A Sword Named Truth by Sherwood Smith
Cover design by Adam Auerbach
Published by DAW Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
I have a long and complex relationship with the 'verse to which this novel belongs. I originally met Sherwood Smith via a now-defunct by-mail writers' workshop, back in the spring of 1989. It was in the format of a monthly newsletter (I think I still have all of them tucked away somewhere), and in the letter column of one of them she expressed her frustration with the extreme difficulty of finding a route to publication for a huge world that had been developed over years, to the point she was wondering if it would be better to just put everything in a big box and concentrate on writing in a 'verse specifically designed to appeal to publishers.
I wrote to her with words of sympathy and my own struggles to get even a nibble on stories from my sf world, which was also fairly large and involved. Over that summer we exchanged copies of our work, and soon I came to look forward to each new package with another installment of her fascinating magical world. Things slowed down when classes started again in the fall (I was a graduate student, she was a teacher at a private school, earning her children's tuition so they didn't have to go to the horrible public schools in her area), but the bond had been forged. Over the years that followed, I would work my way backward from the relatively mature and polished later novels to some of the earliest adventures of a group of girls fighting local baddies with magic (which have since been published as Over the Sea: CJ's First Notebook and Mearsies Heili Bounces Back: CJ's Second Notebook).
In some cases, I got to read multiple iterations of the same novel as she struggled to present the events in a way that was palatable to publishers that were becoming increasingly difficult to convince to acquire any new works by anyone who wasn't an established superstar. Sometimes it's difficult to remember whether a given story element actually made it into the published version of a given work, or if I'm remembering an earlier draft that I read somewhere along the route to publication. As a result, while seeing this novel finally in published form is a joy to behold, it's also something of difficult process to write about it, because I have to make sure I'm writing about what's actually in the published volume, and not what I remember from some much earlier version of the book.
It also means that I know a lot more background to the 'verse, which makes it difficult to judge just how it will read for someone who's picked it up for the first time, knowing nothing about author or 'verse. And A Sword Named Truth begins very much in media res, although there is a brief introduction by the character who's the in-'verse narrator, informing us that they are writing anonymously in order to be able to comment freely upon the events, and giving a very brief run-down of some of the most critical elements, particularly the existence of Norsunder as a mysterious realm of bad guys who periodically try to take over the world.
And then we are thrown headlong into the worries of young Senrid, the boy king of Marloven Hess, who's still coming to grips with the civil war that threw out the cruel Regent and has made him king in fact as well as title. I want to re-read both Senrid and A Stranger to Command to see exactly how events in them fit together with this novel -- but it still reminds me that I'm coming to it with a lot of background, which makes it difficult to tell how well it reads for someone who hasn't read it before.
No sooner than Senrid's gotten himself in over his head, determined to rule by principle rather than by brute force, we're delivered another shock. In Maersies Heili, the land where Ms. Smith's earliest Sartorias-deles adventures took place, the fundamental setup is changing. From the moment that Claire first called CJ into the world, they were battling the villainous Chwahir who lived in the Shadowland under the floating land on which their tiny nation's capital was built. Now the spell which raised that chunk of land is dissolving, and the land is sinking back to its natural place -- which will crush the Chwahir outpost beneath it. So CJ and the girls are trying to get everyone away to safety, only to have the wicked and tyrannical Chwahir king, Schnit Sonscarna, magic-transfer all the way from his capital in distant Chwahirsland.
And then a portal opens and he is taken bodily into Chwahirsland, leaving a dangerous power void in a kingdom that has become synonymous with dark magic villainy. So a number of light-mages hurry to his citadel in the Chwahir capital of Narad, hoping to get intelligence on his plans, and just how the conquest of the relatively insignificant Maersies Heili fit into the larger scheme of things. However, this massively paranoid king, who could give Stalin a run for his money, has laid so many layers of dark-magic wards on the palace that it's not enough to watch out for immediately fatal traps. The cumulative effects of the energy-draining power of these spells can sap the lives of anyone who stays within their range of effect too long, and they have to flee to safety.
However, young Jilo, formerly the Maersiesan girls' enemy, but now an ally after he's been freed of the mind-control spells put on him by mad old king, decides to return to Narad and seek counter-spells to the mind-dull and night-vision spells that had been put on the Shadowland soldiers. As Jilo looks around the city, he realizes that power can't just be left lying in the street for anyone to pick up. It's too likely that the new ruler will be just as bad as Schnit, who was called Wan-Edhe (literally "The King," echoing the various Twentieth-century dictators whose titles literally translated into "The Leader") because he'd put tracer spells on every mention of his name. However, Jilo's not sure he's equal to the challenges of kingship in a country that has a long history of tyrannical kings, even before the eighty-year reign of Schnit.
Aware that these events mean that Norsunder is clearly on the move again, a number of the young rulers of various realms decide to form an alliance. Several of them have good reasons not to trust adults in positions of authority, and others think that the adults are blinded by Normalcy Bias and the assumptions it breeds.
Then we get to see the other side, namely the base Norsunder operates at Sartorias-deles' south polar region. As the scene begins, several of their top mages are observing a disastrous attempt to perform a group transfer from Norsunder to Sartorias-deles. At first it seems to be succeeding, just long enough that the failure comes as a shock, especially when we the readers realize that 1. The people being transferred just died. And 2. The mages at the Base show very little grief for the lives lost, instead being more irritated at the waste of resources involved in the failed transfer.
