What are the Gray Men, and how are they connected to the skazzerai?
In Wicked Problems, we are introduced fairly on to Mr Brown, a bland seeming man who turns out to be merely a shell for a horrifying metal death machine (classic Gladstone). We later meet more similar types, known as gray men for the colour of their metal, or blasphemies for their ability to attack the Twin Serpents.
But what exactly are the gray men? Who, if anyone, is controlling them? And what do the have to do with the skazzerai?
This is a follow-up to 'The Grimwalds, the skazzerai, and the last end of the world’, and an addition to the skazzerai series.
Major spoilers for Wicked Problems. Also, warning for inconsistency in spelling of gray / grey, and full stops in ‘Mr Brown’. I’m Scottish, and doing my best with these American books.
What are the gray men?
“Who’s Mr Brown?”
“Not his real name. Our employers don’t like using them. It’s a community term for whoever’s paying the bills this week.”
…
He occupied a bare table across from two empty chairs. He wore a grey suit and a white shirt with an open collar. He seemed so normal. He looked like a man with daughters, a man whose daughters would have violin recitals. His hands were clasped in front of him, on the table, their fingers meshed as if he were sheltering something small and delicate in his palms.
...
There was something funny about the way he blinked, Dawn thought. As if it were the first and only time he’d blinked since they came in. She tried to watch his eyes. They seemed larger than they should be, behind the spectacles.”
At first the gray men, shown initially in the guise of Mr Brown, appear as normal, albeit bland, white men. We don’t know that there is more than one Mr Brown at first, but as we progress through the rollercoaster of Wicked Problems it becomes clear to the audience and characters that there is something of an army of bland grey men hiding secret metalwork.
This Mr Brown contracted Mal (who is alive btw, sorry if you ignored the spoiler warning above) to retrieve the metal shard that created the spirecliffs and ensnared the goddess Ajaia - the spirecliffs that are held steady by the Twin Serpents Group (hi Caleb), who was hired by the Sacerdotal of Kavekana (hi Kai), on behalf of their client who allegedly caused the disaster (hi Grimwald).
Dawn and the Craft-god (who is now in the spectral form of a snake called Sybil) interrupted Mal’s plan and absorbed the shard plus the spirit of Ajaia, both of which are actively trying to drain their soul and eat them. In lieu of the shard itself, Mal abducts Dawn and takes her back to the Arsenal, home base for a gang of outlaws who take jobs from clients they call Mr Brown.
So, we know this bland man with strange eyes is dodgy even before things start to get…weird.
“His shoes looked like the kind with hard leather soles, but his footsteps made no sounds at all. No one spoke.
She heard a sound beneath the silence. A rushing waterfall sort of sound, made up of millions of tiny and precise noises. Like clockwork, or the sound a dashing spider’s legs would make across a marble floor.
...
There was a glint of green, a flash—and Sybil’s fangs were buried in Mr. Brown’s hand. He recoiled with a hiss and dragged the serpent with him. Dawn felt the tug, as if Sybil was wrapped around her heart and not her arm.
Mr. Brown’s hand began to crumble. His skin curled and blackened, like paper held to a flame. Mr. Brown watched it with a colorless fascination, as if watching something important happen to someone else. There was no meat beneath, no bones. There was instead a wrongness of dark wire, churning like the innards of a clock. Sybil’s fangs stuck in the tangle of the mechanism beneath his dissolving flesh.
“You see,” Mr. Brown said. Then his wire fingers were not fingers anymore. Whiplike serrated filaments as finely jointed as a necklace chain burst from their previously fingerlike arrangement. Sybil tried to draw back, but the wires wrapped around her iridescent body, cutting, carving, squeezing. Dawn screamed. Maybe Sybil screamed, too. She couldn’t hear.
Brown was inside her, through those whips, crawling through her mind. She heard his voice, the darkness of him whispering in a strange tongue–strange for now, but the pain would teach her, and understanding would unwork her from the inside out and make her theirs.”
Not remotely disturbing. Either the visual, or the fact that it can attack Sybil, who is a) not corporeal, and b) is kind of the embodiment of Craft. Mr Brown’s weird metal insides contain power.
I have over 4,000 words of quotes about the various Mr Browns, but I’ll spare you a mass recitation. Here is a summary of what we learn about this first Mr Brown at the Arsenal:
He appears unremarkable, a generically bland white man who probably has a normal family who do normal activities - not the kind of man you’d expect at a top secret mercenary base seeking a skazzerai shard
There’s something mechanical about the way he moves
He represents a group that wants out of the dying world: “Our only way out is up. That is the proper goal. To achieve it, we need the shard, unencumbered.”
He doesn’t make normal sounds of movement, but beneath his silence there’s a sound “made up of millions of tiny and precise notes. Like clockwork, or the sound a dashing spider’s legs would make across a marble floor.”
Up close he smells of soap and hot iron
Beneath his skin he is formed of a mass of churning dark wire, which can viciously attack people (and whatever Sybil and Dawn are)
When the wire strangles Dawn, she can hear Mr Brown “crawling through her mind, the darkness of him whispering in a strange tongue.”
