Charis spends two books being the wronged party. The small clever kingdom that got jumped by four corrupt men in Zion, that only ever hit back, that had the moral high ground handed to it by people who tried to burn it off the map first. And then this one opens with the Charisian navy sailing back into Delferahk and hanging churchmen by secular authority, the first time anyone on Safehold has done that in eight hundred years of written history, and I sat there for a second going, hang on, are we still the ones I’m cheering for.
Killing off the villain, killing off priests, killing off people I was fairly confident had plot armour. It doesn’t seem like what the good guys would do. But that’s absolutely what happened in this book, and what I like is that Weber doesn’t soften it, doesn’t hand Cayleb a speech that makes it all fine, doesn’t cut away. Charis does something it cannot walk back and the story just sits with that for a while.
By Heresies Distressed is a really good continuation, and I want to say that up front because the rest of this is me being pleased about specific things. The previous book put the brakes on. It went from broadsides to committee rooms and legal argument about who owns a bishopric, and while I didn’t hate that, I could feel the pace bleeding out of it. This one gets the momentum back and then some. Nothing here felt like treading water or refilling pages that were already full.
The land war turns up, and Weber can actually write it
The bit I enjoyed most is the transition. Two books of age-of-sail brilliance, galleons doing appalling things to galleys, and Weber has a deserved reputation for that going all the way back to On Basilisk Station and the Honorverse. So the honest question going into Corisande was whether he could do the same thing with infantry, because plenty of writers can only really see one kind of battle.
He can. Cayleb takes the Imperial Charisian Marines through Zebediah and into Corisande and the whole technological argument the series has been making at sea comes ashore at once. Rifled muskets against matchlocks. Mobile field artillery against pike blocks. Something very close to modern light infantry doctrine walking into formations that were state of the art a generation ago and are now just targets standing in a field. The Corisandians aren’t stupid and they aren’t cowards, they get routed in the open, they pull back behind fortifications like sensible people, and then they get surrounded anyway. King of the Nerds called it the strongest book in the series largely on the strength of that land campaign and I’m not going to argue.
It’s a very different flavour of war writing from the one I usually reach for. Starship Troopers sits inside one man’s head for the whole book and you learn about the war through him, whereas Weber is up at twenty thousand feet with the map spread out, moving regiments and telling you what the artillery is doing to the left flank. Both work. They’re just not doing the same job at all, and if you only like the Heinlein version you’ll find the Corisande chapters cold.
The other thing the campaign does is hand the series two proper soldiers in Eastshare and Green Valley, which it badly needed. Up to now the military competence has mostly radiated out from Merlin, who knows everything because he has satellites, and that’s a hard thing to build tension around. Generals who are simply good at their jobs, arguing about supply and ground and how fast infantry can actually move, give the war a texture it didn’t have when the answer to every question was that Charis already knew.
Hektor dies and Clyntahn wins the part that matters
Then there’s Hektor. Two and a half books of being the antagonist, and Weber gives him a genuinely affecting last stretch as a father, getting his children out of the country before the end arrives, knowing exactly what’s coming for him. And before he can surrender, Clyntahn’s people murder him and his heir, and the whole world decides Cayleb did it.
That’s the smartest thing in the book and possibly in the series so far. Charis wins the war and loses the peace in the same afternoon. Clyntahn takes a straight military defeat and turns it into a martyred prince, an occupied province with a reason to hate its occupiers, and a story that travels faster than the truth ever will. He’s not a fanatic who believes, which would be the ordinary version of this character. He’s a man who uses other people’s belief and knows precisely what it’s worth.
Irys and Daivyn getting out with the Earl of Coris is the other half of it. A furious teenage girl and a small boy, running a blockade, landing in Delferahk with a claim and a grievance and nothing else. Coris is one of the quiet successes of the whole run, a spymaster who ends up as guardian to two children with a price on their heads and takes it seriously. I could see even at this stage that Irys was going to matter enormously, and I say that as someone who is usually wrong about which characters get promoted.
Letting more people in on the Grand Secret
The other thing I thought was handled really well is the widening of the secret. After the attempt on her life, Sharleyan is taken to the Brethren of Saint Zherneau and told all of it. Nimue, the Gbaba, Langhorne, the eight hundred year lie sitting underneath every church on the planet. And she doesn’t break, she doesn’t spend forty pages in denial, she absorbs the worst thing anyone has ever been told and starts working out what to do about it.
Bringing more people inside was the right call and the way it’s done makes sense, which is not a small thing. A secret this size is a plotting problem. Keep it too tight and Merlin has to be everywhere personally, which gets silly and makes everyone else furniture. Open it too fast and you lose the tension entirely. Weber threads it, and the people who get told are the people who obviously should be told, and each of them reacts like an adult with a job rather than like a device.
Siddarmark quietly deciding to keep trading with Charis despite the embargo is the small thing I noticed and filed away. It’s barely a subplot here. Money beating doctrine, a few paragraphs of merchants and harbour numbers, and you can feel it being loaded for later.
What all of this adds up to is the series growing a conscience it didn’t really have before. The first two books had a fairly clean shape, four corrupt men in Zion versus a kingdom that hadn’t done anything to deserve what it got, and you could enjoy it without doing much moral arithmetic. This one takes that away. Charis works out it’s capable of doing genuinely terrible things for reasons it believes are good, and Clyntahn works out he doesn’t need to win battles as long as he controls what people think the battles meant. Those two discoveries happen in the same book and they’re pointed straight at each other.
Four out of five, and still climbing
I gave this four out of five and it holds up. Really enjoyed this one. It does the thing a third book in a long series most needs to do, which is prove the whole enterprise still has somewhere to go, and it does that by changing the kind of war it’s fighting rather than by making the existing war bigger.
The gripe is small and it’s the same one the series has always had. Weber does not use an editor with a sharp enough knife, and hankrules2011 was blunter about that than I’d be, though the complaint is fair. There’s still a lot of people thinking at length about things they’ve already thought about. It bothered me much less here than in book two, because now there are things happening between the deliberations.
Three books in and the pace and momentum are genuinely still there. It isn’t dragging, it isn’t recycling, and the pieces being set up are more interesting than the ones already in play. If you bounced off book two for being all law and theology, come back for this one, because the war shows up and it brings the moral cost with it.