Imagine, if you will, that you’ve spent the last couple of weeks building a magical defence of your hometown, a town you loathe but to which you’re connected by blood and birth; that you fought a battle against powerful enemies, and won, only for them to abduct the one person to whom those magical defences are tied.
You cross a vast wilderness with your new apprentice, and your new lover (not the same person), only for a magical storm to whip up right in your path. If you go around it, you’ll be too late to save the man and thus your town. If you go through it, you’ll probably lose your mind.
That’s the situation in which we find Tara Abernathy midway through Dead Country. And Tara being Tara, she doesn’t give up. This is, as an old enemy once said, not a woman who knows her limits. She’ll go for the long-shot solution.
Thus, the edge storm.
But, I hear you ask, what actually is an edge storm?
Have I mentioned recently how much I love Gladstone’s worldbuilding?
Thus, we have the stakes. To save Pastor Merrott, they need to cross the edge storm. This can work in their favour, making them cross distances faster. Yet, they could lose themselves in other worlds, other lives, other stories. Whatever they hear or see in the storm, they must ignore it or risk losing everything.
And so, our heroes enter the storm. In doing so, they learn more than ever before about the skazzerai and what’s coming for them - and the world.
This next quote is very long, and could be longer but I cut out a bit for a later section. Bear with me, it’s all important.
Well.
Let’s, uh, let’s unpack that, shall we?
The end of the world is coming
The skazzerai are coming, that’s for sure. The edge storm is supposed to show you all possible futures, but now it shows only one - the Domain, the world of the Craft, destroyed by these immense beings from the end of space. The Domain, a world of necromancy and lives after death, is “deeper than dead” from the battle. The great skyspires of Craftsfolk, homes and business and machines of war from around the world, gathered to fight and were destroyed.
Craftsfolk, who defeated real, literal gods in the last century, destroyed. And if this world is deeper than dead, presumably the rest of the gods went with them - Kos, Seril, the Blue Lady, Ajaia, Firekeeper, every god we have names for and more that we don’t.
But what killed them?
What are the skazzerai?
We already knew they looked spider-like and are utterly immense. But now we have a clearer visual. The skyspires were destroyed by “jet-black spears like holes in space”, which “sank into the soil … into bedrock and magma” and “towered into the sky.”
My first thought was that these spears were legs of the spider-like creatures, but on a closer read the spears seem to be the web in which our space spiders exist. Looking up, you see “where the black spears join and twist into an iron web, to those great depths where self-assembling many-legged thousand-eyed structures the size of small moons and framed of bone and iron climb and curl and feed and pulse in their cold common dream--”
The space spiders, the skazzerai are up there: self-assembling, many-legged, thousand-eyed structures, framed of bone and iron. Are the skazzerai alive? Are they post-death, in the way Denovo planned to step beyond life and death and become a god in Three Parts Dead? Are they machines? Are they all of these things at the same time?
Are the images of spiders passed down from time immemorial a depiction of the fabricated bodies housing great Craft-intelligences? Perhaps the only way these great beings can interact with the physical world? We know from previous books that gods struggle to understand and interact with the real world - think of Seril struggling to make Tara a snack in Four Roads Cross: “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to do things with matter. Every activity on this plane involves so many counterbalancing forces and microscopic, hells, quantum interactions” (99).
If the skazzerai are powerful enough to break the world, destroy gods and Craftsfolk deeper than dead, they are likely to outstrip the capabilities of any natural body and require something else to work through.
(If you’ve read the book - which you should have, my god, SPOILERS) you’ll see where I’m going with this.
If not, well. You’re in for a treat with part three.
What are the skazzerai doing?
The skazzerai don’t seem to be eating people in the way we’d think in our world. We’ve heard they smell us, they’re hungry etc, but as they seem to be Craft beings without traditional physical forms it’s not animalistic hunger and eating. Rather, it seems they’re draining something. Life, energy, soulstuff, Craft… whatever you want to call it, that seems to be how they make the world deeper than dead.
Because, of course, we see that the great webs in which the skazzerai exist actually hold sometimes still-living (to some quality of ‘living’) beings:
So, organic beings from other planets are found in each spear, each strand of the skazzerai’s web, the web in which ancient, hungry, immense Craft beings eat. It sounds to me that the skazzerai feed off the soulstuff of victims in the web, like spiders suck blood.
But, crucially, it seems those victims want to be there. Patients rescued from the spears want to go back. And we hear that “survivors” - which I take as those who were never part of the web, but I could be wrong - “claim they heard an offer, a deal. Surrender all. Gain all.”
Now, that sounds even more Craftlike to me.
The Craft is all about deals, bargains, agreements. Its foundational principles are necromantic contract law. It appears the skazzerai have made their own deal with their “victims”. We get your soulstuff and you get bliss forever.
Surrender all - we have you, all of you, for all time.
Gain all - but you’ll like it.
This also sounds very similar to something we saw in Ruin of Angels, part of the Iskari religion. Kai and Tara see a man “hung from the far wall, limbs wrapped in octopoid arms” (251) who they think is being tortured. However, when the instruments of ‘torture’ are removed, he begs for their return:
The Craft and Applied Theology are the same thing through different means. The union with the Iskari squid god could be very similar to an ecstatic union of Craft - and sounds very like what we read of a victim of the skazzerai, crying out “--of bliss and bliss and bliss forever and don’t stop cutting, oh please don’t–”
Which brings us to the next section.
Skazzerai, the Craft, and the future of Deathless Kings
We’ve often seen the Craft described similarly to the skazzerai. In Tara’s first scene she sucks the energy out of an oasis and some vultures to sustain her own life. In Three Parts Dead we’re told “Gerhardt’s first experiments created half the desert we call the Northern Gleb” (261). At the end of Two Serpents Rise, Caleb says “The Craft makes Dresediel Lex possible. But use the Craft to farm, and the soil dies. Use the Craft to drill wells, and the land itself sinks” (344). We hear time and time again that “high-energy Craft” sucks the life out of everything around it, and this life, or energy, or soulstuff, is not easily replenished - it’s deeper than dead.
Are the skazzerai the logical, inevitable endpoint of the Craft?
Way back in book one, Denovo talks about leaving the planet to stride among the stars, asking Elayne “[do] you think we’ll still be human when we get there?” (257).
Is this what he meant?
Perhaps. You’ll have to tune in for our next article, for which I’m wavering between two titles: what Denovo did in the desert, or, Denovo, the Body, and the Others.
Either way, you won’t want to miss it. See you there, hopefully soon.
What do you think? Let me know - and don’t forget you can subscribe to be the first to hear about new articles and fun projects in the pipeline.