The Godless by Ben Peeks

“Fifteen thousand years have passed since the War of the Gods and their corpses now lie scattered across the world. When men and women awake with strange powers derived from their bodies, some see it as a gift – others, a curse”.

One girl who finds herself in just such a predicament is Ayae, one of the three central characters and we meet her as she is waking up with her emotionally distant lover Illaan in the land of Mireea. He is a soldier who is recovering from recently seeing the burnt and cooked bodies of those he knew, only to wake to, what he thinks is, Ayae’s eyes on fire.

‘It felt as if Illaan were barely in her life lately, a crease in sheets that could be straightened.’ I just loved the imagery in this line and had to share it.

She is a young cartographer’s apprentice who has been sent to Mireea, a settlement that is part of the Mountains of Mireaa, near the Spine of Ger, a fallen God, whose corpse now defines the landscape. She herself has been having bad dreams, often about fire, and blames herself for the death of the matron at her orphanage who casually mentioned ‘the room always seems warmer when you are in it’ before being burnt to death in an accident a few days later. So…der… the lady has a thing with fire, and with the blurb telling the clues and as much in the opening, it is hard not to be anticipating her discovery of this untapped well of power.

Mireea is under attack from raiders and it is through this we are introduced to Bueralan Le, exiled baron and Captain of ‘Dark’, a group of mercenaries hired to help limit the attacks. He and Dark have just done a very dirty job, one that pushed them and their sense of morality to it’s limits and after losing one of the group they are all searching and desperate for something lighter. It’s hard not to like him as one can almost assume the any exiled nobility has probably been exiled for doing something unfathomably noble but simply not becoming his position, and despite mercenaries of the time authorizing novels and plays to shout out their exploits, he prefers to keep things quiet and contained, being a hero to his men is enough. He is a saboteur and his job is to find out why the army marching on Mireea is in fact doing so.

When a living corpse sets fire to the map shop she works in, and brutally throws Ayae into the fire, she is rescued unharmed and unburnt by Zaifyr, a mystic of sorts, and discovers she has inherited latent powers from the blood, breath and bodies of the old dead gods that permeate the environment, and thus finds herself ‘cursed’. She has the power to light stuff on fire, and she herself cannot be burned. Suddenly she is treated like an outcast, abandoned by her former partner and made to feel a stranger in a town that she has called home for a long time. Zaifyr is also ‘cursed’ with the power of immortality and has been alive a very long time and knows more than he is letting on. Seen as a God himself at one stage he has taken on many personas over the years and has a wider world scope than any other character.

We also have two delightfully disgusting characters in Bau and Fo who too are ‘cursed’, one a healer, one the disease. One has a healing factor like Wolverine, the other spends his days experimenting on animals in a bid to find out everything about decay and infection. They show us what can go wrong with those that inherit the powers of the Gods in that they start to believe they are Gods themselves and so start to view humanity with a vapid detachment.

The Godless moves at a quick pace. The chapters are quite short which, in the beginning, works well to draw the reader into the world, but midway though, becomes more of an interruption. It looks to keep everyone happy by giving us a nice array of characters, who are all quite different from one another but I often felt that just as I was getting into one part of the story we were off and I’m left half way between committing to this next piece of the story or reading to get to the part I was just interested in. When a chapter is only five pages long you know you don’t have to wait long for the next moment to come along but it stopped me hitting a flow and this happens consistently through the book. It is a strange choice and one that I became more at odds with as chapters went from five pages to two pages to single pages as the action heated up.

Peek has created an immersive and well thought out world and delivers on a great fantasy tale that has hints of everyone from Gemmell and Feist to Terry Brooks. Readers will enjoy the political intrigue, a wonderful lack of clumsy erotica, a talking bird and much more. I could have used some more action sequences but those in the book are handled very well, in fact it’s such a strength, I am a little surprised it is not utilized more. This is a big lead in to a trilogy that shows huge potential but personally I really hope they chapters are a bit longer and we get time with each character before we are whisked off to the next scene. That time would allow for some more thorough development leading to a more distinct voice for each character which would help the reader immensely in those later sequences.

I would not put Peeks on par with the likes of Abercrombie, Lawrence or Sanderson but he certainly has potential and has delivered a fine book.