Drop Them in a Teacup

Knot of Shadows (Penric & Desdemona, volume 11)

By Lois McMaster Bujold

18 Jan, 2022

**Miscellaneous Reviews**

4 comments

Support me with a Patreon monthly subscription! — 18 Jan, 2022

**Miscellaneous Reviews**

4 comments

Knot of Shadows is the eleventh volume in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric and Desdemona series, which takes place in her Five Gods secondary fantasy universe.

Drownings are not rare in Vilnoc, a port. Drowned men who stand up and try to escape the morgue, on the other hand, are unusual. Clearly the ambulatory corpse is a matter for a sorcerer. Physician Tolga asks Penric and his demon Desdemona to help.

The walking dead man is an example of a phenomenon Penric has heard of but never encountered before now. Some desperate person has used death magic to strike down their enemy, sacrificing their own life to power the spell. That is rare enough. However, a wandering spirit appropriated the empty shell left behind by the target of the spell.

This is not a second chance at life for the spirit. The body it inhabits is still dead and still rotting. Furthermore, the energy to make the body mobile comes from the ghost. A sundered spirit has a raw deal in this universe, but becoming a walking revenant is even worse.

Penric’s course of action seems clear. Determine the dead man’s identity. From there, work out who could have hated him enough to give up their own life to strike him down. Locate the killer’s body and ensure both corpses are laid to rest.

By the time Penric and Desdemona have their answers, the killer’s corpse has its own uninvited spectral guest. Dealing with that complication requires solving a missing person case and confirming a parent’s worst fears.

~oOo~

Death magic seems easy enough to reinvent from scratch. The two main reasons it is not more common is that casting it is suicide and that the authorities do their best to keep its existence obscure. Given that this world is patterned on ours, one wonders what will happen once the Five Gods version of Guttenberg makes it possible to mass produce grimoires. (As my editor reminds me, Penric himself is busily advancing printing technology. Perhaps his techniques will do for magical security what Guttenberg did for theological unity.)

This is a cozy addition to the series. Matters of state are not at stake and by the time Penric and Desdemona enter the story, all the dramatic moments are in the past. Their task is to unravel what happened, why it happened, and do their best to resolve matters as well as tragedies can be resolved. The plot is more methodical than tense.

The novella is also surprisingly short. If you are having trouble maintaining focus, this puff-pastry of a whodunit may be just what you need.

Knot of Shadows is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), and here (Barnes & Noble) but not from either Book Depository or Chapters-Indigo.

Comments

Erp

Well there is also the mystery of whether the dead man is the caster or victim of death magic.

Tavella

Bujold seems to have changed how death miracles work substantially since Curse of Chalion. Here, someone killed by death magic is automatically sundered; in CoC (spoilers follow for both CoC and Knot of Shadows) they know that Dondo was killed with death magic, but everyone is surprised when the ceremonial animals don't sign him as taken up by a god, including the religious functionaries who know how death magic works. It's also implied that death magic only works against people who are really exceptionally bad. The target here, having tried to get a co-worker killed by framing him, is definitely pretty awful, and Dondo is as well, but nearly everything Dondo does his brother Martou is a co-conspirator on, and goes on to kill more people, yet he's taken up by the Father. Of the others we know about, the duellist was a violent asshole, but not an unusual one within the confines of his society's rules, and the Golden General was just extremely effective leader. Sure, he was about to conquer Chalion, but Chalion in Paladin of Souls is preparing to do the same to the Roknari princedoms.

I feel that the automatic forced sundering is especially out of sync with how the religion and gods had previously been presented. Always it had been presented that sundering was a great grief to the gods, but they had no power to force the choice. It was never ever implied that you had to be specially good to get into heaven, or that sins would keep you out (except to the extent that you kept yourself out because you refused the call.) And I really, really do not believe that the Father would have been okay with losing the soul of his beloved Golden General because the Bastard decided he'd answer someone's prayer.

Erp

There may also be the question of what the characters in the world "know" about death magic and what the author knows.

David Siegel

Tavella:

In "Knot of Shadows" Penric says:

The evil target is supposed, or at any rate imagined, to go with the demon to the Bastard’s hell, to be boiled down to chaos and utterly destroyed, not to join with any god. Which, when you think it through, is much like ordinary sundering, only faster.
What happens to the supplicant’s soul is, er, argued. It’s said the funeral animals often sign that it’s gone on to a god, usually but not always the Bastard. Rarely, they do sign that it’s sundered. If there’s any underlying pattern to that fate, it seems to be visible only to god-sight.

That does not sound as though "someone killed by death magic is automatically sundered" Indeed the contrary, usually suppliants are not sundered.

Note also that the people of this universe do not actually have much firm knowledge of hoe death magic (or death miracle) works, and that people of Penric's time have about 150 years less knowledge than those at the time of Thw Curse of Chalion.