ISFDB
Tor, Amazon UK/US

_____________________

Editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Fiction:
The Mongolian Wizard • short story by Michael Swanwick ∗∗∗+
The Fire Gown • short story by Michael Swanwick ∗∗∗+
Day of the Kraken • short story by Michael Swanwick ∗∗∗
House of Dreams • short story by Michael Swanwick ∗∗
The Night of the Salamander • short story by Michael Swanwick ∗∗∗
The Pyramid of Krakow • short story by Michael Swanwick ∗∗∗+
The Phantom in the Maze • short story by Michael Swanwick ∗
Murder in the Spook House • short story by Michael Swanwick ∗
The New Prometheus • short story by Michael Swanwick ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Artwork • by Gregory Manchess

_____________________

This isn’t a magazine or a book review, but a look at a series of stories from Michael Swanwick published on Tor.com since 2012.¹ As I didn’t want to start with the seventh story (in the hopefully forthcoming May/June “issue” of Tor.com’s magazine), I went back to the beginning.

The series opens with The Mongolian Wizard, which introduces us to what I presume will be the series’ two main characters, a British wizard called Sir Toby (“Tobias Gracchus Willoughby-Quirke”), and Kaptainleutnant Franz-Karl Ritter (of the “Werewolf Corps”). They meet when the Sir Toby arrives at Scholss Greiffenhorst (“the wild griffins for which the region was famous were sporting in the sky above the snow-clad peaks of the Riphean Mountains”), where Ritter is in charge of security.
As you can tell, this takes place in a different version of Europe, a magical, early 20^th Century one, and there is more fantasy furniture introduced throughout the course of the story. The first example of this is Sir Toby’s demonstration, to the conference of assembled wizards, of a miniature fortress containing forty soldiers no more than two inches tall. After their short military display, the soldiers are let into the walls of the schloss to hunt for rats and mice. Meanwhile, the conference discusses the threat from the Mongolian Wizard, who now controls all of Russia and threatens to invade the rest of Europe.
During the group’s political and social discussion, Sir Toby discreetly turns invisible, something noticed by Ritter. Although Ritter’s uncle has warned him about pestering Sir Toby, Ritter is suspicious, and thinks that the soldiers may be in the walls to spy on the conference. So he takes his wolf and searches the castle hoping to pick up Sir Toby’s scent (Ritter isn’t a werewolf, by the way, but can inhabit the mind of his wolf and use its senses).
The animal eventually leads Ritter to a basement room where they find Sir Toby, supposedly looking for his missing soldiers. Sir Toby confesses to being a spy for King Oberon VII, but adds that both their countries have a mutual interest in defeating the Mongolian Wizard.
Then the wolf finds the bodies of the soldiers in the next room—beside the body of a dead basilisk guarding a phoenix egg.
The rest of the story (spoiler) involves the evacuation of the schloss, the exposure of the Mongolian Wizard’s agent, and what happens to the egg the following dawn:

At sunrise, the mountaintop erupted in fire and ceased to be. Everyone in the village below, standing in the streets to watch, threw up their arms to block the sight and turned away from its fury. When Ritter could see again, there was a luminous cloud of smoke and ash rising from what had been Schloss Greiffenhorst. Coalescing in the heart of the fire, a mighty firebird slowly took form. It started to move its tremendous wings even before they were complete. Then, over the course of several minutes, it broke free of the rising cloud and began the long flight back to its ancestral homelands in the East.
“A terrifying sight,” Ritter said at last.
“There are worse to come,” Sir Toby replied. “I arrived at the conference late because, by a special dispensation of your Emperor Rupert, I had arranged an interview with the Wittenberg Sibyl. She foresees cities destroyed, farmlands blasted, the slaughter of millions in a pointless and genocidal war. This she told me in great and horrifying detail.”
“But surely that is only a possible future,” Ritter said. “As I understand it, the Sibyl always offers two contradictory predictions, one much darker than the other.”
“You don’t understand. What I told you was the good outcome. The one where, after terrible suffering, the Mongolian Wizard and his evil empire are defeated. The alternative—well, I do not care to speak of the alternative.”

The story ends with Sir Toby telling Ritter that he will arrange to have him join the British Secret Service.
A good start to what promises to be an original and enjoyable series.

The Fire Gown takes up the story as the armies of the Mongolian Wizard have invaded Poland, and Sir Tobias and Ritter arrive at Buckingham Palace (it’s just “Buckingham” in the text for some reason) to be told that Queen Titania has died from spontaneous combustion:

The soldiers standing guard before the queen’s door parted at their approach. Inside, Sir Toby discovered a perfect circle of black where the oriental carpet had been burned to cinder and a corresponding, though softer-edged, circle of soot on the ceiling above. The smell of charred human flesh lingered in the air.
The queen must have gone up like a flare.

