Saevus Corax is the sort of man who doesn’t like to be the center of attention, because being the center of attention invariably means that someone is trying to kill him. He seeks no glory in the wars that constantly pop up across his benighted continent; he waits until the battles are done, then he and his salvage crew tidy up the field: burning or burying bodies, retrieving uniforms and weapons, removing rings from fingers and earrings from ears, prying shoes from horses and arrows from people. Any wounded found in the wreckage are nursed back to health; needless to say, Saevus, who does not run a charity, charges their government for this service.
Unfortunately for Saevus Corax, he is the protagonist of a K.J. Parker trilogy, and so he never can labor in his desired obscurity.
[Some spoilers ahead for the first book in the series.]
In the first volume, Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead, Corax somehow managed to save his skin, nearly bankrupt his vindictive family, and prevent a devastating war, though his efforts cost him a good friend and a great deal of treasure. So the man we meet at the beginning of the second novel, Saevus Corax Captures the Castle, is relatively content. He’s safe, he’s successful, and the weight of the world is off his moment. As in the first volume, Corax narrates the tale with what he calls his “usual hard-glazed charm and meretricious flippancy.”
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Saevus Corax Captures the Castle
One night, while returning from a disappointing salvage expedition with his company, Corax awakes to chaos in his camp. Mysterious attackers have snuck in and kidnapped several of his deputies. As Corax learns the morning after, this assault was coordinated by his mother-in-law, Praeclara, a leader in a mysterious and fanatical organization. Praeclara’s ultimate goals may be mysterious, but there’s no doubt of her ruthlessness. As Corax puts it, “I feel about her the way most people feel about death.” Praeclara is an idealist, and few things perturb Corax more:
I don’t happen to believe in Evil with a capital E. I think there are nice people and nasty people, people who think nice thoughts and people who think nasty ones; and generally speaking, the bad stuff in this world is much more likely to emanate from the nice people with nice thoughts. Such as: well, liberty, equality and fraternity, for a start. Those concepts have started more wars and killed more human beings than dear old greed and selfishness could possibly ever aspire to. Show me a genuinely serious war, not just a border dispute or a scrap about trade but a million-killing, city-burning, depopulating, starvation-inducing nightmare, and I bet you ten staurata I can show you the idealist who started it.
Since there’s been no prior mention of Corax’s wife, much less of his mother-in-law, this development comes as a surprise, though we soon learn why the salvager doesn’t like to talk about the family he married into. In any case, if Corax doesn’t capture a small and poorly defended castle for his loathed in-law, his friends will die. To further complicate matters, the castle’s garrison is under the command of Stauracia, the con artist Corax probably loves, if only he would admit it.
Given the novel’s title and that Parker’s last three novels constituted “the Siege Trilogy,” you might expect that Captures the Castle would be a sort of medieval heist novel, with Corax as the master thief and the castle as the casino’s bank vault. In fact, the castle falls fairly quickly, but Corax’s problems don’t vanish; they compound. First, there’s the question of why this castle was so valuable, given its lack of apparent treasure and negligible strategic importance. Second, when Praeclara returns to further torment her son-in-law, she gives him a piece of information that sends him on an almost certainly lethal private quest into the lands of the mysterious Hetsuan people.
The Hetsuan are an isolationist and xenophobic people; they maintain their independence with a reputation for mercilessness and a penchant for ritual cannibalism. An intruder’s life is measured in hours, if not minutes. An insular society of cannibals does, of course, call up all sorts of unpleasant clichés of bloodthirsty pulp-fiction savages, invariably primitive people of color. To my relief but not my surprise, Parker upends, or updates, the old tropes. The Hetsuan’s appearance unnerves Corax: Not only is their skin pale, but their eyes are blue. When we meet individual Hetsuans, their personal and family names sound suspiciously French.
Life as a Hetsuan is good, since their nation is wealthy, prosperous, and democratic. Their arts are accomplished; their crafts are sublime. Because only the criminals and enemies are eaten and because the death sentence is rare in their nation, most Hetsuan have never actually consumed flesh; when the opportunity arises, they find they’d prefer to stick to their otherwise vegetarian diet. Corax’s eventful sojourn among these people is, by his standards, relatively peaceful, as he only commits one murder on their soil.
Saevus Corax Captures the Castle is, like its predecessor, a darkly comic romp with an antihero just a little more appealing than he should rightfully agree. Like the first book in the series, this one can easily stand alone, since the main plot is resolved in the course of the adventure and relatively few plot threads are direct carry-overs. While it’s a little less antic than the first book, with all its kidnappings, naval battles, palace intrigue, and double-crosses, Captures the Castle is just as much fun. When I turned the last page, only the fact that I needed to file this review prevented me from diving right into the trilogy’s conclusion, Saevus Corax Gets Away with Murder. I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Saevus Corax Captures the Castle is published by Orbit.
Matt Keeley reads too much and watches too many movies. You can find him on Twitter at @mattkeeley.
