Notorious Sorcerer (Part 4)
STATS
Title: Notorious Sorcerer
Series: The Burnished City (Book 1)
Author(s): Davinia Evans
Genre: Fantasy fiction
First Printing: September 2022
Publisher: Orbit
Rating: 3/10
SPOILER WARNING
Mild spoilers will be necessary to properly break down this story. I will include “Heavy Spoilers” in the heading for any section where further detail is required. I will keep the first paragraph of section as spoiler-free as possible in case you want to skim and then read the book for yourself before coming back for the full analysis.
WORLDBUILDING (The Inquisitors)
Factions – whether they be nations, political movements, schools, socio-economic classes, fantasy races, alien species, or anything else a writer might come up with – are an important aspect of the worldbuilding. They lend crucial context to characters, both those within and those without. They can define stakes and drive tension. Often, a vast and complex conflict can be distilled down into two easily understood factions in opposition.
The inquisitors of Notorious Sorcerer had a great deal of potential as a faction. Evans probably chose to name them thusly to evoke the various Catholic Inquisitions (or, rather, the fictional trope that has gained a life of its own over the years as writers stopped referencing real-world sources and started making derivatives of one another’s work). I think this was a good choice. While the concept of an inquisitor does not fit every story or setting, it is one that serves as a package deal. It is a characterization and a conflict rolled into one. When either the protagonists or the antagonists are inquisitors, we understand that we are seeing a clash of ideologies at play, with the inquisitor faction being willing to go to any lengths to root out their quarry and their opposition being pushed to desperate lengths to evade them.
Bezim was the right setting for inquisitors, too. The city has suffered calamity due to unregulated magic use. The inquisitors therefore have an understandable and sympathetic reason to police magic users in response. The magic users, in turn, have a reason to want to avoid the inquisitors’ wrath, since their ways of life put them directly in the inquisitors’ crosshairs. These inquisitors are also a very real threat to the magic users. Because neither alchemy nor sorcery is something that can be casually evoked in a fight (at least, not from what we’ve been shown), just two inquisitors can overpower the average magic user with brute force alone.
The potential was here. It was squandered.
The inquisitors were not something that Evans cared about. She was more than happy to use them in a utilitarian manner, and they were not ineffective in their role, but they were not one of her passions. The bare minimum of effort was put in to enable them to interact with the story.
Maybe that doesn’t sound so bad. After all, several of the characters were transparent in their functionality. Xhanari and Olenka are inquisitors, and they work just fine.
The problem is that the inquisitors are so superficial, so two-dimensional, that the story collapses if one thinks about them for even a second. I’m not even talking deep reflection. The subconscious action of remembering earlier events in the book in order to understand the scene that is currently being read is enough to punch holes through the inquisitors. This may not destroy the plot as severely as the magic system does, but it does result in the assassination of nearly every character who isn’t an inquisitor.
(I will note that the issues we’re about to cover here would apply regardless of what Evans called the inquisitors. Changing their name to “constables” wouldn’t resolve these problems. Evans’s decision to give them a name with so much baggage just made it easier to identity why this faction doesn’t work.)
Who Are You People?
The inquisitors don’t quite fall upon their introduction, but this first layer of issues does start there. You see, the inquisitors of Bezim, as a faction, do not have an identity. They don’t even have a name.
The Nameless
You might reasonably assume that their faction’s name is “the Inquisition”. That’s what I thought at first, but it simply is not the case. They are just “the inquisitors” (or “inqs”, as they are colloquially known by the bravi). There’s not even a capital letter in there to turn it into a proper noun. This is really hammered home in the first sentence of Chapter 6, which describes their headquarters as, “the inquisitors’ wing of the Palace of Justice” (that being the place from which the prefect rules Bezim). If there was any point in the story when it would have been easy to slide in a name, it would have been there.
Evans chose to do this. It wasn’t an accident. On February 24th, she tweeted this as part of a tweet chain where writers share the opening lines of their work in progress.
