Synopsis
In Heroes Die and Blade of Tyshalle, Matthew Stover created a new kind of fantasy novel, and a new kind of hero to go with it: Caine, a street thug turned superstar, battling in a future where reality shows take place in another dimension, on a world where magic exists and gods are up close and personal. In that beautiful, savage land, Caine is an assassin without peer, a living legend born from one of the highest-rated reality shows ever made. That season, Caine almost single-handedly defeated—and all but exterminated—the fiercest of all tribes: the Black Knives. But the shocking truth of what really took place during that blood-drenched adventure has never been revealed…until now.
Thirty years later, Caine returns to the scene of his greatest triumph—some would say greatest crime—at the request of his adopted brother Orbek, the last of the true Black Knives. But where Caine goes, danger follows, and he soon finds himself back in familiar territory: fighting for his life against impossible odds, with the fate of two worlds hanging in the balance.
Just the way Caine likes it.
Review
After the sheer extremes Matthew Stover went to in Blade of Tyshalle, it should come as no surprise that the third book in The Acts of Caine is a more restrained experience.
Coming in at less than half the length of Blade of Tyshalle, Caine Black Knife is a more contemplative story than either of the first two books—despite nearly half of it being a look into the insanely bombastic Retreat From the Boedecken, the legendary Adventure that catapulted Caine to superstardom. In those chapters, there is all the violence and humor and pure adrenaline that you could hope for (and even a sex scene, as the Studio thinks any good Adventure should have).
But it’s in the current-time chapters set in Purthin’s Ford, as a man named Dominic Shade comes to the new heart of what is now known as the Battleground, the bastion of the Knights of Khryl, that the real soul of this book lies.
Shade (of course just a pseudonym for Caine [though actually more than just a pseudonym (no, I will not elaborate)]) has received a divine vision, sent in a dream, of his adopted brother Orbek getting into mortal trouble in Purthin’s Ford, and knows that it will be up to him if Orbek is to be saved. But when he arrives in Purthin’s Ford, overwhelmed by the changes to the landscape since Retreat From the Boedecken, he discovers even more dangerous currents moving beneath the surface of events.
Stover does an outstanding job of weaving back and forth between Caine’s Adventure twenty-five years ago and Shade’s encounters in Purthin’s Ford, both plot-wise and thematically. There is a great deal of mirroring happening, a great deal of introspection, a great deal of catharsis. Where Caine is plunging headlong into insanity, Dominic Shade is stepping contemplatively and dealing with the unintended consequences of his actions decades earlier.
It is in this side of the story that Stover returns to the philosophical thrust of the series. It has always been present in The Acts of Caine, though it took more of a front seat in Blade of Tyshalle than in Heroes Die; here, we get a more clearly delineated look at what Stover wants to do with Caine and with these books.
My father used to tell me that you can’t control the consequences of your actions. You can’t even predict them. So all you can do is your best, and all that matters is to make sure what you do will let you look in the mirror and like what you see.
We really start getting into the meat of Caine’s (Stover’s?) perspective on volition and the meaning of action. Why we do things matters, Dominic Shade says, even more than what the results of our actions are. There is a fine distinction between this and an outright rejection of “the ends justify the means” consequentialist philosophy; there are layers of action at work, and a constant evaluation of consequences at hand.
This will be interrogated even more deeply in the final book of the series, Caine’s Law. The two books, after all, are of a set: In the nomenclature of the series, where Heroes Die is the “Act of Violence” and Blade of Tyshalle is the “Act of War”, these final two books comprise the “Act of Atonement”. Atonement is a fraught word, in the context of these philosophical themes.
Going hand-in-hand with this more contemplative angle on the story is the character work during Shade’s plot arc. A few new players are introduced, nearly all of them Knights of Khryl: Tyrkilld, Knight Aedharr; Markham, Lord Tarkanen; Lord Justiciar Purthin Khlaylock; and the Champion of Khryl herself—Angvasse, Lady Khlaylock. Each of these characters plays off Shade in fascinating and oftentimes deceptive ways, revealing elements of both themselves and Shade. Of them all, Angvasse is the most compelling.
But her eyes—
Those eyes…damn. I knew that color.
Lifetimes ago, I trained at the Studio Conservatory on Naxos, in Earth’s Aegean Sea. At twilight in late summer, as the last arc of the sun slips into the sea and the first stars kindle, the sky goes to indigo velvet: warm, and soft, and impossibly remote. That color.
Angvasse is immediately presented as a tragic figure, a young woman beset with grief of many shades, thrust into a role which she did not understand and now crushed under the responsibilities of a more-than-mortal position. Dominic Shade and she do not get along; Dominic Shade and she are two sides of the same coin.
As the story progresses, and both Caine and Shade come to their destinies in the same place, separated by decades, new threats emerge. Once again Overworld is at risk, both from itself and from without, and only the main known occasionally as Hari Michaelson can make the choices necessary to save it.
“Everything’s more complicated than you think it is.”
Caine Black Knife feels like a welcome breeze of simplification to the series after the excesses of Blade of Tyshalle. It is shorter, faster, less miserable in its depths; it is funnier, more action-packed, with brighter characters.
But of course it is not that. Stover always has something else up his sleeve, and what seems simple on the surface begs for more context. Caine Black Knife ends on a tremendous cliffhanger, and that necessary context awaits in Caine’s Law.
Shoulder to shoulder, we walk from blind dark into rose-steel dawn. They’re waiting for us outside.
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