It's volume five and the major themes of this series have become actualised, or perhaps just become so flippin' obvious that even someone like me, reading for the cool characters and relentless plot twists and reversals, finally actually noticed them. Sacrifice and violence, both personal and political, selfish and selfless, whether any sacrifice is truly selfless, whether all violence is fundamentally corrupting. Plenty of people doing horrible violent things for supposedly noble reasons. Marko and the Robot Prince chasing their families, Dengo murdering and kidnapping to stop an unjust war and trying to join up with Revolutionaries who do more of the same on an even larger scale, and Sophie and the gang off looking for dragon sperm to save the Will and, yes, I really love this series.