When City of Bones was released in 1995, I didn’t read it. I didn’t even know it existed. Not for any malicious or snobby reasons, but because I was 12 and the most fantasy I was reading at the time were the Chronicles of Narnia books. It’s taken me three decades to finally crack open City of Bones and I kinda wish I hadn’t waited so long. Like with the Books of the Raksura, I was nervous about reading more second world high fantasy with a nonhuman protagonist—still not my preferred type of fantasy—but also eager to see what else Wells has to offer. So, trading dragon people for bioengineered marsupial people, let’s get into it.
Khat is in the relic market, partially because of his knowledge of relics but mostly because it’s the only financially viable career path available to him as an immigrant and a krismen. Ages ago, the Ancient Mages used dangerous magic that boiled the seas and left desert and lava behind. Only relics and Remnants, giant structures dotting the landscape, remain. In the immediate aftermath, the Ancients tried to biohack humanity into a new species that could survive the hostile environmental conditions. The result were the kris, of whom Khat is one, who now live in communities deep in the Waste and rarely venture to the city-states like Charisat. Krismen share the desert with Pirates, humans driven out of the safety of civilization and who lose their humanity in the process. They become almost like creatures out of a zombie movie, terrorizing and cannibalizing the kris and human travelers. Khat fled his village after he survived a devastating Pirate attack that killed most of his family line. Eventually he’s rescued by the humans Sagai and his wife Miram who are on their way from their hometown of Kenniliar to Charisat. Khat and Sagai live together, work together, and get into and out of trouble together, but this is mostly Khat’s story.
The trouble with being a relic dealer is that most deals run the risk of attracting the attention of the Trade Inspectors, law enforcement that is beholden to almost no one and whose punishments are at best death and at worst torture then death. Khat is strongarmed into taking a job exploring a Remnant with Seul, a Patrician from one of the top tiers. Charisat is divided into eight tiers, with the Elector and his daughter the Heir at the literal top of the city and the beggars at the bottom; Khat and Sagai live on the Sixth Tier. The exploration goes awry almost as soon as they’re out of the gates. Pirates attack their caravan and Khat and one of the party, a cloaked figure who turns out to be a young Warder (mage) from the Third Tier named Elen. She and Khat help each other survive the night while also exploring the Remnant they hide out in. They aren’t alone in fighting the Pirates; an enigmatic and possibly mad Warder, Constans, is very keen on what Khat and Elen are up to.
They’re rescued—if you could call Khat being beaten up a rescue—by a bunch of overzealous, anti-kris lictors brought by Seul and his and Elen’s boss Riathen to the Remnant. Khat examines a book written by an Ancient owned by Riathen and realizes the relic Elen brought with her is depicted within its pages. As are two other objects. Once again, Khat is presented with an offer he cannot refuse: locate the other two relics for Riathen… or else.
Back in Charisat, Khat, Elen in disguise as his apprentice, and Sagai pull on their contacts to track down the missing relics. Khat also has to deal with a powerful lower-tier crimeboss with high-tier ambitions who keeps sending his flunkies after Khat. Lushan is yet another human trying to order Khat around, but Khat is able to push back just enough to keep out from under his bootheel. But when Lushan sends his goons after a neighborhood teen, Khat reaches his limit and spills some blood to force an accord.
What I like most about Khat is that he’s ultimately a pragmatist about death. When he has to hurt or kill someone, he doesn’t spend much time fretting over the morality of it. He does whatever he must to protect the people he cares about and himself. He doesn’t enjoy killing, but he’s not ridden with guilt over the blood on his hands either. Even when facing his own demise, such as when he’s being inquisitioned by Trade Inspectors and threatened with execution, he doesn’t break down or cower. He’s not some cool-as-a-cucumber superhero, just someone who’s been to hell and back enough times now that the novelty has worn off.
I’m going to skip over a bunch of plot details so this essay doesn’t get too unwieldy. Khat, Sagai, and Elen collect a relic from another thief, who dies in mysterious circumstances. They partner with scholars at the Academia to translate the rest of Riathen’s book and try to figure out what the relics are used for. The Warders and Patricians start betraying each other. The two factions of Warders and the two factions of Patricians all want the relics for their own purposes. They’re betrayed by Seul and the Heir who are in turn betrayed by an unscrupulous ally, the third mysterious, cloaked figure in this book. That guy turns out to be one of the Inhabitants, spirit-like beings from elsewhere who tried to devour this world once before and are about to try again unless Khat, Constans, and Elen can stop them. They do, but just barely and not without great personal cost. In the end, Charisat is left without an Heir, Elen is promoted to Riathen’s old position of Master Warder, and Khat, Sagai, and their friends and family decide they’re safer in Kenniliar and leave town.
