It starts so promising – fun heists, bit too heavy-handed, but good fun. But then it drags. and drags. and drags. You get to see every turn coming, and there are so fucking many of them. The quipping – fun at first – grows stale, and the betrayals get boring, and even predicting them isn’t all that interesting at some point.
Add to this the unfortunate pattern of revealing each party member’s (and there are a lot) sAd uNiQue backstory literally in the middle of a big important showdown (different ones for each), and … ugh. I had fun, but not that much, and writing the review 18 months later, I had already forgotten most of the book. Yawn.
Plot summary
Beware: full spoilers! Also probably incomplete and possibly incomprehensible.
Rulers live in the flying city, prisoners beneath, cleaning the magic crystals that keep the city flying, walking around on a narrow grid that is magically electrified for extra punishment.
Loch (a half-Urujar, a minority looked down upon?) is stuck there, and planning to escape while the evil warden Orris tries to have her injured without killing her (evil evil). She escpaes dramatically with Kail, who was in her unit in the army, where Loch was the captain.
News are spread via puppeteers, who have a dragon, a manticore and a griffin discuss them, in the political roles ascribed to them, with the slogan “It’s your republic – stay informed”. Clever!
Archvoyant Silestin is super powerful and has adopted an Urujar girl and, uh, civilised her. He’s clearly evil, and sends Orris, the evil warden to re-capture the two – and the Skilled insist on sending Pyvic along as justicar. Unknown to both of them, he sends his First Blade, a mysterious figure dripping shadows, to follow them, clean up after them, and possibly kill Pyvic as needed, telling us he’s potentially a good guy.
Loch builds her band and her everything with fun plots, including hiding people inside safes to open them, recruiting a shape-shifting unicorn (see quote), and wizard who was kicked out of university before graduating and is the funny haha loser archetype. Oh, and the young hunky man, who appears to be mostly there because the unicorn is really into virgin hunks (and because he keeps following the wizard dude).
They find out the Master of the Thieves’ Guild is an old friend, Jyelle, who betrayed them and is the reason they were in jail – actually, from the last time they tried to enter Heaven’s Spire, their high-profile target. She claims to want to steal back an priceless elven manuscript the Archvoyant stole from her family — enough for everbody to retire on.
Pyvic meanwhile stations Orric up at the Spire to watch incoming ships (both because somebody’s gotta, and because Orric is clearly useless). He knows he’s near and keeps asking around – finally having tea with Loch without realising it’s her until she walks away after a very pleasant and flirty conversation.
Loch wins a confrontation with Jyelle by luring her into dressing like her, and then getting chased as the escaped prisoner, which is funny. They hitch a ride with the airship bringing Jyelle to the Spire, but then everything devolves in a brawl when they get discovered close to the Spire. They escape the ship amid the chaos, and Loch even saves Pyvic’s life along the way.
They make their way to an old family friend / uncle, and it turns out Loch should’ve inherited not just the manuscript, but also, like, her father’s barony, which was stolen while she was behind enemy lines, alone, on a fake secret mission ordered by then-Colonel Silestin, the Archvoyant. We see increasing hints that Dairy, the young hunk, is way more important than he seems. Icy, one of the crew, meanwhile rescues a young woman from pursuing guards, and she turns out to be Naria, Loch’s blind younger sister.
Pyvic and Loch fuck. Orris makes a deal with unholy forces and promises them Loch’s soul. It looks like everything is going to hell, yawn, all the good side characters that we never quite got to care about die, the unholy force turns out to be a unicorn hunter. The writing devolves because there is less space for banter, and that’s the only thing that’s good. The death goddess explains some lore that will be semi-important but comes in too late, when suddenly everybody seems to need to info-dump.
Finally, they sneak in while a big important party is going on, as you do. Plans made obviously unravel. Some more random infodumping in the middle of that gets us the fact that the other evil guy is the champion of evil according to the gods, who want to let good and evil dunk it out, and there’s kinda a champion for good missing (yup, it’ll be Dairy, bored already. at least Loch has it worked out too, and uses him as insurance, because he’ll obviously survive till his fated duel. smort). We even get the wizard’s sob story in the middle of a showdown. Trying-too-hard badassery everywhere. Even the fucking WARHAMMER gets a backstory in the middle of a showdown ffs.
The useless wizard heart-warmingly sacrifices himself for Dairy, but no worries, he’s only willing to die, but won’t have to. Of course, then it turns out that Loch’s sister is also evil, and the Archvoyant’s First Blade, and that Silestin really wants her to come and get the manuscript, in order to kick off a war. He mocks them and makes it clear that it all was in vain, and that even with the money, Loch would not have found the cure for Kail she needs, and then … reveals the wand she would need instead. sigh. Upon this hybris, Loch and Pyvic team up like they had planned all along, Loch reveals that she also has the real book, but really was there to take Silestin down, and we iterate on backstabs and betrayals for a while.
The two champions face each other, and Dairy, who is very much Carrot, wins with some dirty fighting, that he learned from Vi… Loch. Loch and Silestin also face each other, and then Naria jumps in and kills him because she didn’t know all of his dastardly plots, only some. Naria will end up as baroness, Loch gets a clean record and her freedom – and Pyvic recruits her to be a justicar, the end.
