Book Review: Of Sand and Malice Made by Bradley Beaulieu
Before she started her quest for vengeance against the Twelve Kings of Sharakhai, Ceda had a different encounter with the supernatural otherness that infuses the world of the Shattered Sands. Early in her career as a pit fighter, her exploits, and a chance encounter, brought her to the attention of Rümayesh. Rümayesh is an ehrekh, a creature of fire and chaos living in Sharakhai under the guise of humanity. Her interest and fascination with Ceda, however, as with all who attracted her attention, is a corrosive, sadistic and destructive one, as befits her nature. Ceda found herself having to protect much more than just herself in order to ward against the creature’s manipulations. This is the story told in Of Sand and Malice Made, by Bradley Beaulieu. Of Sand and Malice Made isn’t really a prequel as I expected at the outset, but rather a side story to Ceda’s main tale. While Twelve Kings of Sharakhai has a number of threads in different time periods, Of Sand and Malice made is a much more straightforward narrative, set in a single time frame in between a couple of the time frames in Twelve Kings. Ceda is already the White Wolf, but relatively young and new to the arena, her youth being much more noteworthy than her skill. Ceda is still fighting for a place there, fighting to make her name. The novel does well in showing that she’s not the force of nature that she is in the “present” portions of Twelve Kings in Sharakhai.