When parts of Mr Brown’s body are broken off they bleed rainbow oil but keep moving, and when his entire chest is torn open and “spindly metal legs darker than black” unfurl, his human limps lie limp but he still watches Dawn with an impassive face
He doesn’t feel like a god despite his power
Dawn realises he is something like Sybil (the Craft-god she melded with) who is murderous, new to the human form, uncomfortable with time, and doesn’t like gods
Mal later says “Brown, his people, they needed someone like me. They wanted artifacts, joss, bits of dead gods, bits of live ones. They wanted to sow havoc in the markets, take a lot of soul from a lot of rich assholes. I was okay with that, even if it meant some other assholes making more. I never saw anything like… that.”
This first Mr Brown is squashed by a god Dawn raises from the depths. Though, of course, at this point we don’t realise he is only the first and not the only. It’s another 80 or so pages before we see a picture of another one - “The face was not the same, but everything else was: the gait, the angle of the head, the way he moved. Dawn knew that with a close enough angle she would see the gentle eyes and hear the ticking of gears. ‘Mr Brown.’” - and then a further 60 pages to see another in the flesh, so to speak.
Our characters have no clue what he is or who he’s working for, and I confess on my first read I missed the obvious clues.
We only consistently hear of one metal that’s ‘darker than black’, the touch of which weaves voices through your mind, that resembles clockwork - or spiders.
The churning metal wire within Mr Brown is skazzerai metal.
We see more to confirm this later in the book:
“The gray man lay in coils around her and upon her, the wires and whips of him not iron, after all, but bits of highly ordered carbon in some kind of graphene-derived suspension fluid. At four-hundred-factor magnification, the filings reminded her of the workings of a watch: tiny wheels and gears and springs and hooked, impossibly fine.
That was what he had been, inside the suit and the sack of human skin.”
This precisely matches the description we see in Tara’s visions in the edge storm while crossing the Badlands in Dead Country:
“to those spears, those strands not made form iron after all but from thin spun carbon tubes clasped round with shadow gathered from the star-depths where they walk, and at each spear’s heart a hole the shape of a being that once was something not altogether unlike human—
when we cut one down and carved it open we found tissues fossilized, but by machines not minerals, tiny clockworks with hooks and spires and springs, more complex the closer we looked, like a trellis grown through with vines, they were unmistakably organic figures,”
(Sidenote: as somebody who typically hates body horror, I appreciate Gladstone’s skill at imagery but gods, I could do with not rereading these sections. You probably won’t see too many quotes describing this side of Craft or the skazzerai because I am desperately fighting not to rip into my own skin.)
Looking at these descriptions side-by-side, it seems quite clear that whatever is inside the grey men is skazzerai metal.
Now that doesn’t mean they are actually skazzerai. We know a bit more about what skazzerai actually are now, which will form the bulk of another article. But the grey men are undeniably connected to the skazzerai; victims, one could call them, or perhaps hosts? We saw in Dead Country that people who became entwined with the metal spears of the skazzerai seemed to have made a deal to give themselves over, and live on in ecstasy. Those who were ‘rescued’ tried to reconnect with the metal they were torn from.
The grey men we see in Wicked Problems don’t seem to entirely match that description, but there could be many reasons for that. Perhaps this is a different type of union with skazzerai metal. Perhaps is because there is so little of the metal left; we know that Grimwald attempted to find and secure all remaining skazzerai iron after the last end of the world, so there can’t be all that much lying around.
Whatever the background of how they were formed, it is clear that the grey men are skazzerai connected, skazzerai infected. If once they were people, they aren’t any more; and perhaps they never were. Perhaps the bland face of Mr Brown was a mask, and never a person.
Why are the gray men so frightening?
There are a lot of objectively terrifying powers in the Craft Sequence. Craftsfolk themselves, particularly once they become Deathless Kings, can break the world without too much difficulty. There are literal gods. There are demons breaking through reality, and vampires under the sea. Unkillable paladins of half a dozen pantheons. There are two giant Serpents which once broke a continent in half, couldn’t be defeated by the King in Red with all his power. and, oh yes, basically defeated the skazzerai the last time they came.
Well, let’s take a look at our old pals Aquel and Achal:
“It leapt from the cavern wall, a shape like a splayed and many-fingered hand a hundred feet across, all writhing chains. It landed on the Serpent’s scales and burrowed in.
Fusion-flare blood sprayed from Aquel’s wounds, melting glassy troughs into the cavern wall. She roared and burned white, but the spider-thing on her neck dug its legs in deeper. He expected it to melt, but it grew instead, as if it drained her heat. Where its legs touched the diamond scales, they buckled, cooled, and cracked.
…
Above, Aquel slithered skyward to join her embattled sister. She scraped her bulk against the stone but could not dislodge the black iron things–there were more of them now, or else the one that struck her had budded others. They carved in deep, leaving trenches in the lava-flesh beneath which fire surged like a muscle.
Where the Serpent bled, it cooled, and the spider-things grew larger, darker, in their feast.”
Guard and shield us from the fire, as the old Quechal would have prayed. These things can not only battle the Serpents but deeply injure them, and seemingly suck power from them like a tick on a mammal.