“(Does it count as my WIP if I’m half an hour from handing it to my editor? [Winking emoji.]
“The clerk on the front desk of the Inquisitors’ wing at the Palace of Justice eyed Siyon with a grumpy resignation that filled him with satisfaction about how he was living his life.”
I thought that maybe she had realized this issue and named the faction retroactively, so I responded to her tweet, asking her directly if this was her intention and pointing out the lack of a name in the first book.
Her response?
“I suffer a little from ‘put capital letters on things’ in my drafts so it’s entirely possible that my copy-editor will slash that capital down like she (rightly) did most of the instances in the first book. [Grinning emoji]”
A name, while not essential, is an easy and straightforward way to characterize a faction. The fact that Evans is so casual about the lack of a name for her antagonists, despite taking the trouble to name and give distinct identities to multiple bravi tribes, shows how little she cared about telling a story with a conflict the audience could truly get invested in. Literally all she had to do was refer to them as “the Inquisitors”, making the common noun for the individuals into a proper one for the group. She deliberately chose to not make the effort.
As I said, though, a name is not essential. What matters is that the faction has a clear identity. Motivations and an ideology matter more. If Evans can nail those, then the inquisitors will be memorable, with or without a name of their own.
Unfortunately, the inquisitors of Notorious Sorcerer fall flat on both motivation and ideology.
What’s My Motivation?
The inquisitors police magic so that there won’t be another Sundering.
That’s it. That’s the whole of their mission.
It makes sense at face value, but then one has to look at how Bezim operates. The economy of this city does not run without magic. Their industry relies upon it, as do many of their luxury goods. As we’ll get into a little further down, the prefect won’t let the inquisitors interfere with the economy. The best the inquisitors can do is prevent high-powered magic that would be most likely to trigger another Sundering … yet they allow the Summer Club to discuss such things on a theoretical level, and Bezim’s university is allowed to archive alchemical research instead of outright destroying it.
We also don’t see any evidence that anyone outside of the inquisitors are opposed to magic. No religious leaders are trying to incite righteous discontent against the magic users who blew up a chunk of the city. No activists are picketing businesses that use alchemy to make their products. We don’t even get evidence of informants who sniff out magic users and sell the information to the inquisitors.
The long and short of it is, the inquisitors are just beat cops with a fancy name. They oppose magic because it is illegal, not because they actually care about their stated mission. We are given no reason to believe that they wouldn’t simply turn a blind eye to magic if it was legalized (and during this story, they do indeed turn a blind eye to some very public magic on the prefect’s orders). This muddies their motivations. Are they the enemies of magic users, or are they just law enforcement?
Crusade Without a Cause
This is, I think, the much bigger issue.
If you look at the most iconic inquisitions in popular culture, they don’t exist purely to contribute to a narrative. Even the most utilitarian or parodic embodiments of persecution serves an ideology and has a greater goal beyond simply, “Purge the enemy.” Let’s take just two examples.
Star Wars gives us the Inquisitorius. These inquisitors hunt Jedi who survived Order 66. However, this mandate isn’t persecution for the sake of persecution. Jedi are a threat to the stability of the Empire itself, both because they stand in direct opposition to the Emperor’s religion and because they could (and do) serve as a rallying point for his political opponents. The Inquisitorius propagated Sith ideology by dealing with local Force sects and abducting Force sensitive children. Furthermore, they served a utilitarian purpose in the setting itself. The Emperor needed Force sensitive warriors to do his bidding, and organizing them into a subservient order allowed him to uphold the tenants of his religion and limit the risk that they would rise up to become rivals. The Inquisitorius may have been written purely to be bad guys, both in Legends and Canon, but they did possess an identity that holds up even outside of the narratives in which they appear.
