Rating: 5 out of 5
I didn’t see what was coming at the end – or at least not one of the resolutions. The main event was easy to guess at after the prologue. The specific outcomes, knowing the hard hand which the two directors of this world often take, were more difficult to guess and somehow, even with the results obvious on hindsight, I don’t think I would have guessed the case of the Crimson Guard.
But what’s this one about then? Assail, a cold and bleak northern land, is meant to give us many answers. To get them, our crews are converging on this land. The full set includes many individual players as well as the Malazans and the Crimson Guard. The main characters are mostly familiar: Kyle steps up in a big way, Shimmer does the same, Fisher is here, and so are Badlands and Coots who I remember though I’m not sure from where. Overall, the list of characters is great and they manage plenty on the journey.
Unlike most of the other Malazan stories, magic really takes a distant second place here to regular action, but also missing from most of the story are proper Malazan regulars. This leaves us with an interesting so-called ’off-hire‘ solution to the expansion of the empire, but this is a distinctly lower-level event here compared to the prior titles of this series. Through most of the book I was thinking it should perhaps be called ‘the Crimson Guard’ instead given the main arc features them rather heavily in each installation.
The natives of Assail meanwhile remind me of the cold north – an area where we could come up with hundreds of heroic exploits. It was refreshing therefore to see most of these folks shy away from such and focus on what was important, the land itself. This was a refreshing attitude in a world in which many that we see and experience focus primarily on power (of some kind) alone.
Overall, I really liked this ending to this series!
