Daniel Abraham’s Age of Ash is a meaty, thick city-state fantasy that is concentrated on the life and times of the residents of one fantasy city-state.
“All things good on this Earth flow into the City, because of the City’s greatness.”
In the movie CITY HALL, Al Pacino’s Mayor Pappas quotes this from Pericles, who was talking about Athens (and Pappas about New York) but it also applies to worlds where the city-state is the center of the action, where in many ways, the city-state IS the world. You know their names from fantasy. Lankhmar. The City State of the Invincible Overlord. Maradaine. Ankh-Morpork. Camorr. Sjona. Sigil. Kirkwall. New Crobuzon. The nameless City of K.J. Parker’s Siege Trilogy. Saraykeht. And many others.
Daniel Abraham’s Age of Ash introduces us to a polity that would join that number, the city-state of Kithamar.
It may sound strange and weird to talk about this book in terms of a place, even for a reviewer like myself who enjoys worldbuilding and setting as pillars of his SFF reading. Why have I not gone into my usual opening of introducing the protagonist and their plight? This is not a non-fiction book, there definitely is a protagonist and her name is Alys. But in a real way, this novel (and I am going to venture, the entire series) really has the city of Kithamar as its real protagonist and telling Alys’ story is a way to tell part of the story of Kithamar.
But it goes beyond that, though, for it soon emerges, that the city-state of Kithamar, a deity, an eidolon, a guiding spirit, an animus, IS a tangible and real being with goals and desires of their own. They do not get the most viewpoint chapters and to talk about this God in detail would spoil lots of revelations about how this world works and how they work in particular.
So let’s go back to Alys, the ostensible main character of Age of Ash. Alys lives in Longhill, which is, charitably, near the bottom of districts in Kithamar. It is a hardscrabble sort of place, with the concordant problems of crime and poverty. While this is an expansive book that covers a number of characters and threads (including the aforementioned deity of Kithamar), the heart of this book, narratively boils down to Alys and her drive to follow in her murdered elder brother Darro’s footsteps, and eventually, his legacy.
Abraham masterfully hands that narrative, among the many other narratives, giving us a story that resonates, is self-aware and ultimately makes us feel. We feel for Alys and her plight and her story, sometimes especially when her obsession and drive and desire to avenge her brother get the best of her, and it proves to be as self-destructive as it is in raising her up from her hardscrabble origins.
And Alys’ story, and the aforementioned story of the deity of Kithamar itself, are just part of the tapestry of stories that inhabit the book. Abraham has a number of other characters, particularly Sammish. Sammish is from the same hardscrabble background as Alys, and has an unspoken thing for Alys. Her path braids in and out of Alys’ tale as she makes her own way through the narrative. In a sense, while the grand narrative is the story of Kithamar, this story itself is the story of how Alys and Sammish come to terms with each other, with a lot of water winding up between them in the process.
This is a world that does not have a tremendous amount of high magic, and for the most part, the characters in this novel do not have any direct experience of it. The aforementioned Sammish has a gift, one she does not herself understand. There are other, strange forms of magic afoot, as well as charlatans, fakes, tricks and the like. Magic does become important in the narrative and there is a MacGuffin that is in fact an item for a magical ritual in fact, but in general, this is not a story, a world that relies heavily on it. It is much more of a sword and sorcery school of magic in a story than an epic fantasy.
Like his Long Price Quartet but on a smaller scale, Abraham likes to play with time1. That series has novels set apart by decades, purposefully showing the evolution of how Saraykeht evolves over a long period of time. This novel does it in two ways, flipping back and forth in time between the reigns of several Princes in the city, but also having a narrative that in between set-piece events, jumps ahead in seasons. There is a real feel for the city going through changes and tumult, as do the characters in the city as well. Between narrative jumps, characters and their positions, places, roles and fortunes change. There is a real organic feel to the city and to the characters using this sort of pacing. It does mean that this is a thick and epic tome and while it is a flowing and well written, it is not a quick read by any means.
The worldbuilding in the city is the highlight here. Kithamar is one of the best realized fantasy series in a single volume. The powers of the author as a worldbuilder and with burgeoning experience, and a focused lens on a single city-state. Given that most of our characters are down-at-the-heels sorts, this is a story that has a much greater emphasis on the lower and middle level levels of society than more rarefied noble or princely ones. Readers who come to fantasy hoping for halls of power settings amid stories may be a bit frustrated with the book, since we do spend a lot of time with people who do not have enough, are not treated well, and live on the edge. But showing the lower and middle levels of society and locales makes Kithamar a city that I feel I came to know and immerse myself in.
So what kind of city is Kithamar like, you might ask? It’s a cold-weather trading city, with trading links to more “Exotic” locations. Entrepots and trading cities are some of my favorites in fantasy fiction, because they provide reasons for strangers to arrive, reasons for things outside the city to be found, and give a dynamism to cities that make them locations for story and adventure. It is a river city, centered around a river that the city extensively uses and also fears (arc words in the novel : “water is hungry”). So I got a sense of a city that is somewhat like a cross between Seattle and London.
One nice bit that I really appreciated is a small detail but it is one that helps as a useful corrective. We do have a couple of characters from a distant, “Exotic” location, the Bronze Coast. And they are different from the Kithamarians and their homeland is very different from chilly Kithamar. And yet, Abraham makes it clear that Kithamar is just as exotic and weird to these denizens of the Bronze Coast as the Bronze Coast is to natives of Kithamar. There is no “default”.
I mentioned a lot of city-states before, and certainly Abraham’s novel is in dialogue with a lot of them. The aforementioned worldbuilding, especially given it is mostly from the lower end of the socio-economic scale, puts in mind city-state novels and stories that focus on more down-on-their-luck characters than potentates, princes and nobles. Having Alys be a thief, having other characters running cons and less than legal methods of making money, certainly put me in the mind of Jean and Locke from the Gentleman Bastards series of Scott Lynch as a real touchstone in this book. Jean and Locke are more con artists than outright thieves, but just as that novel goes into detail as to how Jean and Locke pull cons (and how they can go wrong) this novel goes into a lot of detail with its hardscrabble protagonists as to how thieving rings work, the roles of the various people in it, and yes, how things can go so badly wrong. A little bit of R. R. Virdi’s The First Binding comes to mind, with the portion of the protagonist’s life in such an organization.
Age of Ash, then is a fantasy novel, the start of a series, that rewards readers who are already immersed in the fantasy genre and are looking for dialogue with a lot of other secondary world fantasy and tells an interestingly framed story. I look forward to how Kithamar evolves and changes and grows in the subsequent volumes. (The ending of this book and the logline for the second book, Blade of Dream, suggest that this is the end of Alys’ story and that the braiding of all of these individual stories is the point of the series).
1 Come to think, the time jumps in the Expanse series and some lesser ones in the Dragon’s Path series suggest that this is a tactic the author likes to use in all of his work.