Warhammer 40,000 gives us the Holy Orders of the Emperor’s Inquisition. They prosecute a wide array of offenses: worship of any god that isn’t the God-Emperor, heretical practices in worshipping the God-Emperor, Chaos cults, mutants, and association with any aliens who aren’t currently on good terms with the Imperium of Man (which is nearly all of them). They have devoted chapters of Space Marines (or Sisters of Battle, for the Ordo Hereticus) at their beck and call, and entire worlds of innocents are annihilated at their command. While this last bit sounds cartoonishly evil (and Warhammer 40,000 did originate from a parody game), decades of lore have established that the Inquisition’s power and brutality are necessary for humanity’s survival. The entire galaxy is eager to subjugate, torture, enslave, kill, or eat humanity. Only the Imperium’s sheer weight in terms of numbers and industrial capacity keeps humanity safe. By maintaining ideological purity under the God-Emperor, the Inquisition maintains the Imperium’s unity and protects countless trillions of human lives.
What do the inquisitors of Notorious Sorcerer have? What do they believe in? What greater purpose do they work towards?
The answer to all three questions is “nothing.”
The inquisitors don’t have an ideology. They don’t have an identity. They aren’t prosecuting magic users because they believe in a higher purpose. From what we are shown, they aren’t technically devoted to preventing another Sundering, even if that is their stated goal. All they seem to care about is enforcing laws, which is practice means that they are the prefect’s attack dogs. The only time they act against her orders is when they perceive an immediate threat to her well-being, and even then, they don’t oppose her so much as they ignore her wishes. We get a hint at ritual in how they punish magic users – the penalty to magic user is execution via poison, so that no magic-tainted blood will fall on the ground – but again, that seems to be a city ordinance, not something that represents the beliefs of the inquisitors.
This is where the lack of religion in Bezim comes back to bite this story in the ass. The barest minimum of religious worldbuilding would have patched it. “I persecute you because God wills it” – or, for that matter, “I persecute you because your belief in God caused the Sundering” – would have been very shallow, yet even that bare minimum of ideology would have given these inquisitors some character. There would have elevated the faction out of being merely two-dimensional antagonists.
Empty Package
Okay, that covers the lack of characterization. Let’s look at the lack of conflict.
Here’s the thing about the inquisitors’ mission: the protagonists do not disagree with it. No one wants another Sundering. Every time that a major work of magic goes wrong in this story, Siyon and Nihath display abject terror as the possibility that the whole city is about the collapse into the ocean. The conflicts involving the inquisitors feel like they could be resolved in a heartbeat if the alchemists of the city (especially the nigh-untouchable elites of the Summer Club) sat down with the prefect and the highest-ranking inquisitors and had a polite conversation. That’s probably how the Summer Club got permission to exist in the first place. Both sides of this conflict are already on more or less the same team, yet we’re not given a reason why negotiation couldn’t have been attempted when Danelani disappeared and the inquisitors began their purge. The result is a conflict that feels very artificial.
Again, simply assigning religious beliefs to one or both sides could have corrected this. It would have created an ideological gap between the two sides that couldn’t be resolved with a straightforward conversation. The ongoing conflict and the refusal to parley would then be the result of this gap rather than characters refusing the obvious solution.
How Do You Know Each Other?
While the inquisitors have no identity in isolation, they could still be characterized through their relationship with Bezim. That’s why it’s so frustrating that their relationship with Bezim is so ill-defined and contradictory.
Notorious Sorcerer gives us the following to go on:
The inquisitors answer to the prefect.
The inquisitors are the only law enforcement in Bezim (that we see, at least).
The inquisitors are not permitted to interfere in the city’s economy (to the point that they can’t even maintain a curfew and security checkpoints for more than a few days).
The inquisitors do not attempt to police the Flowers district (the red light district, which is under the control of crime barons).
The inquisitors lack the power and influence needed to directly menace nobles without hard evidence, leading them to expend most of their efforts on the poor and the foreigner.
Like so many other superficial elements in this book, this relationship holds up well at first glance. The inquisitors are law enforcement with a fancy title. Problems start when they begin to take an active role in the story.
