SAEVUS CORAX CAPTURES THE CASTLE

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

Several years have past since the events Saevus Corax described in Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead and he is once again leading his band of scavengers cleaning up the messes left behind by belligerents throughout their known world. The second book in K.J. Parker's trilogy, Saevus Corax Captures the Castle opens with several of Corax's lieutenants disappearing in the night. The next day, it is revealed they have been taken hostage and only returned if Corax successfully takes control of a nearby castle. Despite the job being well outside his area of expertise, Corax agrees in order to get his team back.

Told in the first person by an admittedly unreliable narrator, Saevus Corax Captures the Castle continues the story of a man who may lead a group of war profiteers, but at heart is a con artist. He describes his adventures in a way to glorify himself, even while he is self-deprecating. Although he makes occasional references to the events of the previous novel, and, of course, many of the characters from that novel make appearances in Saevus Corax Captures the Castle, this book stands completely on its own as the events of his siege of the castle spin out of his control and he must deal with the schemes of Stauracia, one of his rivals from the earlier book, and Praeclara, a new antagonist. He is aided by his team of scavengers, who accept him because he is a known quantity, including the newly introduced Eudo, who appears to idolize him.

Once Corax captures the castle and finds himself on a personal quest, based on an enormous personal revelation akin to the one that featured midway through the first novel, he abandons his scavenging crew and tries to go off on his own, only to find that the adoring Eudo and the less than adoring Stauracia have decided they needed to join him. Suspicious of both of them, Stauracia because of his past experience with her and Eudo because of his lack of past experience with him, Corax refuses to trust them or let them in on his secrets. Instead, he leads them to the land of the Hetsuan, a tribe that just wants to be left alone and practices cannibalism on any foreigners who are stupid enough to enter their lands. Unfortunately for Corax, his quest takes him into Hetsuan lands.

A lot of Saevus Corax Captures the Castle consists of Corax's musings on the state of his world and its history, as well as his own personal failures to achieve anything beyond survival and his ability to create enemies wherever he goes. Even his friends, whether they are part of his crew, innkeepers he has met over the years, or others, at most only put up with him. Because Corax knows more of his own personal history than he has shared with the reader, he has no expectations that he deserves any more than he receives from his acquaintances, even when some of them try to convince him that he needs to let people get closer to him, a surefire method of ensuring that he builds more walls. Fortunately, Parker has made Corax a likeable enough rogue that the reader will sympathize with him and continue with him on his quest to discover where he will wind up in the final novel.

Although Saevus Corax Captures the Castle can be read on its own, it does build on groundwork laid in Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead and gives hints about what Corax will face in the final novel, Saevus Corax Gets Away With Murder (in fact, Corax gets away with murder in the first two novels as well). Although the story being told in the Corax trilogy appears to be reasonably linear, punctuated by surprise revelations about Corax's life prior to the beginning of the first novel, Parker may eventually offer a twist that requires the reader to reconsider the narration in light of new information once the third volume has been read.

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