Away from the Serpents, Elayne only survives an attack through the sacrifice of an overpowered golem and by burning through some of her strongest defences, built up over decades, in a mere 73 seconds. Most Craftsfolk would have been killed. Dawn is able to defeat the first Mr Brown by literally raising a dead god from the sea. Caleb manages to channel Kos’ power and then abruptly drop it, to defeat some of the grey men while also nearly sacrificing himself (as per usual for Caleb). Temoc literally burns through several of his remaining gods to the point that they die.
The rest in the cavern are killed by Kopil tearing open holes in reality and letting dead gods feed on the grey men.
This is extreme stuff. A few more grey men, a handful fewer of the gang fighting back, and they could probably have destroyed the Serpents. In a few battles, they came close to destroying the King in Red, Temoc, Caleb, Mal, Dawn and Elayne. Not to mention the grey men in Chartegnon attacking Tara, Kai and Shale with the help of Clarity.
Ah yes. Let’s speak about Clarity.
Who is controlling the gray men?
“Three figures stood in the open hatch. Two wore grey suits, grey ties. The one the left held a Wrecker by the spine.
Between them stood a woman. Ghostlight traced the contours of her black velvet dress.
Tara recognised her. She remembered that dress under the opera house chandeliers as she ascended the staircase. One strap still hung off her shoulder. She wore gloves now, it seemed; her arms were coated in iridescent blood from the pop of triceps down. A gold disc the size of a child’s palm hung from a choker at her throat. Her countenance was regal, the swell of her lower lip dimpled by the tip of a glistening fang.
The vampire flowed across the threshold.
…
“As to why I am here–don’t you know, Tara Abernathy? Only one thing is happening. I bear the blood and the chalice. I am Clarity. I bid you welcome to the oldest war.”
…
The suits dived into the water.
Tara had thought they were vampires, too, but as they moved, they came apart. Their arms unspooled into whips of wire. Their chests opened and a nest of sharp and glinting cables burst free. Squid limbs caught them, but the wires of their bodies spiralled along the arms, and carved, and cut.”
Until this point we had seen the grey men operating alone. Now, however, they are with a vampire - a particularly powerful one. It seems clear in this interaction that Clarity, not the grey men, is in charge of the encounter. She is the one who speak to Tara, who flows across the threshold, who bids Tara welcome to ‘the oldest war’.
So who exactly is Clarity?
We haven’t, to our knowledge, met Clarity before this book, but I reserve the right to go back on that in future. We have met vampires before (see this article for more info on Craft vampires), but primarily in the person of Captain Raz Pelham, who seems to be an unusual example of the species.
Clarity is quite something else.
She’s a vampire, clearly. In the encounter with Tara and Squid Saint Tiffany, she seems incredibly powerful. Like other vampires she reacts badly to the sun, but "even as the fire ate her Tara saw new pink flesh grow back around the age-dark bones.” Tara also tells us that vampires are usually starving but “Tara had never seen anything like her—so flush, so full.”
So, Clarity is a vampire, very powerful, and very old. She killed Grimwald, and kills Tiffany - AKA two beings who had a chance of defeating the skazzerai. She’s working alongside the grey men, who are imbued with skazzerai metal.
She catches up with Tara, Kai and Shale at the Grimwald spire after Kai does her vision quest. She says only a couple of sentences but they tell us a lot:
Now you understand the great path
We shall rise eternal to the joyous dark
Also she has wings now.
This sounds very religious in language, so I anticipate we’ll learn something about vampire religion in future books. However, there’s also something about that language that feels…familiar.
Rising into the dark, of space. Leaving the planet behind. It sounds a bit Denovo-ish, but there’s something else tugging at my mind. Who else has said something similar?
We can connect Clarity to another character through a key part of her physical description: the gold medallion. Tara recognised the dress and the medallion from the opera-house in Chartegnon, but to a keen-eyed reader we saw the medallion quite a bit earlier.
“The poolside bar, he noticed, was open. Two figures waited there: a young man in rust-red robes and a woman in a suit, whom he hoped he did not recognise. There was a second woman on the pool deck, too, pale, dark-haired, and gorgeous in a quarter ounce of bathing suit, draped across a deck chair. She was wearing big dark glasses and a gold medallion at her neck, and might have been sunbathing if there had been a sun.”
That’s quite a bit of description to give a character who doesn’t then feature in the next few chapters. This is right before Tara, Caleb, Abelard and Kai all join up in their quest, so the reader is distracted by that anticipation, but it feels odd even at the time. And then later, one connects the gold medallion, and the sunbathing without sun.
Clarity was there, right at the start of the mission.
On billionaire playboy philanthropist Eberhardt Jax’s boat.
Jax, who we last saw in Ruin of Angels, funding the trip to orbit where Kai obtained a recording of the skazzerai.
Jax, who explicitly said he wants leaving the world to be an option.
Jax, who started his investment pitch to Kai with the words, “There is only one thing happening. The planet is about to die.” Words Clarity echoes in Wicked Problems.
What the hell is Jax up to?
And that’s what we’ll cover next time, in “Who is Eberhardt Jax, and what does he want?”
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