The Purge (Heavy Spoilers)
After Danelani teleports to the Abyss, the prefect unleashes the inquisitors. They begin to purge the alchemists for the city, starting with the poor and the foreigner and working their way up through the social strata. Their presence looms over Siyon for the rest of the book, providing a source of tension. It also serves as the catalyst of Zagiri’s subplot, since she is trying to protect people from the inquisitors.
I like this in concept. It’s the execution that’s nonsensical.
Danelani teleports himself into the Abyss while within the walls of the Summer Club, while many alchemists are gathered to discuss Siyon’s miraculous use of magic. The act is one of the most dangerous magical events since the Sundering. While the inquisitors aren’t alchemists themselves, they have tools to detect magic, so they would know both the severity of the event and where it occurred.
Logically, this should make the alchemists of the Summer Club the objects of suspicion. They promised that their alchemy was purely theoretical, yet now, their gathering place is both ground zero for significant magical event and the place where the prefect’s son disappeared. Sure, most of the membership is too influential or the inquisitors to touch, but they could at least shut the place down. (They do shut the place down later in the story, so it makes little sense that they don’t do so in the immediate aftermath.) Alternatively, the inquisitors could monitor the Club’s members closely, surgically applying pressure to force them to hand over the party guilty of Danelani’s disappearance.
What the inquisitors choose to do instead is start at the opposite end of the social ladder – the people farthest from the Club, and those whose acts of magic are the least dangerous – and work their way up. Over time, they escalate from targeting shopkeepers to targeting the industrialists, shutting down factories. Only after this do they go after the nobles.
Evans uses this escalation to fuel the narrative about the downtrodden being unfairly oppressed. The rich are protected, while the poor and the foreigner are neglected and bullied. Emphasis is put upon the fact that the inquisitors don’t dare interfere in the economy of Bezim. Had the inquisitors only targeted the shopkeepers, maybe this would have held together. It could be rationalized that the inquisitors were trying to leverage the prefect’s anguish to purge the people that they could. They can’t deal with the people who are truly responsible, so they go after the ones they can as a show of power.
The second that they targeted industrialists, everything fell apart. An apothecary using alchemy to make hair products may not be that important to a city’s economy, but the factories that fuel its industry absolutely would be. The inquisitors dealt a crippling blow to Bezim when they escalated things.
This doesn’t make sense no matter how one slices it. If the inquisitors are fueled by ideology, and they don’t really care about the economy, then they would have gone after the members of the Summer Club and other nobles. They know that this group are the actual threat. If the inquisitors are kept in check by the economy of Bezim, then either they would have targeted Summer Club members with surgical precision, or they would have contented themselves with simply sweeping up everyone below the industrialists. If the answer to this inconsistency is that the prefect is holding their leash, then that just doubles down on the problems. The prefect should be fully aware of how an economy works, and she would also have a motivation to target the people responsible for the disappearance of her son.
Independent Action
The inquisitors are treated as a core aspect of Bezim’s power structure, deriving their authority from the prefect, yet their actions are most befitting of an activist group, religious movement, or political party with charismatic leaders and a lot of followers who can act independently. Again, it feels like Evans wanted to have things both ways. She wanted the inquisitors to be powerful enough to threaten every alchemist in the city and serve as an imposing force to oppose Siyon, yet she also wanted them to have checks on their power so that Zagiri’s subplot could happen.
This would have been incredibly easy to patch: Evans could have made it so that the inquisitors themselves weren’t involved in the purging of the lower classes. All she had to do was given the inquisitors followers who weren’t officially a part of the organization. The inquisitors would know the elites were truly guilty, and they would be chomping at the bit to get to those elites, but they wouldn’t be directly able to act. Meanwhile, their followers could be spurred into a frenzy by the disappearance of Danelani and news of the near-calamity. There could have been riots, harassment, and vandalism against alchemists throughout the city. The inquisitors would stop them from going after the industrialists and nobles, but everyone else would be fair game for attacks. When industrialists are targeted, it would be because public fervor got so hot that the inquisitors were losing control of their own followers.
