 on our street as there is in the whole of Selenoth.  (Unless you count elves, dwarves and goblins?  I don’t.  My feeling is that fantasy races don’t adequately substitute for real-world ethnic groups.  And also that the elves and dwarves both come across as pretty much white anyway, while the explicitly non-white [green] goblins are also a disadvantaged group that it’s OK to enslave and murder.)

So, while Beale isn’t indulging in any overt political ranting, his attitudes show through in what he’s erasing.  (Especially when it comes to LGBT+, of course.  We are talking about a society based on ancient Rome that apparently contains no gay people.  If you took all the gays and bisexuals out of ancient Rome, the place would have a very depopulated look to it.)  And I’ve mentioned, where I’ve noticed it, places where his attitudes do seem to show through.  The general acceptance of authoritarian systems (even to the point of the Savondir eugenics and institutionalized rape programme), the way female characters mostly subordinate themselves to men, the way all the -por people are slaves and happy with their lot….

The thing is, this may not immediately be visible to the casual reader, for two reasons.  One of them, simply, is that you have to dig your way through Beale’s God-awful moribund writing to get at his attitudes; the impression most casual readers are likely to get, I fear, is that Beale is just a crashing bore who can’t write for toffee.  However, the other reason – and this, finally, is where I get to my more general rant – is that, for fantasy fans of a certain vintage (my vintage, in fact), the whiter-than-Metroland authoritarian sausage-fest society is, unfortunately, kind of what we’re used to seeing.  Fantasy fiction was positively addicted to this sort of thing for many years.  I can see, on my bookshelves, several examples of writers (most of them, deservedly, much more highly regarded than Beale) where the men are manly (and straight), the women are supportive (and subordinate), everything is fine so long as the Rightful King is on his throne and ruling justly, and non-white people exist only as swarthy hordes to be slaughtered when they threaten the proper order.  There’s an awful lot of this about.

(I blame, not so much Tolkien, as bad Tolkien imitators.  Tolkien was specifically constructing a mythos of his own in a North European idiom; he was working in the traditions of a specific ethnic group, and it’s only to be expected that other ethnic groups should be marginal in the work he was constructing.  There’s a big difference between that, and a supposedly fully-featured secondary world where everyone of any importance just happens to be white.)

Fantasy fiction is, to be fair, getting better these days.  (And I can also see, on my bookshelves, people like Ursula Le Guin, who’s been doing better for a long, long time.)  But it is still possible to read A Throne of Bones as “just another generic hack fantasy”, and that doesn’t say anything good about generic hack fantasy and its underlying attitudes.  Some people say that the function of Art is to hold a mirror up to Life: well, it’s a bloomin’ peculiar sort of mirror that only reflects people like me.

Well, rant over.  And let’s be fair to the fantasy genre; there is no danger of A Throne of Bones ever being regarded as anything better than generic hack fantasy, and even as a generic hack fantasy, it’s not any good.  The best I can say about it is, a decent editor might have made something entertaining out of it.  And you can say that about pretty much anything.

There are plenty of hack fantasies for which I’ve got a certain fondness, for one reason or another – some character or situation struck a chord with me, somewhere, perhaps, or something about it was amusing or diverting in some way.  (One of the many books I can see from here is L. Sprague de Camp’s The Goblin Tower, which is a case in point – it’s never going to win any prizes for literary merit or political correctness, but it’s inventive in its own way, and doesn’t take itself remotely seriously, so manages to be pretty funny.)  It’s safe to say, though, that I don’t feel any fondness for A Throne of Bones.  Now, perhaps that’s because I went into it expecting not to enjoy it… but it was always open to the author, wasn’t it, to confound my expectations by making the book good and enjoyable?  But he didn’t.

So that’s it for A Throne of Bones, and I will go back to reading and writing about things I like, instead.  All it’s done, at the end of the day, is confirm what I’ve said about Beale in particular (and Puppies in general) several times before.  The reason Beale doesn’t win awards is because he’s not good enough.  That’s it.  No need to imagine vast “social justice” and “PC” conspiracies; he’s just not any good, as a writer.  Simple as that.

No , I don’t imagine for one moment he’ll believe me.

