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The real problem with any truly special story is that doing it again is difficult. Especially if you take the same characters and find a new story for them to fit into as well as they did the first. This a large part of the heart of “sequelitis”. I’d been warned that The Story of the Stone suffered from it.

Not so much. It is not as good as the original Bridge of Birds, but it is close, and a lot of what makes the original work is here. Overall, I’d say the plot here is more of a mess, which is where the book tends to fall short. But what makes Hugart’s writing work is his simultaneously a sympathetic deep-dive into Chinese myth, folklore, and history, and a satire of the same. There’s little details scattered all over, and I have to wonder how much is made up whole-cloth, and how much traces at least the seed of the idea to some actual folklore. Some of it is obviously based on real myths and tales, which makes me wonder about parts that seem to be there because of story demands.

But what makes all that work, and is carried over from the first book is an honest sense of wonder and joy in telling a tale. In Hugart’s hands even some thoroughly nasty people contribute to some very fun scenes. Really, that’s what these books are about, a bit of fun, a bit of whimsy. Anyone to takes Master Li seriously deserves to.

As would be expected from the first book, we go on the road again, and make quick visits to several locales. But the Valley of Sorrows dominates the book, as this time Li and Number Ten Ox are off to solve a mystery. As with anything Master Li touches, it turns out to be more than it first appears, and like any good classic mystery it is obvious from the start that something truly odd is going on, even if it does have a perfectly reasonable explanation.

In short, I’m sorry have taken so long to get around to continuing to read about these two mis-matched partners. It stands alone perfectly well, and you can easily start here. I recommend starting with Bridge of Birds anyway, because I found the conclusion to that book to really get into the sense of wonder I mentioned, and this one nearly matches it in several points, but never quite gets there.

Once again, Guy Gavriel Kay does not disappoint. That said, the very beginning didn’t really grab me (especially the caper on Rian’s Island). But partway through chapter 3, Blaise, our main character, gets ambushed, and I was hooked for the rest of the novel.

This is a fantasy drawing deeply of southern France. The Court of Love rules here, and troubadours and joglars are what keep the Court vital. There is a god-goddess duo here which is much reflected in somewhat separate but equally important male and female characters of the novel. The nature of Corannos the god are not much gone into, but Rian’s, the goddess, power all emanates from an island in the southern sea. The world is much wider than we really get to see, Gorhaut being somewhat developed as the antithesis of Arbonne, and Portezza being an Italy-equivalent that a couple characters are from and the main character has spent time in, and other areas merely mentioned.

The novel is, as ever with Kay, well-paced, with the action working up to greater heights after every lull, and Blaise becoming more important in every lull. His centrality to events flows naturally as we learn more about him, and he takes to himself more responsibility.

There is a much wider cast of characters, many of which get to be viewpoint characters at one point or another. However, Lisset, the second-most prominent, seems a little undeserved as her progression doesn’t seem to mirror the novel’s like Blaise, even though she’s a vital viewpoint, and in the center of the distinctive artistic-centered culture Kay is presenting here.

And that just barely scratches the surface of an expansive novel. All of Kay’s books have enough going on to feel epic, and I think this one tops Tigana and Al-Rassan in that for me. Better yet, I have thought for a while that Occitian France needed more attention, and this makes a good primer on the subject.

First off, I recommend against buying the Evinity Kindle edition. While it does have the original illustrations, it also has a number of errors, and breaks up the text with tags for the original pages—breaking up paragraphs and sentences willy-nilly. This is, I believe, straight from old Project Gutenberg files, though those do not have the pagination notes any more.

As for the book itself, it’s a 1922 proto-fantasy, using some tropes of the sword and planet genre. Though that last is really just an intro or broken frame to introduce the action. Supposedly, this all happens on Mercury (which here just means “not on Earth at any time”), and the initial viewpoint character is transported there as a vision and introduced to some of the major characters (for the benefit of the reader). After the second chapter, this device is dropped, and never mentioned again, so it’s not even a framing device. These days, there’s no problems with the idea of a landscape with people and places that have no reference to Earth, but I imagine an introduction was considered necessary when written.

Complicating matters is that it is written in Elizabethan English, making it a bit rougher for most readers to get through. It’s been praised for how consistently he keeps up what is effectively a foreign dialect, and doesn’t miss the mark, spoiling the illusion. That is beyond my ability to judge. The really rough parts are when a letter or other writing appears in the novel, as none of the characters are great scribes, and the text is an appropriately phonetic approximation of words that quickly becomes very tedious to parse through.

On top of the rest of this, the story is basically a chivalric romance, set in prose. (In fact, I could see Pendragon, with its passion system, being an excellent RPG for this world.) So, we follow the struggle between the island power of Demonland and the continental Witchland (tell me there’s not a parallel going on here…), as the hubris of Gorlice of Witchland has him demand fealty from the Demons, and war results. (And I will note that various fantasy staple terms are used here, demons, imps, pixies, etc., but they are more ethnicities than meaning to evoke actual fantastical powers.)

In the end, it’s certainly an important book, and generally entertaining in the high heroic mode of great men doing great deeds and leading great armies. Personally, the pacing was all over the place, with all the elements you’d expect: sieges, battles, heroes in single combat, beautiful ladies, politics, beautiful ladies politicing…. And a too-long sequence of climbing a glacier. If you are willing to buckle down with the language, it will reward you, but you have to be mindful of that going in.

So, a fantasy book from a generally unknown author and a niche publisher. Immediate question: was it worthwhile. Answer: yes.

The biggest problem is one of setting. This appears to an alternate-universe setting stuck in the Victorian era. There’s no political or geographical names that bear any resemblance to identifiable places on Earth, and there’s no map to tell yea or nay if this is meant to be an alternate Earth. On the other hand, we have Christianity, and King Arthur gets name dropped near the end. I had figured that the Mark Isles were the British Isles in general and Dumagh was Ireland, but from the ending we find out that the sun rises earlier in Dumagh than the Mark Isles, which would be the wrong way around. I’d love a map.

Calendar dates would imply this is mid-twentieth century (and it at least would be Christian Era calendar), but part of the novel is a very Victorian style romance of manners. And don’t get me wrong, unlike the above, it’s not a complaint, and frankly it does a lot to add some charm to the story.

The main story isn’t fully explained until some while into the book, and actually reading the blurb helps with getting through that portion. Short of that, it flows easily and well, and the plot is very well structured, with pretty much everything tying in to the main plot at one point or another.

A few notes: This a full Christian-mythology universe, with demons, some glimpses of Hell, and the church having power against them. Generally speaking, supernatural interference has apparently been on the wane for some time; enough that its possible to be an atheist in this universe, and more devout people have ‘that still happens?’ reactions to elements of the plot. There is a rape scene, that, some other reviews aside, doesn’t really pull punches. The victim is decidedly still dealing with the emotional wreckage of it afterwards, and the rapist isn’t forgiven. He does end up helping, for his own reasons, but the main character is appropriately thankful, but that’s as far as it goes.

At any rate, it’s a good, well paced story, with a conclusion that has all the excitement one could wish for. The conclusion has a fresh unresolved problem for the sequel but the story at hand is conclusively finished.