Are We the Baddies?
The lack of identity for the inquisitors and their muddled relationship with Bezim causes problems for the plot. Conflicts involving the inquisitors feel artificial or nonsensical. This is not the greatest problem that their superficial writing causes. No, the real problem with the inquisitors’ writing is character assassination of our protagonists.
Remember when I said that the protagonists agree with the inquisitors’ mission?
It is public knowledge that magic use could trigger another Sundering. Time and again, we see Siyon, Nihath, and other characters being overcome by terror when magic runs amok and shakes the foundations of the planes. Every act of magic has the potential to kill thousands of people.
And yet. They keep. Doing it.
Every alchemist in Notorious Sorcerer is a hideous amalgam of an alcoholic who insists on driving drunk and a greedy industrialist dumping toxic waste into pristine nature. They play with lives for personal pleasure and monetary gain. By the rules established by Evans in the text, the inquisitors are in the right.
This issue isn’t apparent at the start of the book. At that point, Siyon is just harvesting ingredients and selling them so that shopkeepers can make shampoo (and purple hair dye, judging by another of Evans’s tweets about the next book) and the folks in the lumbermill can keep their saws sharp. This is an arrangement that has existed for a hundred and fifty years without incident.
However, then the plot starts.
Every act of magic that drives the story of Notorious Sorcerer rattles the planes and is capable of causing another Sundering. The pursuit of the Power of the Mundane, Danelani’s disappearance and the efforts to rescue him, and Siyon’s efforts to send Izmirlian beyond reality all have repercussions. What’s more, Izmirlian tried multiple other alchemists before Siyon. He was actively pursuing this kind of magic before the story even started.
Outside of Nihath trying to restore the alignment of the planes, the motivations behind every single one of these acts of magic are selfish. Izmirlian and Danelani are chasing their own desires. Siyon wants to get paid. Rescuing Danelani is about getting the inquisitors off the protagonists’ backs. Sure, Auntie Geryss makes an attempt that might be considered charitable, but her survival is at stake. Likewise, Siyon waits several days (if not a few weeks) to make his own attempt, only risking it when the inquisitors starting coming for nobles (thereby meaning Anahid’s house would no longer be a sanctuary for him). These people know what they are doing is wrong, admit that what they are doing is wrong, are repeatedly shown evidence that what they are doing is wrong, and yet keep doing it because they gain something from it.
The inquisitors were the best hope of salvaging this situation. If a meaningful conflict based upon ideologies was established, an argument could be made that what the protagonists were doing was not as bad as the inquisitors made it out to be. Deeper ideas could have been explored. Sure, people like me would have still poked holes in the alchemists’ stance, but at least there would be an argument that the inquisitors were still in the wrong.
What we got was not enough. It is very hard to root from the protagonists when every fact presented to us indicates that they are indeed in the wrong. Making the antagonists even more wrong to compensate would be lazy writing, but even that low bar would be higher than what we have here.
The long and short of it is, because there is nothing to the identity of the inquisitors except an objective that the protagonists both agree is good and actively work against, the protagonists are the villains of the story. This isn’t the conclusion drawn from hours of theory-crafting. It’s not the result of real-world parallels that true this story into a proxy war of ideologies. This is the story that Evans herself deliberately chose to present to us.
Lessons Learned
It is a common adage in writing that heroes are only as good as their villains. This begins with making antagonists into a credible threat, but it doesn’t end there. Giving antagonists identities and depth is an important part of doing the same for the protagonists. Antagonists don’t need to be sympathetic or relatable, but they should have enough thought put into them to hold up to same level of scrutiny as the protagonists.
The Story
We’re nearing the end of the road now. We have explored the core problem with Notorious Sorcerer, delved into the characters, and explored the highs and lows of the worldbuilding. Only the plot and the ideas that it engages with remain.
Just one part left to go. I’ll see you next week.
