The Clockwork world, aka the Temple of the White Rat world, hosts a series of adventure/romance novels by T. Kingfisher. It’s admittedly light reading, which is a thing we need right now, and I will not apologize for a bit of self-soothing. The series isn’t finished yet and as it has progressed, the plots have gotten thinner and the romance thicker. At least one plot is tissue-paper thin, heavy on desire but incorporating loyalty as a saving subtext.
All of which is okay. I remember being told that Romance is the only genre built on happiness and its attainment and, with that perspective, my appreciation of Romance has risen over time. What was once entirely dismissible now requires a second look and some thought.
The conventions and machinery of Romance are well-honed, and Kingfisher makes use of them through the whole series. I’m not going to dwell much on the crossed signals, the misplaced assumptions, the yearning that never seems to land until the end when the lovers finally speak from their hearts and not their heads. They’re ancient tools: Shakespeare used them in Much Ado About Nothing to great effect after the Romans were done with them, and Jane Austen employed them throughout her career….and what Austen did was copied by many writers ranging from terrific through average through mediocre all the way to godawful. It’s a long arc, and here we are, definitely not on the godawful side of the spectrum.
What I propose to do is to focus less on story tonight and more on what we can glean about the world that houses both the Temple of the White Rat (and all the other temples) and the Clocktaurs. I’ve scoured the Intertubes and haven’t found anyone who’s written about that. So, if it’s okay with you, that’s what I want to look at. We can, of course, discuss any other aspect of the stories that strike you, but what has interested me most on re-reading these books is the worldbuilding. Kingfisher is remarkably restrained in giving out information about the Clockwork world, trailing hints like breadcrumbs; our innate sense of the world is more complete than what we actually know about it. Therefore, starting with:
Clockwork Boys
The novel’s setup is informed by the D&D quest, and it’s a hoot of a cast: a forger, a damaged paladin, an assassin — all convicted criminals — and one 19 year old cleric/scholar, all tasked with a suicide mission. (If you’ve ever followed Kingfisher’s live-tweets of her gaming sessions, you’ll understand that she’s reining it in here.)
Our unlikely protagonists set out from the Dowager’s City, a city which is never named, traveling to Anuket City to do what no one else has managed to do: stop the Clockwork Boys that are rampaging through the countryside and chewing up the Dowager’s army.
“The problem is the Anuket troops — the Clockwork Boys, as they call ‘em. As fast as the army cuts them down — which frankly isn’t very fast — more show up. They’re not human. We don’t know how to stop them except sheer brute dismemberment.”
Slate could feel her eyes watering. She snuffled.
“Here.” The Captain dug through papers and came up with a hunk of debris. It looked like a cross between the inside of a clock and a piece of driftwood. Tiny gears and cog-wheels encrusted the sides like barnacles.
The knight took the object and turned it over in his fingers. “What is this?”
“Part of a Clockwork Boy. It used to move, but we boiled it for a few hours and it finally stopped.”
“Are these made of bone?”
“We don’t know. The alchemists are still fighting over it. Half of them think it’s organic, and the other half think someone carved each little piece. They use a lot of words that I don’t think even they understand.”
“Hmm.” Caliban handed the piece back to the Captain, and wiped his hand on his pant leg.
“Anyway.” The Captain set it down on his desk. “They’ve got to be making them somewhere — or building them, or breeding them, or summoning them, or the Dreaming God knows what.”
— Clockwork Boys, pp. 24-25
The Clockwork Boys are an entirely unknowable menace. They’ve created a no man’s land between the two cities. They’re destroying the army and murdering everything that moves. Other teams assembled to investigate and destroy the Clockwork Boys have disappeared and are presumed dead. Sending this unlikely quartet is the Dowager’s Hail Mary, her last hope.
What ensues is a classic road-trip/teambuilding exercise, and an excellent introduction to the series. Our heroes meet dangers minor and major, hitherto unknown species like the rune and the gnoles, and more than one encounter with magical menaces, as well as the realities of traveling; it’s a miracle the four don’t kill each other on the way. In all, Clockwork Boys Is a good introduction to a world that begins in a dungeon and expands outward, book after book.
So what do we know about this world? It’s built on the bones of a much older civilization, one entirely lost to the inhabitants of the scattered city-states. Just think about how rare it is to have all memory of a civilization disappear entirely. And when that happens, it’s because the material traces of that civilization have fallen into ruin. Usually folk memory lives on.
That’s not what happens here. All knowledge of the earlier civilization is gone, but everyone knows there was an earlier civilization. And there are plenty of working artifacts still around:
People said that the Dowager’s keep was built on the ruins of an older building. People said that there were rooms no one had opened in a thousand years, filled with old wonders from civilizations dead and gone.
