Today I read Clocktaur War by T. Kingfisher. I mean, technically the books are Clockwork Boys and The Wonder Engine, but Ursula Vernon says in her acknowledgements that they were originally intended to be a single volume. But she didn’t want a brick, so she split the story into two. I’ll circle back later and see how I feel about that decision.
These books are from the Temple of the White Rat universe, joining Swordheart and the Paladin books. I believe these two were actually the first written and published, and the rest are spinoffs from them. Well, not necessarily spinoffs, but expansions on other aspects of the world taking place some years later. So yes, I technically should have read these first.
However, I think the order I did read the series in worked a lot better. True, the Clocktaur War was over before the Saint of Steel died and has some legacy to deal with in later books. But Paladin’s Faith in particular helped me to better understand these books.
Clockwork Boys opens up with our female lead in a prison. She’s not a prisoner (at this time), but she wants one or more of the people jailed there for a task. The Dowager’s City is losing a war to Anuket City because of the titular Clockwork Boys. But no one in the Dowager’s City knows who or what these fighters are. Two previous groups have been sent to find out and stop the war. One is dead, the other is presumed dead because no one’s heard from them in quite some time. So, they’ve decided to resort to the expendable. There’s Slate, our female lead and professional forger (of papers, not like Brandon Sanderson’s novella). An old partner of hers is Brenner, an assassin. And there’s the man she finds in prison: Caliban, Knight and paladin of the Dreaming God. He’s locked up because he was possessed by a demon he’d been trying to exorcise and went on a bit of a killing spree as a result. Kind of a stain on the Dreaming God’s people’s reputation.
This is also in part why I think reading Paladin’s Faith first helped me. Marguerite brings up Caliban when she’s pointing out how bad the Dreaming God’s people are about finding and keeping track of information. They had a paladin go on a killing spree and now no one knows where he is. Seems like a problem.
Oh and demons in this world are bodiless creatures that possess lifeforms in the material world and make them do strange things. Young demons don’t really understand the bodies they find themselves in, are obvious, and get exorcised more quickly. Older, stronger demons are cannier and more subtle. They tend to be found in humans instead of livestock and might even make a deal with a human to hide for longer.
Anyway. The trio are being sent to deal with the Clockwork Boys for the Dowager and her city. And they’re given carnivorous tattoos to ensure they stay on task. If they deviate from their mission, the tattoos will bite down. If they betray the Dowager, they’ll be devoured.
The first book is the initial meetings and the journey to Anuket City. The second book is almost entirely in that City and deals with them discovering what is going on and then figuring out how to stop it. Oh, and learning why Slate left said city in a hurry when she’s from there originally.
They really are two halves of the story, which is why it feels a bit incomplete to talk about one and not the other. Which is part of why I’m writing this so late; I had a few other things to do today but I wanted to discuss both books in a single post. The common pattern for this world is that each book has a new pair of romantic leads. But the Clocktaur War is the exception to this rule, with Slate and Caliban remaining the leads in the second book. Probably, in part, because they didn’t actually get together in the first. And, you know, other considerations.
We all know that The Lord of the Rings was originally a single novel that the publisher chose to split. And there are pros and cons to that, including the fact that those three books together would be a rather large brick. Clocktaur War wouldn’t actually be that bad – more in line with the four or five hundred page novels that had become the standard – but considering how short all the T. Kingfisher books I’ve read have been, I guess it was too much for Vernon’s preferences.
Still, I don’t really think I can consider these two separate books. They’re just two halves of a single story. They may each have enough story that they can technically be published separately, but it seems like a waste to me. Yes, I’ve read other books and series where it was divided like this, but this one just strikes me as really and truly being a single book. I’m glad that I didn’t find Clockwork Boys before The Wonder Engine was released, although if I had, I might have a different opinion here.
Frankly, I probably wouldn’t have bought the first book even if I’d known about it when it was originally published. Steampunk tends to be heavily weighted towards “miss” instead of “hit” for me, so I’ve gotten to the point where I tend to avoid it. It’s not the concept I dislike, but rather a lot of the settings and societies that use it. And a lot of the stories I’ve run across tend to be boring or (pardon the pun) run out of steam partway through.
But Clocktaur War isn’t really steampunk. Not just because these machines don’t run on steam. It’s a magical world and there are some magics that are expressed through mechanical means. The wonder engines, of course, being the most inexplicable. There’s one that changes gold into pears. Why? How? We’ll never know. Well, maybe why. Why could just be some random thought Vernon had.
Obviously I liked these books. I think I prefer the Paladin books and Swordheart to these, but I can’t complain too much. Without Clocktaur War, we wouldn’t have Swordheart. And without Swordheart we wouldn’t have the Saint of Steel series. So all in all, it’s a good thing there was a Clocktaur War. And I definitely want to keep reading T. Kingfisher novels.
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