A review by thearbiter89
The Cold Commands, by Richard K. Morgan

4.0

What it's about: The story of the three antiheroes, Ringil, Archeth and Egar continues. Ringil cuts his way into the centre of yet another dwenda conspiracy, Egar gets himself into successively worse situations, and Archeth, having received a dire warning, mounts an expedition to find a lost Kiriath city in the North.

Notes:

• This is an odd middle novel. It feels less like the continuation of a first part and more like the start of a sequel series to the first book. Part of the reason was because the first novel could have been a standalone work with a number of minor modifications. The Cold Commands also opens with the characters, particularly Ringil, in very different circumstances - Ringil himself has developed magical powers the provenance of which is not made clear until quite a ways into the book, and is now an outlaw that hunts down and kills slavers.



• In that sense, it feels a bit disjointed at first, because of the introduction of new world elements that were not really present in the first book. The ikinri'ska magic that Ringil seems to have picked up out of nowhere, the vague portents and weird things that keep happening to him, and his mysterious vanguard of wraiths - the cold commands of the book - that show up at just the right time to slaughter his enemies when he's on the verge of being overwhelmed, and the weird time-warped relationship between him and the mysterious, out-of-nowhere Hjel and his band of followers.



• Clearly, the deities and powers-that-be in the book are trying very hard to set Ringil up to be the hero-savior keystone to basically solve all the accumulating plot-threads he's weaving together - power-leveling him through tribulation after tribulation and giving him all sorts of weird powers, even as the series tries to subvert the very idea of there being a world-savior type hero. Ringil suffers from an extreme form of plot armour, emerging unscathed even after a dwenda bites a chunk of his face off - but it could be construed, to a certain extent, to be deliberately seeded as part of the meta-narrative. But the way in which he rebounds is a testament to his pure, shonen-like bloody-mindedness.



• The other two threads featuring Egar and Archeth aren't nearly as weird, but they do take the series in interesting new directions. The full weirdness of the Kiriath wasn't quite apparent in the first novel, but there is significant development in the second that really hints that they are essentially a technologically advanced race that just keeps up appearances with the barbarian locals in an effort to "uplift" them to their own standards of civilization. There's even that intimation that their helmsman servants are just glorified AIs. I have a weakness for that sort of thing.

Verdict: Disjointed, hyper-violent, and initially confusing, The Cold Commands nevertheless opens up enough questions to keep the reader invested.

I give this: 4/5 space crabs