C.J. Cherryh’s Fires of Azeroth concludes the original trilogy of books in her Morgaine cycle. as the previous book, Well of Shiuan, did, Fires of Azeroth picks up more or less immediately where the last book left off, in this case with Morgaine and Vanye racing to get ahead of the massed army that came through the gate from the last world they visited.
it has much in common with the previous two books: Vanye and Morgaine meet the locals, meet the local authorities, do some zig-zagging around, are separated for a time, and finally reunite for a climactic battle en route to the gate. this is a reductive summary, though, and doesn’t account for the biggest change here. the basic conceit of the series is that some time in the distant past, the alien (but human-looking, and capable of interbreeding with humans) qhal made use of a linked sequence of abandoned Gates across space and time to build a kind of galaxy- and millennia-spanning empire, only to have it collapse. Morgaine is the last survivor of a group — formerly a hundred strong — tasked with traveling along the network and shutting down each Gate, to prevent them from shattering the fabric of reality entirely, as they nearly did when the qhal’s empire cataclysmically collapsed. on the various worlds that host Gates, there are often humans, seeded by the qhal to act as servants. on Vanye’s homeworld the qhal were effectively extinct; on the doomed Shiuan, only descendants of qhal-human interbreeding remained, ruling tyrannically over humans. in this new world, however, there are qhal who remember their history and understand something of the power of the Gates still — but, in a striking turn, they are not Morgaine’s enemy. they live as, basically, elves, in protected woodlands, from which they watch over the peaceful human villages of the surrounding plains, each qhal — or at least many of them — paired with a human bodyguard.
this makes Morgaine’s task both easier and much more complicated, because it is the power of the Gate that has allowed these qhal to maintain their authority — however gentle it may be — over humans and to protect the plains villages from harm in return, though the last serious threat was some fifteen hundred years before. as such, while Morgaine has no wish to harm them directly, she nonetheless represents a threat to the status quo, one that makes the qhal decidedly uneasy. meanwhile, the possessed body of Vanye’s cousin, Chya Roh, is with the invading army, and there are questions now about who, in fact, really inhabits that body.
I will say that when Vanye once again was separated from Morgaine and captured I did sigh a little, because it’s so much like the plot of Well of Shiuan, but the tone of this book is so different — and the ending in particular so striking — that it more than compensates for a little repetition. this book is the culmination of the trilogy, and as such it is the culmination of the trilogy’s meditations on power, represented on the one hand by Morgaine’s sword Changeling — which is in effect a miniature but enormously powerful Gate to nowhere — and on the other hand by the Gate itself and, more narrowly, by the small jewels which the qhal use to access its power. part of the climax of the novel is Morgaine’s final confrontation with the leaders of the qhal, who threaten to turn their jewels against her and overwhelm even Changeling, or rather use Changeling to open a gate that will consume all of them, Morgaine included, unless she gives them the sword. Morgaine responds, first:
My lords of the arrha! Lord Merir is right...that is an evil thing. And there is only one of it, and that itself is a great evil, and subtle. You hold your power divided into many hands; whoever takes this, that one will be more powerful than all the others. Which? Who of you seeks it?
and then, more elaborately:
“I always questioned the wisdom that made this thing. I know the evil of it. Its maker knew[.] And perhaps that is its only virtue: that it is shapd as what it is...it is something that you can see and know exac[t]ly as it is. There is no ambiguity here, no yes and no. This thing ought not to exist. Those delicate jewels of yours...are nothing other than this. Their beauty deludes you. Their usefulness deludes you. Someday someone will gather them together and you will know that they were all aspects of this. [...] That is the power you hold, arrha. You have but to combine your tiny jewels into one. Did you not know that? We are armed...alike. And I make you free gift of that knowledge now—for someday one will discover it, and you will have to use them that way.”
“No.”
“Can you forget what I have told you?” she asked in a low voice. “Can you forget what you have seen? Can you take the sword and keep it forever sheathed, when the sirrindim rise up with cities and threaten you, when Men increase and you are few? Some evil, qhal or Man, someday...will draw it. And unlike your jewels, which will fade when the Gate is sealed, the sword is knowledge to build more Gates.
(the copyediting in this book is, alas, quite bad, from missing punctuation to typos to, in one case, a repeated sentence.)
I am reminded here, first, of Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories — “The sword maims and kills. Evil is its essence” — and I am also of course thinking about it being 1979 and the prospect of nuclear war, and I am also thinking about it being 2026 and the prospect of nuclear war. if, as Morgaine says the (only) wisdom in the qhal’s Gate-tools is that they are many and individually weak, such that no one person can overpower the rest, what happens when one party suddenly acquires the ability to wipe out the rest? there is an obvious allegorical reading here of the development of nuclear weapons, and there is also a newly-possible allegorical reading of it that warns us about the post-Cold War period — which now seems, thankfully, to be nearing its end — when the world had only one “superpower”. within the context of the novel, this is a stark reminder of the fact that, as Morgaine is at pains to point out, she is not — cannot be — driven by questions of morality. she has a task, and she intends to see it through to the best of her ability. if she can avoid hurting people who do not actively oppose her, she will do so; if she cannot, her task is more important.
at stake here is, again, the question of time: Morgaine and Vanye will always be both too late to change the past and, as this book — with its gentler setting than Well of Shiuan — is at pains to point out, too early to see the fruits of whatever future their work lays the foundations for. this is part of why Morgaine has been so single-minded: down any other road lies madness. over the course of Fires of Azeroth, however, this becomes untenable, because the more Vanye and others observe his possessed cousin the more they come to see that there are, truly, two (perhaps more) selves battling within him. to kill him would be safest, but also cruelest, and Morgaine does not like to murder; to leave him behind would mean trusting in a man she barely knows, in the strength of his word and in the accuracy of Vanye’s judgment, and Morgaine does not like to trust others’ judgment, even Vanye’s. so she must make a choice and live without knowing its consequences.
but the reader knows. Fires of Azeroth begins, as all three books have, with a brief summary of the history of the qhal — but this is followed by the text of an inscription on a stone in Shiuan, cursing Morgaine for the destruction she left in her wake. Fires of Azeroth ends, though, with an epilogue, long years after Morgaine and Vanye’s departure: for better or for worse, Morgaine has made a choice, and the world behind her has had to live with the consequences in her absence. there is something hopeful in this, perhaps — that there is a world with people in it at all, unlike devastated Shiuan — but there is also something deeply sad. Fires of Azeroth is a book with moments of peace and respite, a book that hopes for a better world, but it is also a reminder that most of us will not live to see whatever world we hoped for come fully into being, even if we’re lucky enough to see its beginning.
this was an extremely satisfying conclusion to the trilogy, and I’m very curious to see how Cherryh will handle the return to Morgaine in Exile’s Gate, published almost a decade later in 1988.
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