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mburnamfink 's review for:
House of Open Wounds
by Adrian Tchaikovsky
House of Open Wounds follows the first book with a skip of a couple of years, and the presence of only one character. Yasnic has been arrested for god-smuggling, and since his prior record says 'miraculous healer', he's given the option of working in an experimental Pallaseen military hospital rather than a short drop.
The hospital is Hell, overseen by a large disgraced Pal called The Butcher. Torturers have the option of showing mercy, the hospital does not. There's no kindness, just unusually good odds of survival thanks to The Butcher's skills with a saw and alchemy, a fire priestess turned surgeon, a plague priest who draws away infection, and a Divinati healer who can take wounds onto herself. Yasnic, now Maric Jack, is entirely superfluous in a magical sense. God is an ornery bastard who won't heal, and the price of God's intervention is impossibly high for soldiers. But Yasnic can carry and bandage and stitch, so he does.
There's a fair bit of amusement with intra-Pal problems between the "specials", the necromancer in charge of the hospital (raw material, you know), her archrival the demonologist, and the golem mechanic, but compared to City of Last Chances most of the other characters don't leave much of an impact. Only Banders, former-Cohort-Broker and a Milo Minderbinder-esque war profiteer, had much interest for me. The battle/casualty scenes go a beat too long; there's a lot of screaming in hell.
The main plot concerns God's private war against Pallaseen discipline. At first uninterested in healing soldiers, when Yasnic is explicitly forbidden from using magic to heal anyone, God decides that he's the one who does the commanding around here. The ordered and devious Pallaseen military mind codifies what kind of violence God prohibits into the "97 Loopholes of God", a fantastic scripture if I say so myself.
However, this is maybe a C plot, against Yasnic's further loss of faith and pursuit of a succubus, which I didn't care for at all, and the military situation between the Pals and an opponent organized and powerful enough to slow their war machine.
The hospital is Hell, overseen by a large disgraced Pal called The Butcher. Torturers have the option of showing mercy, the hospital does not. There's no kindness, just unusually good odds of survival thanks to The Butcher's skills with a saw and alchemy, a fire priestess turned surgeon, a plague priest who draws away infection, and a Divinati healer who can take wounds onto herself. Yasnic, now Maric Jack, is entirely superfluous in a magical sense. God is an ornery bastard who won't heal, and the price of God's intervention is impossibly high for soldiers. But Yasnic can carry and bandage and stitch, so he does.
There's a fair bit of amusement with intra-Pal problems between the "specials", the necromancer in charge of the hospital (raw material, you know), her archrival the demonologist, and the golem mechanic, but compared to City of Last Chances most of the other characters don't leave much of an impact. Only Banders, former-Cohort-Broker and a Milo Minderbinder-esque war profiteer, had much interest for me. The battle/casualty scenes go a beat too long; there's a lot of screaming in hell.
The main plot concerns God's private war against Pallaseen discipline. At first uninterested in healing soldiers, when Yasnic is explicitly forbidden from using magic to heal anyone, God decides that he's the one who does the commanding around here. The ordered and devious Pallaseen military mind codifies what kind of violence God prohibits into the "97 Loopholes of God", a fantastic scripture if I say so myself.
However, this is maybe a C plot, against Yasnic's further loss of faith and pursuit of a succubus, which I didn't care for at all, and the military situation between the Pals and an opponent organized and powerful enough to slow their war machine.