Norsunder Base is a snake-pit of infighting and backstabbing, in which true loyalty is impossible because everyone is always angling to better their own positions at the expenses of others. It makes me think of the Mirror Universe in Star Trek, in which captains regularly succeed by assassinating their predecessors, but I'm sure there are plenty of other possible models, both Primary World and fictional.
Meanwhile, Jilo discovers just how dangerous Wan-Edhe's spells are. Sitting down to research for a few hours, Jilo looks down at his hand and is horrified that it has grown filthy and sallow. He magic-transfers away to discover that eight months have passed in the outside world while he was working for hours. Either extreme concentrations of dark magic have time-dilation effects similar to extreme concentrations of mass in the Primary World, or this sort of magic can warp one's perceptions of time so as to be unaware of its passage.
In any case, his friends are so horrified by his condition, yet astonished by his determination, that they decide to bring him fully into the Alliance. He's definitely earned their trust, as well as some rest. Off he goes to Marloven Hess to spend some time with Senrid, who'd dealing with a similar but less severe situation in the wake of the misrule of his uncle the Regent. Jilo is astonished to discover that this famous Proud Warrior Race enjoys luxuries his people have been trained to despise as soft and decadent.
While the various young rulers struggle through the intricate web that is the adult world, an item reappears that I instantly recognized from some of the earliest stories Ms. Smith wrote about Sartorias-deles: Schnit's magic book. In the earliest accounts, it seemed as if he just needed to write down the name of a character he wanted to track and the book would tell him that character's movements and locations. However, in this novel we discover that things aren't quite so simple. Entering someone's name involves complex spells that go beyond the simple act of inscription, and even then the tracing process isn't automatic or continuous. The magic can only detect when someone has passed through a transfer point that has been magically compromised with some kind of special tracer spell, so it is possible to avoid being tracked by not using transfer magic.
In this novel, the magic book has certain qualities that are reminiscent of the One Ring in Tolkien's Middle-Earth. The mere sight of it seems to arouse covetousness and an intense desire to acquire it for oneself. And there are strong hints that it is so deeply steeped in dark magic that there is simply no way at all to use it for good.
But there's no time to contemplate the issues involved in magic, for Norsunder is on the move, having found a way to work around the spells that prevent group transfers. It's rather grim to watch them brush aside resistance, particularly among the younger kids who seem to have regarded defense as sort of a game. One of the most telling scenes is that in which an elderly grandmother figure is killed -- and then the character who avenges her death must come to terms with the cost of taking another human life, even when that life was so ill-spent as that of a man who would kill a harmless old woman who provided maternal love and guidance to so many children left orphaned by recent civil war.
And then the storyline moves to another of the shirtsleeve-environment worlds of the Erhal system. I had read references to the world of Geth in many of the manuscripts I read during the 1990's, but had never actually read anything that took place on that world for any substantial period of time. I had known it was supposed to be on the other side of their sun, but only in this novel was it finally clear that yes, Geth was at Sartorias-deles' L3 position relative to their sun -- rather like the old notion of a "Counter-Earth" on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth. (That said, it appears that magic must've been used to stabilize these orbits, since according to everything I've read, the L3 Lagrange point is not stable without regular stationkeeping).
Gethan magic is similar but not identical to that of Sartorias-deles, but the Norsundrans clearly regard that world is being of considerable value and worth the cost to conquor. This confrontation ends most enigmatically, with several key villains slipping away with coded challenges or warnings that they may have lost this skirmish, but they have by no means lost the war, recalling the warning at the end of Eric Flint's 1632 that a skirmish is not a battle, a battle is not a campaign, and a campaign is not a war. Given that the third volume in this trilogy is titled Dark Side of the Sun, it strongly suggests that a significant portion of it will take place on Geth, or at least involve Geth.
It was interesting to read this novel a second time. The first time I read it was shortly after it first came out, and there were other people waiting to read the library copy, so I needed to read it as rapidly as I could. That meant I got a pretty superficial experience -- but enough that I knew that I definitely wanted to read it again when I could take the time to savor it rather than having to race against a deadline. Almost two years later I finally was able to give it a second, more in-depth read, and as I expected, I picked up a lot of fine details that had slipped right past me.
However, one of the interesting results of the long period between the two readings was being able to read it the second time right after a re-read of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Telling. As I was reading the scenes of Jilo going to his father's hometown and encountering preserved bits and pieces of the old Chwahir culture, eating rice noodles and participating in the Great Hum, I saw echoes of the scenes in which Sutty journeys to Okzat-Okzat, a mountain village where the old Akan culture from before the Corporate State is still preserved.
This is definitely a novel I'd like to read again, preferably along with the other books of the Sartarias-deles series so I can appreciate the links between them. I know that in my youth, when books were few and hard to come by (the public library in the nearby small town had all of 800 books, including the encyclopedias and the books of law for when it doubled as a town hall), this would've been a book I'd read and re-read until the librarian would suggest I shouldn't monopolize shared resources.
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Review posted January 2, 2022.
