The story so far... Full Fathom Five
Last time on ‘Craft Sequence Story So Far’… the world learned that Seril is back from the dead, and tried to send her to the grave again. Tara met the Dresediel Lex crew, Seril regained rights over Alt Coulumb’s skies, and Denovo’s allies tried to steal his skull - and knowledge. Read the article here, and then join us for FULL FATHOM FIVE.
This post contains extensive spoilers for Full Fathom Five, some spoilers for the rest of the series, and expects the reader to have already read all currently published Craft Sequence books.
Full Fathom Five
“If you live and work in the Old World, gods demand sacrifices to support themselves. If you’re in the New World, the Deathless Kings and their councils charge heavy fees to fund police forces, utilities, public works. If you travel from place to place, a horde of gods and goddesses and Craftsmen chase after pieces of your soul. You can give them what they want—or you can build an idol with us, on Kavekana, and keep your soulstuff safe here. The idol remains, administered by our priests, and you receive the benefits of its grace wherever you go, no more subject to gods or Deathless Kings than any other worshipper of a foreign deity.”
...
“You were wrong before, when you called me a Craftswoman. I am a priest.”
“Of what god?”
“Of no gods,” she said. “I’m a priest of Kavekana’ai.”
“I know your Order,” Margot said, “by reputation. Purveyors of false faith and strained promises.”
“We’re not so bad once you get to know us.”
Dramatis Personae
Our leads
KAI POHALA - Priest-slash-offshore-banker for the Sacerdotal Order of Kavekana. Builds idols and worships them. Loves her island, but doesn’t necessarily see it for what it is.
IZZA JALAI - Refugee street kid who fled from the Gleb after her community was massacred. Storyteller of the street kid gods.
Wait, what are you doing here?
CAT ELLE - Appears to be a washed up addict on the run from her goddess. Secretly on a mission for Seril.
ELAYNE KEVARIAN - Craftswoman for Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, representing the Grimwalds and investigating the death of Seven Alpha.
TEO BATAN - Potential pilgrim to Kavekana’ai, secretly part of Seril’s heist.
THE SACERDOTAL ORDER OF KAVEKANA
JACE KOL - CEO (for lack of a better turn) of the Sacerdotal Order of Kavekana. Working for the greater good, or so he claims.
MARA CEYLA - A fellow priest, whose idol dies at the start of the book.
TWILLING - Leads the sales function of Kavekana’ai, bringing in pilgrims (and their soulstuff)
SEVEN ALPHA / THE BLUE LADY - An idol in the pool of Kavekana’ai that seemed to come to life; actually a mask for the real goddess in the pool, the Blue Lady. Not quite dead yet.
MAKAWE’S REST
MAKO - Blind and scarred God Wars veteran living above a poetry slam bar at the beach. Secret identity.
EDMOND MARGOT - Poet from Iskar, unintentional prophet for the Blue Lady.
EVE - Mako’s landlady / bartender at Makawe’s Rest.
Assorted others
NICK - Street kid, Izza’s closest friend and ally until she decides to leave.
CLAUDE - Kai’s ex. A cop, broken by being Penitent.
M GRIMWALD - Client of Kavekana’ai, whose idol drowned at the beginning of the book.
IVY, ELLEN, JET, SOPHIE, VEL, CASSIE, SETH - Other street kids.
What happens in Full Fathom Five?
On the tropical island of Kavekana, theologian investment bankers build idols for the world’s richest to store their soulstuff off shore. KAI POHALA is one such priest, responsible for building and worshipping a portfolio of idols. The idols live - for a given value of ‘living’ - in a deep otherworldly pool in the caldera of a volcano; Kai remade her body in the same pool, and has unusual control over its unreality. When colleague MARA CEYLA has a failed idol that must be terminated, Kai makes the rash decision to dive into the pool and attempt to save it. She almost succeeds, before her boss JACE KOL tears her back up into the world. The idol, nicknamed SEVEN ALPHA dies as scheduled, and Kai winds up in hospital.
Across the island, street kid refugee IZZA JALAI uses what little is left of her soul to buy religious incense to mourn her god, THE BLUE LADY. The Blue Lady is just the latest in a series of gods worshipped by the street kids who has died, killed in their theology by Smiling Jack. This is the last time she’ll bury a god, Izza decides. She’s going to leave the island. She can’t go back where she came from, as the Gleb is burning and everyone she knew there dead, but she’ll go somewhere.