Ritter uses his wolf Freki to investigate the scene, finding a small charred scrap of red cloth from the Queen’s dress. He notes it contains highly flammable salamander thread. Sir Tobias and Ritter then talk to the Queen’s dresser Lady Anne and, during her questioning, we see Ritter’s poor people skills:

“Who brought [the gown] to the palace?”
“It was Gregory Pinski.” Lady Anne lifted her head from Sir Toby’s embrace and almost smiled.
“He’s the clerk for Knopfman and Rosenberg. I don’t ordinarily know the names of the deliverymen, but Gregory is such a gossip, and such a flirt. Perfectly harmless, you understand, but very amusing.”
“When this Pinski brought the gown, did you happen to mention to him, among all the gossip and flirtation, that Queen Titania would be wearing the gown on this particular day?”
“I . . . I don’t remember. It’s possible, I suppose.”
“Think hard! Did you—?”
“Mr. Vestey!” Sir Toby said loudly. “Would you do us the kindness of escorting Lady Anne back to her chambers? She has had a difficult day and I shouldn’t be surprised if her doctor wants to prescribe a sedative for her.” Then, when the lady had departed, he turned to Ritter and exclaimed.
“My dear young dunderhead! You have the most damnably brusque way with women that I have ever seen in my life.”
“I get results,” Ritter said defensively. “That’s all that matters.”
“You haven’t gotten any results yet,” Sir Toby reminded him.

Sir Tobias then goes off to see the King, while Ritter leaves to question Pinski and his employers.
When Ritter arrives at the premises there is no one there, but eventually the daughter of the owner, Shulamith Rosenberg, returns. Ritter subjects her to a hostile interrogation during which he learns that the family are Russian, but Jewish refugees. After he is satisfied that she is innocent they look for her father, who they find dead. They then investigate the assistant’s room and find (spoiler) a bolt of salamander cloth in a trough of water, and a booby trapped box of bubonic fleas. When these latter escape Ritter is forced to ignite the salamander cloth and set the room on fire (to stop plague spreading throughout the city), an act that seriously injures him and kills Rosenberg.
This detective plot is interesting but slight; what really makes the story is its emotional arc, and this plays out when Ritter’s previous lack of empathy is revisited in the final scene. Here, Sir Toby offers him a surviving portrait of Shulamith Rosenberg and, although Ritter is baffled by this gesture, he takes the picture home and puts it on his wall. As he looks at it he breaks down and weeps.

Day of the Kraken starts off with another dressing down for Ritter when he opens a suspicious chest recovered from the river by shooting the lock off. It is full of Kraken’s eggs, planted in the river to hatch and make London unusable as a harbour. After paying off the alarmed fishermen, Sir Tobias lays into Ritter:

“What chunderheaded notion was that? You almost frightened those poor men out of their wits. Half of them were convinced the chest contained explosives.”
“When on duty, a portion of my thought is always inside Freki’s mind. He could smell the chest’s contents quite distinctly. There was no possibility of an explosion.”
“Ritter,” Sir Toby said, “there are times when I think that, save for your ignorance of human behavior and utter lack of humor, you have the makings of a first-rate aide.”
“I have an excellent sense of humor,” Ritter said indignantly.
“Have you really? I must remember to have you tell a joke someday in order to test this hypothesis.”

The next day Ritter arrives at the War Office to be told the Mongolian Wizard has attacked Germany with wyverns and giants. Ritter finds Sir Toby dealing with reports of five kidnapped young girls. These accounts note that a catholic vestment was planted at the scene of the last crime, and Sir Toby thinks the saboteurs who planted the kraken eggs intend to foment religious discord in the country by staging a bogus religious sacrifice.
Ritter (spoiler) is sent to find the kidnappers but, although he soon locates them, their sorceress leader puts him under a compulsion which neutralises him as a threat. When Ritter suggests to the sorceress that he is put with the crying girls to calm them down she agrees, and when he joins the children tells them stories about his wolf. He subsequently gets them to pretend to be wolves, and then goes into their minds and weaponises them. Ritter sets the children on the saboteurs when the door is opened, and foils the plot.
Sir Toby cavils about Ritter’s treatment of the youngsters at the end of the story. After this gentle reproof Ritter tries to tell a joke, only to be brushed off by Sir Toby (a clever call-back to the earlier scene).
This is perhaps the slightest of the three stories so far and, while enjoyable, one hopes there will be a more substantial piece coming up. Ritter is becoming an ever more interesting character—albeit one at the end of some psychological spectrum.

House of Dreams sees Ritter and his wolf Freki sent to penetrate the front line in Germany and meet an agent, but we only learn this after he wakes from a dream sequence conjured by two enemy alienists, Drs Borusk and Nergüi, who are holding him prisoner. The pair subject Ritter to several more dreams as they attempt to find out who he is meeting and why.
Eventually (spoiler), Freki breaks into the farmhouse/sanatorium where Ritter is being held prisoner and kills the two doctors. Ritter continues on to meet his contact, a wizard called Godot.
This story, more than any of the others so far, is too fragmentary.

