Is your world totally messed up because mortals just couldn’t stop cutting down and using those magic Numinar trees? Climate borked, magic broken, pretty much everything on fire? No problem! The great god beneath the earth, Kluehnn, has figured out a great solution after being beseeched by Tolemne, a man who went to the bottom of the world to find him. It’s called restoration.
Country by country, Kluehnn will restore everything: the climate, the soil, even the people themselves, changing them to better survive the conversion he brings. But hey, physics still apply; can’t make something from nothing. Half the population is disassembled into their component atoms to become raw material with which to remake the world humanity broke, but it’s better than suffering. Right? R—Right? Such is the driving question behind the first of Andrea Stewart’s new trilogy, The Hollow Covenant, beginning here in The Gods Below.
The country of Kashan has been chosen for Restoration and sisters Hakara and Rasha, orphans with no support but each other, are scrambling to make it across the border to Langzhu, a neighboring country. Of course, there are forces keeping people from leaving—except for those who can pay, of course. Elder sibling Hakara does her best to find them passage, through sheer force of personality and desperation to save her sister, only nine and panicking. But in her effort to prove her strength to a mining camp boss, she passes out, and wakes up across the border, unknowingly leaving her sister behind. Rasha, moments from restoration, thinks her stalwart sister broke her promise and left her. Hakara, heartbroken and screaming, can only hope her sister has survived and try to get back.
Buy the Book
The Gods Below
Ten years pass in the blink of an eye, and we see that Hakara has been saving up enough to go back home—crossing the dangerous, magical border—to see if Rasha lives and bring her home. Rasha, altered to survive Restoration, now a lizard-like humanoid, has spent the last ten years cloistered with a den of Kluehnn, taken in after her supposed abandonment. It is in this essential tension that Stewart sets the narrative afire, and from this beginning, horrifying spark that the entirety of The Gods Below lives, thrumming like a current.
Stewart, practiced in a previous trilogy, has definitely honed her writing chops to keep the reader hooked. For a big-ass fantasy epic with a ton to set up, I flew through this book. The prose is light when need be, and comes slamming into you with moments of importance, with the swiftness of steel across flesh, with heartbreak and tension, and just as fast moves you to the next sequence. Characters weave in and out of focus, not just Hakara or Rasha but also the last scion of a failing clan, Sheun, or her cousin, the inventor and explorer, Mullayne, and even Thassir, a powerful, winged individual with ties to the deep history of this world—and yes, he loves cats. Of all of them, it is Mullayne and his crew of explorers plumbing the depths of the hollow world beneath them, seeking the Inner Star where the gods supposedly come from, who are set apart from the main narrative. But this crew provides a breath of fresh air—mostly, the air gets weird when you go deep—and shifts the tone from epic fantasy to cave diving horror with a little dash of religious fervor for kicks. But as we see throughout this book, his story touches the main narrative, as every character eventually links up and connects. Another theme to add to the question at the top ends up concerning cycles of history, cycles of abuse and hurt, legacies of pain and legacies of hope, and how at some point, you have to learn to trust people, or you will always flounder in the face of great difficulty.
But for all the heaviness of those things, Stewart knows not to linger too long; there’s a rebellion afoot, after all! And that means action. Hakara joins with a group of dissidents to find her sister after learning she can harness the magic of god gems by breathing aether, a magic gas under the surface—and yes, she figured that out in a very embarrassing way, no spoilers. Rasha wishes to aid Kluehnn the only way she knows how: become a godkiller, a personal defender of Kluehnn sent to kill the descendants of other gods. For Kluehnn is powerful and worshipped by many, but he is not the only deity in the world. Amidst Hakara learning magic and Rasha fighting by the skin of her teeth to survive the trials of her god, Stewart peppers in moments of subterfuge and intelligence with Sheun, intent on saving her clan, and moments of deep history, each instance mysterious but growing clearer with every new scene. The Gods Below kept me guessing with every chapter, and left me delighted by the next. It is rare for me to feel so taken care of at the start of a new series, but Stewart has a talent for literary movement, and with every page, I could feel her guiding me with confidence and ease.
I knew of Andrea Stewart’s work before starting The Gods Below but had not yet had a chance to read her first trilogy. The start of this next trilogy has convinced me to seek them out and consume them with gusto. And if you’re like me and haven’t read her work yet either, then I would heartily recommend The Gods Below as the place to begin. Action, heart, sorrow, magic, and mysteries, this book has it all, and if this is how we’re starting, I certainly can’t wait to delve even further with Stewart and her characters in the books to come!
The Gods Below is published by Orbit.