Although I liked City of Bones, I didn’t always like the experience of reading it. The pacing didn’t work for me, although there’s nothing technically or structurally wrong with it. The way the subplots were laid out, they too often felt to me like trying to pad out a novella into a novel. It also takes the characters a ludicrously long time to figure out the transcendental device even though it was obvious to me early on. Khat and Elen move from quest to quest and eventually I got kind of tired of the whole thing. It took until the last hundred or so pages for me to finally get hooked, and I read the rest in one sitting. That was the breathless feeling I normally get in Wells’ books right from the beginning, and it was disappointing I didn’t get that until near the end with this one.
I wish Sagai had more to do—he’s barely in it even though he’s just as compelling as Khat. Elen is fun, but she spends most of the book bogged down by shitty men that it’s hard to get to know her. Elen is clearly frustrated by the sexism she experiences, but it’s never meaningfully addressed as a social problem, nor did it seem like she was particularly interested in tackling it once she was in charge. I was glad the tentative romance between Elen and Khat never went anywhere, partly because I didn’t think they had any sexual or romantic chemistry together. It seemed like they were attracted to each other because there was no one else in the book for them to be attracted to. City of Bone wasn’t attempting to dismantle or deconstruct systemic problems. We’re just supposed to accept that this is a world of rampant economic, gender, and race-based oppressions and that everyone is more or less fine with the status quo even as they suffer under it. I can’t really fault it for basically going “Oh well, I guess things just have to suck for women and kris,” but it’s not my favorite kind of reading experience. Elen and Khat are threatened with forced marriages while Khat is sexually assaulted, and neither get much attention after the moments pass. I’m glad Wells uses her work to interrogate social issues more now.
One of the things I enjoy about the Wells’ fantasy worlds I’ve read so far is how they never feel like your bog-standard Western European medieval fantasy. Fantasy fiction in the US is often cosplaying the European Middle Ages in ways that are both reductive and repetitive. While researching this book, I kept finding references from the 1990s calling this Middle Eastern or Arabian fantasy or that it has connections to 1001 Arabian Nights. I haven’t been able to determine if Wells herself made those connections, or if that came from the contemporary reviewers and then borrowed by Tor’s marketing department. A review from the 1995 issue of Library Journal, claimed the book “combines Middle Eastern legends”—which legends they’re talking about I have been unable to determine. Confusingly, Tor reused this same blurb in the 2023 revised and updated version, the one I read. Having not read the original version, I don’t know how much, if any, of the so-called Arabian elements have since been altered or removed. Her author’s note in the 2023 edition makes no mention of the Middle East, instead describing the setting as “secondary world post-magical-apocalypse-ecological-disaster with a nonhuman main character, a fantasy on the edge of science fiction, grim and dark but not grimdark, with steam technology but not steampunk, weird but not new weird.”
To me, City of Bones is just fantasy that isn’t set in a faux Mediaeval Europe. As far as I can tell, the only thing vaguely Middle Eastern about it is that it’s set in a desert and some of the buildings have onion domes and minarets. I suppose the arcane engines could be inspired by Ismail al-Jazari’s Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, written in 1206. I don’t know much about him, but from what my quickie internet sleuthing turned up, he was a mechanical engineer and is now considered the father of robotics; his creations weren’t magical, he was just incredibly talented at combining science and mathematics into strange inventions. Many other elements that could be seen as drawing from Middle Eastern or Islamic folklore are so general that they could just as easily be pulling from dozens of different traditions from all over the world. There isn’t anything in City of Bones that screams “Arabian” to me. But it’s also quite possible I missed some references; Middle Eastern folklore isn’t my area of expertise.
All of the worldbuilding elements that I think these earlier reviewers are calling “Arabian” are really just ripple effects of setting the story in a desert region with lots of stone everywhere. Wells is very good at worldbuilding and obviously spends a lot of time thinking through how the characters and story are impacted by the environment around them. Given the literary landscape of the mid-90s US, I’m sure this setting felt exciting and new. And given what I know about how Wells approaches storytelling (at least in the few books of hers I’ve read)—that she favors unique settings where the majority are if not brown then definitely not white—this feels exactly in her wheelhouse. I think if Wells was attempting to do Middle Eastern fantasy, it could’ve gone better; but I think if Wells was just doing desert vibes, she did a great job.
Overall, this was a more or less enjoyable read. Not my favorite Wells book by a long shot. The cisheteronormativity was annoying and that high fantasy habit of turning every other noun into a Proper Noun was tiresome, but it’s otherwise a solid book. I imagine fans of this type of fantasy love it more than I did. Despite only being her second book, I could see hints as to where she would eventually go as an author. The relics and Remnants remind me of the alien remnants in Murderbot and the ancient ruins that dot the Three Worlds, Khat reminds me of Kai, Murderbot, and Moon, Elen reminds me of Chime and Mensah, Sagai of Pearl and ART. It’s interesting to be able to compare across decades.
Next month is Wheel of the Infinite. The description sounds intriguing, so I’m looking forward to diving in.