The Night of the Salamander opens with Ritter flirting with a Lady Angélique at a party on the eve of a major battle when he receives a message from Sir Toby. There has been an incident concerning Field Marshal Pierre-Louis Martel and, from the coded note, Ritter suspects that Martel may be injured or dead. So Ritter asks Lady Angélique (who, in another social faux pas, Ritter assumed was a nurse before learning she was a surgeon) to accompany him.
When the pair arrive at Martel’s room Ritter is told that the field marshal has been assassinated and, on examination, his body shows evidence of external and internal burns, evidence of a pyromancer’s work. He has also been sodomised with an object.
Ritter learns that there are only three people who had recent access to Martel (his fourteen year old mistress, his valet, and his aide) so Ritter starts questioning them, beginning with the mistress, although Lady Angelique takes over the interview after Ritter again demonstrates his poor people skills.
When Ritter interrogates the aide, a Russian officer and refugee called Kasimov, the latter causally admits to hating the field marshal. Ritter learns later that the others probably felt the same way (Field Marshall Martel was a successful commander because of his supernatural glamour, and could convince people to do what he wanted even though they may not have liked him).
Ritter then talks to the valet and has his wolf search the premises, but the murder’s identity (spoiler) is only revealed when Lady Angélique finishes talking to the abused mistress, who admits to the crime but who had not realised she was a latent pyromancer.
This straightforward revelation is followed by further revelations about the valet (who Ritter uncovers as a Mongolian spy).
This is well enough done but, again, feels somewhat fragmentary.

The Pyramid of Krakow starts with Ritter on an undercover mission to Poland:

The man who got off the coach from Bern—never an easy trip but made doubly uncomfortable thanks to the rigors and delays of war—had a harsh and at first sight intimidating face. But once one took in his small black-glass spectacles and realized he was blind, pity bestowed upon him a softer cast. Until the coachman brought around his seeing-eye animal and it turned out to be a wolf.
The blind Swiss commercial agent took the wolf by the leash, placed a coin in the coachman’s hand, and then, accepting the leather tote containing toiletries, two changes of clothing, and not much else, strode into the cold and wintry streets of Krakow. On the rooftops, the gargoyles which the city tolerated because they kept down the rat population squinted and peered down at him, as if sensing something out of the ordinary. He did not, of course, look up at them.

Ritter has a cover story as a chemical salesman, and he meets the Under Minister for Industry before being taken to the Great Pyramid he saw from his hotel room window:

The carriage was passing into what in Ritter’s experienced judgment must surely be an internment camp. Overhead floated a gateway with a banal and uplifting slogan spelled out in metal letters. Through the coach windows flooded an effluvium of misery and sickness, of excreta and vomit and pus, overlaid with coal smoke strongly flavored with the same unidentifiable smell that in lesser concentration permeated the air of Krakow. Only now, Ritter feared that the odor was not unidentifiable at all.
The carriage rattled by long rows of windowless barracks, triangular in cross section, each with a single padlocked door. “The pyramid is hollow, of course,” Bannik said, “supported by internal buttresses. We did not have decades in which to build it, as the ancient Egyptians did. Even then, tremendous amounts of labor were required but—ha! ha!—we do not lack for idle hands, do we?” He nodded at the barracks, acknowledging them for the first time.

Ritter and the Minister later climb the pyramid to the events occurring at its peak.
The story then cuts to the Minster’s office, where he explains that the brutal executions that Ritter witnessed are the Mongolian Wizard’s way of discovering latent wizard talent. Those who reveal such under this extreme treatment are saved; those who don’t die.
Ritter (spoiler) later has to flee the interior minister’s office after a tip-off from the Minster’s female assistant about a witch-finder who is searching for him. The woman, who reveals herself as a resistance member, takes Ritter to her garret lodgings, but the witch-finder picks up their trail on the way there. The latter later meets his fate at the claws of the gargoyles mentioned at the beginning of the story (another example of this callback technique).
This a darker and more satisfying story than the previous ones, but if I have a quibble it is that I wasn’t sure what the chemicals were for (other than, along with the smell of the burning bodies, to provide a Holocaust parallel).

The Phantom in the Maze sees Ritter dispatched to a scrying institute where a young woman has been murdered. On arrival he starts his investigation but soon experiences time disturbances caused by the scryers’ examination of the future (this first manifests itself when a bird arrives in his room and then disappears; later, Ritter meets the murdered woman in the centre of the yew tree maze where she was killed before she too vanishes). There is some hand waving about the main trunk of time and the various branches that split off from it, etc., during all this, but it doesn’t explain the phenomenon that Ritter experiences.
The ending (spoiler) involves Ritter in a shoot-out with the director of the institute and his lover (who turns out to be the killer of the murdered woman as she ‘sees‘ a future love rival for the director’s affections). Then there another time disturbance which undoes their deaths and brings the couple back to life.
This latter plot development is based on the unconvincing “tree of time” explanation and, regardless, feels like a bit of a cheat. The twist does not suspend disbelief.