From her hospital bed, deep in nightmares, Kai is interrogated by ELAYNE KEVARIAN, the Craftswoman hired by Seven Alpha’s account holders, the GRIMWALDS. Because Kai tried to save Seven Alpha, Kevarian is investigating whether Mara and the Order as a whole were negligent in their duties towards her client. When Kai tries to go back to work, she’s reassigned to work directly with pilgrims rather than build idols. She’s not happy to put it lightly.
Izza wanders the streets drunk, and comes across CAT ELLE fighting Penitents - the terrifying stone enforcers of Kavekana, each hosting a criminal and re-educating them. She intervenes, and helps an injured and seemingly drugged up Cat back to her secret temple warehouse. Izza helps Cat through her recovery while stealing as much soulstuff as she can to leave for the other street kids when she leaves the island.
Kai goes back to her old haunt, Makawe’s rest, a bar and slam poetry venue by the beach. The proprieter, MAKO, is an old friend - God Wars veteran, blind and scarred, with a wicked sense of humour. They watch an Iskari poet, EDMOND MARGOT, fail his way through a set despite being almost divinely inspired mere weeks ago. He’s lost his muse. Yet, somehow when Izza gets in trouble with the police (she’s too young to be locked in a Penitent), Margot gets a vision from his god and goes to help her out. Izza is freaked out - how does this man know about her gods? In payment for his help, he asks her to tell him what happened to The Blue Lady, and she tells him how She died.
Meanwhile, Kai is reluctantly trying to work with pilgrims in the sales wing of her Order. It’s not the best fit. She’s assigned to work with TEO BATAN, a potential client from the Two Serpents Group trying to see if Kavekana would be a good fit for her Concern. She’s a sceptic, and Kai doesn’t try that hard to convince her - yet for some reason Teo keeps coming back.
What in Seril’s name is going on?
Secretly, Kai investigates what happened with Seven Alpha. She comes across Elayne Kevarian and Mara Ceyla in a nightmare, going through the evidence; when she comes to, she find Mara has slipped a notebook into her bag. It helps her investigation, and she sees that there’s a list of people who received grace from Seven Alpha - people who shouldn’t have had access to the pool or its idols. One is Edmond Margot.
Kai asks her police officer ex-boyfriend CLAUDE to keep an eye on Margot while she investigates further, particularly as Mara has now gone missing after a surprise promotion. It’s no good, though - a Penitent murders Margot, and Izza saw it happen. Having previously spied on Kai when she visited Margot, Izza is convinced she was behind it and sneaks into Kai’s house to confront her.
The two discuss what they know, and Izza shows Kai the temple to her gods. Kai realises that Izza, somehow, has replicated the caldera of Kavekana’ai, including the pool of idols. Kai begins putting things together - somehow, the Blue Lady and Seven Alpha were the same. Somehow, the street kids (and Margot) unintentionally broke into the pool with their prayers, and an idol somehow answered, dispensing grace.
Kai needs to get back up the mountain, but her access has been revoked. Easy solution: use Teo. With a client, she’s able to go up the mountain. Izza tells Cat what happened with Margot, and the two of them decide to run away together.
Up the mountain, Kai and Teo have a philosophical chat about the origin of life, how Kai can square away her beliefs with known evolution, and all sorts of excellent Applied Theology information that will make its way into a future How Magic Works article. In the pool, Kai finds example idols based on Teo’s interests and begins her own investigation into what’s going on in the pool.
She makes a horrifying discovery. Seven Alpha, and a dozen idols before her, flared into life and were snuffed out. Murdered. And then Kai sees beyond the idols and discovers a goddess behind them all, trying idols on as faces to reach out from the darkness. Kai asks who She is, when everything goes wrong. Teo drops a bracelet into the pool. The sky turns red. The volcano shudders.
Kai and Teo are arrested. Kai finds out that Jace knew all along, and that he was behind the deaths of the idols. Now that she knows, and isn’t willing to go quietly along with an NDA, he locks her inside a Penitent to be re-educated. He’s done the same to Mara, and locks Teo in one for good measure.
Izza realises what’s happened, and goes to Kai’s friend Mako for help. Somehow, the old man is able to open Kai’s Penitent and save her. He’s about to do the same to Teo’s, when Teo smashes out of it herself - remember the attempted sacrifice in Two Serpents Rise? Well, it’s left her with a few fun powers akin to Caleb’s.
