House of open wounds

Yasnic, the priest alienated from his god of healing, is the only returning character from Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances (2023), and he has collected a few more abandoned gods on his journey. The perfection-obsessed Palleseens also are much in evidence, warring with a powerful merchant state, the Loruthi. The Pal mission is to wipe out all superstitions and magic practitioners. Yet Yasnic finds himself in a Pal hospital filled with such outcasts healing the unhealable by means of illicit gods, demonology, necromancy, and the power of a divinati who can take on the wounds of her patients and remove them herself. Even when their patients die, necromancy animates the corpses to fight again. Yasnic unwittingly brings his god and his pacifistic strictures into the hospital's work; anyone healed by his unnamed god must foreswear violence or be returned to their fatally injured state. Despite how effective the hospital is, the Pal army is not doing well, which is not good for the healers. By focusing on a small cast of main characters, Tchaikovsky gives each a wonderful arc of transformation with humor and brilliant turns of phrase, exploring the underlying hypocrisies of war as well as the ties that bind.

Set in the world of City of Last Chances, this grim and exceptional look at fantasy warfare from Tchaikovsky feels like M*A*S*H written by an uncharacteristically somber Terry Pratchett. Maric Jack, the latest unwilling inductee into the Palleseen war machine, is assigned to the experimental hospital of the Forthright Battalion. Ordinarily the Palleseen would kill a foreign magic-user like Jack out of hand, but the Higher Orders believe his powers can be used to help the war effort against their adversaries, the mercantile power Lor. What they don't understand is that, unlike the other miracle workers in the hospital, Jack isn't in control of the marvelous healing that happens in his presence. The miracles are bestowed by the cantankerous pacifist God whom Jack was once a priest of--and that God will revoke his blessing from anyone he heals who then goes on to attempt to harm another. While Tchaikovsky centers the story on Jack, he takes the time to develop the other hospital staff as well, painting a broader picture of the corroding conflict between medicine and war. He also spices things up with a potential love interest for Jack and myriad details of both the Palleseen and the cultures it has swallowed in its quest to "perfect" the world. This is not to be missed. (Mar.)