Murder in the Spook House starts with Ritter arriving at a tank depot to investigate yet another (!) murder, and this time it is (spoiler) Sir Toby who has copped it. As Ritter is taken to see the body, he sees a raven appear and disappear—this is another time anomaly event similar to the one Ritter experienced in the previous story.
After some of the usual sniffing about by Ritter’s wolf Freki, Ritter uncovers the murderer. The ending resurrects Sir Toby, and his dead doppelgänger disappears back to whatever timeline it came from.
This story suffers not only from having another murder investigation but also from the same unconvincing temporal shenanigans as the previous tale. If the writer can magically undo any of the story’s previous events by timeline manipulation, how can they expect to maintain any dramatic tension?

The New Prometheus is this world’s Frankenstein story, and opens with Ritter driving a dog-sled across the Arctic in pursuit of his quarry. When the creature sets up camp, and Ritter establishes it is safe to approach—he sends Freki ahead and watches as the wolf gets its tummy rubbed—he enters his quarry’s tent and listens to its story. We find out that the creature is a homunculus created by the Mongolian Wizard:

“It is a gruesome process. First the skeleton is assembled from the living bones of various animals. Human bones would not do, for it was desired to give me the features and physiognomy of a god. Bones taken from dead creatures would be . . . dead. So animals were required to suffer. It took a phalanx of surgical wizards just to keep the skeleton viable while muscles and cartilage were attached, nerves grown to interlace the flesh, organs coaxed into interaction, skin convinced to cover all . . . More magical talents were employed in my creation than for any other single purpose in human history. It is doubtful that anyone but my father—for so I consider him—could have arranged for such a thing. And even he had to effectively bring the war to a standstill to free up the resources necessary for it.”

Ritter later learns of the homunculus’s education (part of which was done by Ritter’s uncle, a prisoner under compulsion), and that it is capable of all the magical arts—not just single talents like humans. However, its gift for mind-reading means it suffers from constant exposure to human thoughts, hence the flight to the Arctic.
At the end of the story (spoiler) the homunculus paralyses Ritter and leaves the tent to take what seems the only logical course of action. After it disappears over the horizon, Ritter sees a terrific explosion.
I found this an engrossing account of the short life and death of an almost godlike bring, and it’s one of the series’ better stories.

The Artwork by Gregory Manchess is a good match for the stories (are these watercolours?) My favourite illustrations are for House of Dreams (lovely) and The New Prometheus, but there are a couple others that are close behind.

Overall, the series is a bit of a mixed bag. Its strengths are the intriguing world it is set in, and the two main characters and their interplay. The main weakness is that the stories are too short and sketchy: most writers pad out their stories, but I think that Swanwick has the opposite problem. These pieces are around four to six and a half thousand words long, and they could all have done with being longer and more detailed; a couple of novelettes or novellas with more world and character building would have strengthened the series. In particular, House of Dreams and The Pyramid of Krakow could perhaps have been combined into a longer story, with linking material dealing with the information the wizard produced, a description of life in the occupied zone, contact with the resistance, etc.
Another weakness is that there are three murder investigations in nine stories (maybe four if you count the tiny soldiers in the first piece), which is far too many.
Despite its occasional shortcomings this series is worth a look, and I’ll be interested to see how many more stories Swanwick produces to compete its narrative arc (I just hope that the Mongolian Wizard is defeated by something other than a time anomaly).²  ●

_____________________

1. The publication dates of the stories on Tor.com (and their lengths) are as follows:

The Mongolian Wizard • July 4th, 2012 • 5360 words
The Fire Gown • August 15th, 2012 • 5020
Day of the Kraken • September 26th, 2012 • 4400
House of Dreams • November 27th, 2013 • 5380
The Night of the Salamander • August 5th, 2015 • 5800
The Pyramid of Krakow • September 30th, 2015 • 5140
The Phantom in the Maze • December 2nd, 2015 • 6210
Murder in the Spook House • May 1st, 2019 • 4080
The New Prometheus • June 19th, 2019 • 6580

The stories run to 50,000 words so far, which would be a short book, approximately 125 pages.

2. Just after posting I found (by way of Jason McGregor’s blog Featured Futures) an interview on File770 where Michael Swanwick provides information about the series. There will be 21 stories, so we are just over one third of the way through.  ●

Edited 14:30 to add footnote 2 and to lower-case the “the” in front of several “Mongolian Wizard”s.