A couple of things I forgot to mention, about the last chapter.  Apparently, this world has two moons (which is fine), and they are different colours (also fine), and visible in the sky at the same time (still fine) and have distinctly different phases (one’s a crescent, one’s an orb – which is… interesting.)  A minor point, to be sure.  Oh, and Marcus has renounced any intentions he might have had about boinking Caitlys.  I’m not entirely sure why.  Maybe he took a good look at Theuderic and Lithriel and decided they weren’t good role models for a relationship.  I know I have.

But anyway, we’re back with “Aulan”, and Aulan is hanging out with Magnus, and Magnus is starting to sound more and more like a pantomime villain.  Even Aulan is starting to worry about the self-styled “Duke of Vallyria”…. Sometimes I wonder what the actual anti-Amorran revolutionaries in the provinces must think about this.  There must be Vallyrians who genuinely wanted to throw off the imperialist yoke, mustn’t there?  What do they think about this Amorran politician taking over their revolution?  It must be like Sellars and Yeatman’s method of dealing with a peasant revolt in 1066 And All That.  I suppose it ties in with the overall authoritarian mind-set of the book, where it’s clear that some people are In Charge and the common folk just follow their orders.  (A setup that’s by no means uncommon in fantasy literature in general.  There may be more on this subject, later.  Consider yourselves warned.)

Magnus wants to get hold of Marcus, and he is increasingly failing to pretend that his reasons are friendly and avuncular… but where has Marcus gone?  We are given a whole host of places where he couldn’t possibly go, at least not without marching himself and his remaining forces into the jaws of doom… but where has he gone?  The only trace of him that Aulan can find is a rather curt letter to his uncle Magnus.  Where is Marcus?  It’s as if he’s vanished from the face of the earth.

Someone who hasn’t vanished from the face of the earth is “Severa” – she’s still in Amorr, where her morale has been somewhat dented by the recent events.  She’s meeting up with her intended husband Sextus, who is all upset about being the son of a traitor, and offers to break off the engagement.  Severa isn’t having any of that; she has decided that Sextus is a loyal Amorran and she will stay at his side while he shows his treacherous father what-for…. I’m disappointed in Severa.  She was showing some signs of actual agency, at one point, of being a character in her own right.  But, as soon as she gets herself a prospective husband to latch onto, she drops into a supportive-loyal-helpmeet sort of role.  I think I smell the author’s personal agenda at work here.  Especially as our other POV female character, Fjotra, went more or less the same way – her last scene involved, not her setting out to save the kingdom, but her setting out to marry the guy who’d tried to rape her so that he could save the kingdom.  (We’ve seen the last of Fjotra and her plot strand, by the way.  I won’t know how all that turns out unless I read the sequel, and, well, that’s not going to happen.)

Severa’s scene with Sextus happens under the benign eye of her servant/witch instructor Quinta Jul… who I thought had become superfluous to the plot’s requirements, but it appears I was wrong.  She accidentally cuts off a fingertip, slicing bread, and has to hide her hand until it’s grown back – Quinta Jul, it turns out, is another Watcher.  I’m even inclined to wonder, now I know another Watcher was in Amorr, whether she was the red-robed figure who summoned that demon to murder those six bishops (and the innocent and sympathetic goblin.)   I may have been maligning Laris Sebastius, who might have been innocent all along, not that innocence would have stopped Corvus from stabbing him.  Never mind.

Finally, we meet up with “Theuderic”.  It is springtime – months have officially passed, although not many months… certainly, as we shall shortly see, nowhere near enough months.  Theuderic and some Savonerderneraiseese bigwigs – members of the Council, we met them once before, you may recall that they are supposed to be “lethally intelligent” – are on their way somewhere bucolic.  They are all expressing guarded misgivings about the new heir to the throne (the late Red Prince’s brother and Fjotra’s would-be rapist), in a way which suggests that intrigue is afoot.  Because, when an army of two hundred thousand orcs is somewhere in the offing, poised to rape and eat everything in sight, nothing says “lethal intelligence” like some internecine backstabbing.  Never mind.  Theuderic has promised them some military support, in the form of a disaffected ex-Amorran legion, fleeing from the civil war in Amorr… but where is this legion?  (Indeed, this is the same question Aulan and Magnus were asking, two chapters ago.)