— page 9
Stick a pin in that — I’m sure at some point it’ll come back. And it can’t have been all that ancient. What ended it? It’s a paradox, and one that upends our common assumptions about civilizational collapse.
We don’t know anything about the old world but that it existed, and left stuff lying around. What about the current one?
We have gods and demons. Caliban, a paladin of the Temple of the Dreaming God, gets possessed by a demon during an exorcism and commits a mass murder, after which he is exorcised and now has a dead demon rotting in his soul and gibbering at him in inconvenient moments.
Other gods at this point? Well, there’s the Many-Armed God, patron apparently of scholars? He’s depicted as having twelve arms, six holding books and six holding pens. His followers are celibate, scholarly and misogynistic. (At least, they start that way.)
In Anuket City there’s something called a Shadow Market and a Grey Church, and something about crow cages that Slate dreads (p. 145).
And there’s magic. How much and of what sort is unclear, but there are powers: the rune demon that summons rats to ratchet up her power is one:
The power was driving the dance, but the dance was feeding the power. Caliban didn’t know how much energy it took to make a dead rat dance — it didn’t come up much at the temple — but all those bodies dancing together were doing something.
Like water through a millwheel. Somehow they’re getting more out than they’re putting in.
That shouldn’t be possible.
— page 167
The rune demon, who Caliban realizes is both incredibly powerful and incredibly subtle, drops a big hint in our laps, even though we won’t know what it means for quite some time:
She glowered. “Not know clokwerk, me. Know demons. Demons come, rune territory, my territory. Kill rune. Want kill me. Know, you?”
— page 170
We know the rune shaman has a demon in her, but apparently the shaman has a certain power of her own:
Caliban felt a fleeting admiration for the strength of the old shaman, completely dominated by the demon, yet holding the creature here nonetheless.
I wish I could have known her.
He looked up into the rune’s face, hearing the demon rant, and he could have sworn, for a fleeting instant, that something looked out of her face and winked at him.
— page 185
In addition to an ancient civilization that left artifacts; gods, demons, shamans; wonderworkers like Slate’s grandmother and the tattoo artist who can ply some sort of talents to make small magics happen, there’s the Vagrant Hills, which are known to be strange and magical in ways that no one understands but that the locals simply accept:
Then they had all argued some more, until Caliban had simply walked out into the road and asked a woman with trays of bread on her head where they were.
“The west gate of Anuket City,” he said, returning to them. “And she looked at me like I was an idiot and I said we’d been in the Vagrant Hills, and she said, ‘Ohhh...’ and offered me a sweet bun.”
— page 223
So the strange magic of the Vagrant Hills is a known factor among the people.
More esoteric are the wonder-engines:
[Learned Edmund] was stroking the material of the statue, which up close didn’t look like stone as much as it looked like ivory, except that was impossible because you couldn’t get a piece of ivory the size of a house, and if there were any seams, they were hidden well.
— page 198
Learned Edmund reports that only about thirty wonder-engines, artifacts of an older civilization have been found, and they render
“Miracles. Marvels. Completely useless things. It doesn’t seem to follow any particular pattern.”
…
“On on the coast turns salt water to fresh water. One in Moldoban incinerates everything they put into it — they worshipped it as a god with human sacrifices for many years. Now it’s a waste disposal system … And there’s one that, if you put in gold, turns it into fresh pears. I’m not sure how they figured that out.”
— pages 198-203
We know now that there’s a wonder engine somewhere in the Vagrant Hills. I wouldn’t be surprised if that didn’t come back into play at some point. And you just know now what’s waiting in Anuket City. And possibly elsewhere in this world.
Finally, there are the Clockwork Boys themselves, or clocktaurs, as Grimehug names them:
Down the road, three abreast, a column of Clockwork Boys came marching.
They were huge. They were horrible.
There were a great many of them.
The basic shape was centaur-like. Some had four legs, some had six. They stood between eight and ten feet tall.
…
Gears. They’re covered in gears, like barnacles. It’s how they move, somehow — but it doesn’t make sense. They’re alive, but they’re a made thing, but nobody could have made that, surely —
She understood now why the artificers were tying themselves in knots.
The creatures could not exist, but they did.
— page 121
Everything is set up for The Wonder-Engine, the second half of a duology that is actually one long book and which is for next week. Learned Edmund, who has indeed learned to respect Slate and is growing into his role as a traveling priest/doctor/confessor/scholar has his quest — to look for his missing mentor, Brother Amadai, while the other three set out to learn about the clocktaurs and stop them or die trying. Surprises await, and more of the universe is to be revealed, and we’ll learn whether Brenner will, indeed, die laughing, as the rabbit foretold.
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