Robot Viking

What if you were the champion of a god, constantly sent on deific errands at the bidding of an angelic messenger? And what if you didn’t really worship that god, but regretted with every fiber of your being the day you begged her for help, binding your fate to her forever after? That would kind of suck, I think. Yet that is the life of Salim, the strange hero of James L. Sutter’s debut novel, Death’s Heretic.

Sutter is the fiction editor at Paizo (and, rumor has it, quite a metalhead), so he’s had a hand in a lot of the good stuff coming from them recently. With Death’s Heretic, he plays with the cosmology of Paizo’s campaign world, Golarion, and uses some of the weird quirks of D&D to craft an unusual murder mystery with noirish overtones.

Salim serves at the beck and call of Pharasma, the Lady of Graves, who ushers the souls of the dead to their appropriate final resting place, sort of like an extraplanar traffic conductor. He’s been sent to Thuvia (in Golarion’s “patchwork of historical cultures,” Thuvia is the Arabian-ish one) because a rich man has been killed. You figure the guy’s got money, his family can just pay to have him resurrected — and you’d be right. Problem is, the resurrection failed because his soul was stolen somewhere along Pharasma’s road to empyrean delights. Pharasma wants what’s hers, so Salim gets the call.

Complicating Salim’s efforts are two people: the pedantic priest of Pharasma, Khoyar, who is of little help, and the victim’s daughter, Neila, who insists with all the certainty of someone born to great wealth that she be allowed to accompany Salim every step of the way. The friction between Sutter’s main characters propels the story from perfunctory investigations around Thuvia to a plane-hopping whodunnit that leads to infinite cities and powerful planar beings. Regular Robot Viking readers know I usually hate that stuff — as soon as someone starts teleporting to another plane, I tune out. And teleporting is exactly what Salim does, jaunting across the planes with Neila in tow. Yet Sutter handles it well, contrasting Salim’s jaded experience with Neila’s wide-eyed wonder. Instead of a bunch of abstract nonsense, it felt more like visiting a big city for the first time with someone who’s lived there for years — new, strange, exciting, yet still grounded and real.

Neila could easily have come off as a one-dimensional spoiled rich girl. She certainly has that element to her, but her competence at managing her father’s estate and her willingness to put herself in danger and go to any ends to save her father’s soul give her added depth. The emotional entanglements that develop between her and Salim occur organically and very gradually. Salim himself is a bit of a cypher, though. He’s grim and bitter about his situation, and he harbors a dark secret, but other than general irritation with Neila, not a lot of his personality comes through.

This is not a novel without humor, by any means. Much of the comic relief comes from Neila’s troubles with a band of fey that live near her estate, particularly a randy satyr with a healthy lust for life (and pretty much anything on two legs). Many of the interactions between Salim and Neila have a dry humor about them as well.

One of my personal dictums of fiction (be it a novel, movie or RPG adventure) is that an ending isn’t satisfying unless it’s ambivalent. It can be a happy ending as long as serious sacrifices were made to get here. Without spoiling it, I can say that Death’s Heretic ties up all the loose ends, yet it doesn’t solve all of its characters’ problems. And, interestingly enough, you’ll finish the novel not entirely sure which character the title refers to.

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