And then a big hole opens up in a nearby hillside, and Marcus and four thousand legionaries march out of it.

You know in my last bit, where I said I bet Marcus’s escape plan involved tunnelling?  I was being facetious.

But Beale, apparently, is not.  Marcus and his troops have spent the last… three or four months… digging their way north, six hundred miles, underground.  Let’s just not get into the logistics of this… just imagine my objections to Marcus’s previous subterranean escapades, only many times magnified.  (And, best of all, he’s managed to be completely unnoticed as well – even a twit like Aulan should surely have noticed a gigantic spoil heap and a legion-sized tunnel entrance somewhere.)

Sorry.  We all have that point where our willing suspension of disbelief finally snaps, and Marcus’s civil engineering projects happen to hit on mine.  This stuff completely undermines the book’s credibility.  (I’m here all week folks.)  Mind you, if Marcus really has given up on the idea of a physical relationship with Caitlys… well, the girl might be missing out.   It’s a pretty safe bet he’d make the earth move.

I’m not even entirely sure what the rest of Marcus’s plan is.  Team up with Theuderic’s mob and fight the rubbish werewolves, the rebel Amorran provinces, and the two hundred thousand orcs, in any order?  Considering the Amorrans hate and fear magic users, and the Savonerderneraiseese appear to be afflicted with chronic backstabbing disorder, I can’t see that ending well.  But Marcus appears confident enough, as the story concludes… well, it doesn’t really conclude.  Doesn’t even have a proper cliffhanger.  As I’d expected, it just sort of stops.  Buy book two, I hear nobody cry.  No thanks.

(I blame George Allen & Unwin, personally.  Their decision to publish The Lord of the Rings in three volumes has led to a flood of trilogies being unleashed upon the world – trilogies with four, five, six, ten, fifteen parts, too.  And very few of those individual volumes stand on their own two feet as complete and readable stories.  The fat fantasy trilogy, and its bloated cousin the fat fantasy series, is positively a cliché by now.  A murrain on it, say I.  Anyway, I suppose we can’t blame Beale for following the genre’s bad habits.)

But, well, anyway, we’ve stopped.  The book’s floundered around for a while, finally decided what it wanted to be about (somewhere around two-thirds of the way through), and then came to an end with everything sort of up in the air.   The only character to reach any sort of satisfactory conclusion was Corvus – well, he’s dead, and I think that’s satisfactory, but the monumental mess he’s made lives on.  Everyone else is still in some sort of motion, and I don’t know where they’re going (especially with Lodi.)  Where will it all end? I don’t know.  I suppose it’s lucky that I don’t care, either.

Looking at the contents table, I thought there was a bit more to go – appendices, sample chapters from book 2, that sort of thing – but in fact there’s just a very long cast list and some adverts at the back.  So, um.  I guess it’s over.  I will have to marshal my thoughts and do some kind of wrap-up post.  I will try to come up with something more cogent than “that was all a bit of a waste of time, really”, but I’m not making any promises.

In the meantime, I’ll play us out with what I’ve decided is Marcus’s theme song.

Cheer up.  Not far to go.  It’ll all be over by Christmas, as they said in World War I, and, indeed, Beale’s prose style continues to remind me of the mud on the Somme.  Never mind.  Let’s press on.

We return to “Theuderic”, who is still zooming around on hawk-back with Lithriel and Caitlys.  They finally find Marcus, and (after a bit of faffing around which might be there to indicate Theuderic is out of his comfort zone) come in for a landing and meet up with him.  My inner cynic wonders if this means the adventuring party (human fighter, human magic user, elven ranger, elven… giggling psycho) is now finally complete, and if the previous sixty-two chapters could not usefully have been replaced with “OK, the four of you meet at a tavern….”  That’s probably just me being silly, though.

Although outnumbered by his enemies and on the run, Marcus still has a plan, and with the aid of Caitlys and her hawk, and Theuderic and his talents (which he isn’t too specific about, when talking to Marcus), he is going to put it into practice.  So, Theuderic finds himself on a moonlight commando raid, helping out with the odd piece of discreet magic as Marcus’s picked men sneak into the town occupied by the enemy Legion XV.  And, come morning, Marcus has his artillery emplaced on the town’s walls, looking in, and when the commander of the XV rejects Marcus’s calls for surrender, Marcus snipes him with a ballista bolt.  Corvus, too, used siege artillery to pick off individual man-sized targets.  It must run in the family.  Anyway, this is enough to convince Legion XV to join Team Marcus, and things are finally looking up for him.