Kai, Teo, and Izza run. Teo leads them out into the sea, to a warded boat - where Cat waits. They were part of a scheme together all along. Cat was sent here by Seril to retrieve a moon shard that had been locked in the pool; Teo dropped in a bracelet as a sort of homing beacon. Together, they break in, retrieve the shard, rescue the Blue Lady, and bring down Jace by calling Elayne Kevarian in - the best deus ex machina one could hope for.
And so the story ends with Izza telling stories of the Blue Lady and rescuing people trapped in Penitents. Kai confronts Mako - he wasn’t just a God Wars veteran who sailed off with the island’s gods. He was the island’s god - Makawe. He returned as a ghost trapped in flesh. He was able to open the Penitents because he made them back before the Wars.
It’s a new dawn for Kavekana, with a new goddess and new theology to build.
“There were all these prophecies,” she said, “about the gods’ return. Unnatural ships would come over the sea, bearing the world’s wealth. Our greatest powers would sing on the seashore before Makawe. Kavekana’ai would be crowned with light. And they’ve all come true, and nobody realised.”
The importance of Full Fathom Five
As discussed in the last article, Full Fathom Five falls in a kind of weird place if you read publication order. In that order, it really feels like you’re missing context, specifically about Cat, Seril, and Teo. The whole time I was reading it I felt sure I’d skipped a book somehow. I always recommend you read Four Roads Cross before this one to have a better grasp of what’s actually going on, and what’s at stake.
As the finale of the numbered books, however, it works perfectly. There’s a natural story progression with Cat and Teo showing up, and it deepens many of the themes already developed - the good and bad of religion and the Craft, the life and death of gods, the impact of the God Wars, the unsatisfactory current state of affairs post-Wars, and the need for a new way forward.
We know the world is breaking bit by bit. We know that the detente at the end of the God Wars isn’t going to last much longer - we’ve seen it across five books, three cities, and twenty years. And that’s just talking about the internal threat! (No skazzerai here, unfortunately).
“You talk as if there’s a war coming.”
“Of course there is. You read the newspapers. Giant serpents over Dresediel Lex. A god killed in Alt Coulumb, and the outbreak there a year later. These aren’t accidents. There’s a story here. And it’s not just the big things, the sudden changes and grand tales. Koschei’s armies fence with the Golden Horde across the steppe—because they’re scared. The Shining Empire stretches its tentacles across the Pax, and Dhisthran armies train in police actions for an invasion they know will come one day. The world’s smaller than ever, and you put too many big things in a small space, and they eye one another wondering who’s biggest. We may be social animals, but our gods are not. They’re hungry, and bloody.”
Jace’s solution - to keep killing idols - wasn’t the right one, but he isn’t wrong about the big problem. The peace of the past few decades won’t hold much longer.
We see this through our characters as well. Kai is a native of Kavekana who has moved with the times and become, for all intents and purposes, an investment banker to keep her island safe. Yet throughout the book she sees the flaws in this system, and when she learns about the Blue Lady something fundamental shifts in her worldview. It’s as though she was in a holding pattern along with her island, and now has the signal to move forward.
Izza is essential to all of this. Unlike the vast majority of our POV characters, Izza is one of the losers of the current world order. She has no power. She lost her entire family and community in a brutal war, and has been on the run ever since. Still a child, she has a jagged edge to keep herself safe. In many ways she’s older than Kai despite being close to half her age.
Years ago in an interview, Gladstone said he wasn’t sure about giving the Craft Sequence a -punk genre title. Faithpunk was the one that had been most discussed, I believe, but he pointed out that -punk subgenres have a requirement that the main characters be on the outside. They’re the ones left behind, not the ones holding the power. Izza is the first character that really exemplifies this, even more than the workers of Alt Coulumb or protestors in the Skittersill. And, if you read in publication order, you also meet her before them.
Izza is the broken world personified. Her past is in tatters, she has no security net other than the faith she built herself, and no future other than being broken by a Penitent. If she runs, she’ll face the same or worse everywhere she goes.
Yet Izza builds a religion. She speaks for a goddess. She’s a prophet of the Blue Lady, and she can rally all the other left behind peoples. She can blaze a brighter future than anyone could have dreamed for her. Much the like the Two Serpents Group, and the Alt Coulumb gang, she can be the path forward, the hope for a future without the current inequalities and power struggles.
So long as nothing else eats her first.
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