At the end of the chapter, we get what might be a comedy moment, as Caitlys has noticed Theuderic’s discreet magicking, and threatens to drop him off her warhawk if he does it again.  She doesn’t want any magic-fearing Amorrans burning her at the stake, as they might if they realise she’s a magic-user.  Though I can’t help but feel that, y’know, if she carries on riding around on the magic-controlled giant warhawk, some of them might eventually twig on…. but I’ll let it pass, since I’m basically in favour of anything which makes Theuderic wet himself.

Next chapter, we revert to the perspective of “The Crows”, last seen in chapter three for some boilerplate atmospherics.  They get a much longer chapter, this time.  Enemy legions commanded by Marcus’s uncle Magnus have closed in, and a big set-piece battle is about to be fought.

The way Beale does this chapter, actually, is not too bad. For most of it, we’re focusing on an individual soldier on the battlefield, and the events that lead up to him getting killed – and then the focus switches to whoever killed him, and the subsequent events that lead up to him getting killed.  It’s a fairly good idea, in fact.  It makes the description reasonably immediate and localized, giving a series of glimpses of the overall action, rather than a god’s-eye view of the game board and a laborious description of all the little minatures moving around.  It is, actually, a half-decent attempt to work around Beale’s limitations when it comes to action scenes.  Although each individual scene is over-long (because Beale), and the chain of deaths goes on long enough for it to start to look contrived.  Still, it’s an actual effort to write a good battle scene, even if it’s not very successful, and Beale deserves credit for trying.

Eventually, Beale runs out of ways to connect the deaths together, and we get one last bit with a doomed cavalry charge by Marcus’s troops onto a trap prepared by Magnus – and then the action switches to Aulan, who doesn’t die, but watches the XV break and flee.  Marcus has, it seems, lost.

Indeed, when we switch to “Marcus”, we find him berating himself for losing, not to mention getting a letter from his uncle Magnus, pointing out that he’s lost, that Amorr itself is going to be conquered by the provincial leagues, and that Marcus would be a lot better off switching sides to join his uncle.  Magnus even says it would be “becumbent” on Marcus to do so – a nice portmanteau word, that, which a proofreader would have spotted.  The letter is brought to him by Aulan, who fills him in on events in Amorr.  Specifically, he mentions Severus’s murder, and also that of Marcus’s brother Corvinus (although he *ahem* tactfully elides some details about that one.)  Marcus, being younger and more sensitive than his late father, is upset about his brother’s death for a couple more paragraphs.

Marcus is deeply suspicious of his uncle’s offer, and probably with good reason, but he’s lost a significant number of his own forces, and he is now almost surrounded by enemies.  Things are looking bleak for the lad.  And then, to top it off, Lodi turns up.

This last development surprised me, I’ll admit.  When we last saw Lodi, he was lost in an interminable flashback, and his relevance to the plot seemed to be non-existent.  But now, here he is; his aimless wandering has brought him up to Marcus’s very door.  And with bad news – it seems there’s an army of two hundred thousand orcs roving around, with supernatural aid from something called Gor Gor (as Churchill almost said, Gor Gor is better than war war.)  Lodi and his companion only just escaped from these orcs –

You know, I’m not entirely sure this is the same dwarf.  Maybe Lodi is a common name among dwarves.  The Lodi we were watching had recently escaped from four orcs, not two hundred thousand… and his companion was carried away by a dragon, he didn’t escape from orcs by another route… and this Lodi makes no mention of a magic hubcap… and this one even talks in a thicker comedy dialect than the Lodi in the POV chapters.  I am, frankly, dubious.

But, anyway, this just adds to Marcus’s woes.  And he has just found out Theuderic is a mage, which annoys him still further.  So he gets all snappish and moody with people for a bit – and then he announces that he’s had an idea.  Yes, he’s surrounded by enemy legions, his home city is going down in flames, there’s an orcish invasion on the way – but everything will be all right, because Marcus has a cunning plan.

I bet it involves tunnels.