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Originally posted on DW a few days ago.

I read Greg van Eekhout's California Bones this past weekend, the first book in his Daniel Blackland trilogy, and you may be observing fic from me in the very near (now) future, so I’m cross-posting the DW posts in which I talked about it this past week.

It's very good - wildly creative urban fantasy/alternate history in which "osteomancers" consume the bones of extinct animals to absorb their powers, whether it's a real-world ability (swimming and breathing underwater from an aquatic creature, strength of a mammoth, etc) or a magical one: dragon bones for flight and fire, the bones of an invisible mystic serpent to avoid pursuers, etc.

The La Brea Tar Pits are consequently the magical equivalent of a major oil strike, leading to a vastly altered world in which Southern and Northern California are independent countries, LA is a canal city a la Venice, and also a horrifying dystopia in which magicians eat other magicians to consume their magic, and the city in general is a dystopian police state.

The book is a heist novel, with the protagonist and his friends trying to pull off an impossible break-in of the vaults of the city's absolute dictator, the superhumanly powerful Hierarch.

Of course, in my classic way - h/t to rionaleonhart on DW for describing this phenomenon perfectly - I immediately found the worst person in the canon and made a beeline for them. This is not, fortunately, the Hierarch, who is a straight-up villain, but rather, the Javert-like character who is hunting the heist gang, and his partner, a human hound who can smell magic.

I still wasn't that far gone and in fact was kind of uncertain whether I wanted to go ahead and read the next books in the series, because they are pretty dark, so I checked out the fic on AO3 and found that:

a) All of it features my problematic faves, so clearly I'm not the only one who latched onto them. (And in fairness, I can see why; I'll talk more about it under the spoiler cut, but they're definite fandom catnip.)

b) It's all extremely good!

I was expecting the usual small-fandom experience where there's 1 fic in Portuguese, 2 Harry Potter crossovers, and 1 drabble that's part of someone's 200-fandom drabble collection ... but no! There are only four fics, but they're all excellent, they hit my buttons delightfully, and while they did spoil me for some later developments in the series, they also took me from lukewarm about whether to read onward, to slamming the hold button on the books at the library and then, um, rereading about 12 times every scene in this book in which these characters appear and thinking about nothing else for the last couple of days.

It's actually kind of an interesting phenomenon because the characters didn't mash down my id buttons on this level until after reading the fic. The book has a very emotionally restrained, kind of bleak style, and I think it took the extra emotionality of the fic to push me over the edge. But once I went, I went hard.

Under the readmore gets pretty spoilery, especially for the first half of the book, but LOOK, I have to talk about them or I will EXPLODE.

So Gabriel Argent is a mid-level bureaucrat in the Evil Dystopian Ministry of Whatever. He is careful, conscientious, an enormous nerd (he does math in his head to calm himself down), very annoyed by incompetence and slacking, and tries to do his job to the best of his ability and very carefully not think any more than he has to about the ethics of everything he's doing.

He occupies a weird, slippery place in the Lawful Good to Lawful Evil spectrum. I would call him Lawful Neutral, except that increasingly, as the book goes along and Gabriel keeps running headlong into all the various ways that his orders and his moral compass conflict, and gets increasingly pissed off about the dystopia he lives in, he doesn't decide to stop following the rules, he instead decides to Change The Rules so that he can keep following better rules, even if it means murdering his way up the hierarchy to reach a high enough level that he can change the government so that it serves the people instead of the other way around.

So that's Gabriel. He's hunting the heist team protagonists, and in order to do this, Gabriel needs the services of Max, who is a magic-sniffing hound.

Since they're living in a horrifying dystopia, hounds are human beings who are taken from their families as children, brutally trained until there's little left of their original personalities (in theory), and kept naked in cages except when they're taken out on collars and leashes to hunt down magic users. They have no rights and are for all intents and purposes considered animals and treated as such. Max is scheduled to be executed ("put down") in two days because he killed his last handler, but as he's older than most of the hounds, he's the only available one who is trained to trace the unusual and rare form of magic that the hero uses.

Max is smart, sarcastic, bleakly cynical, and very clearly not an animal, and as soon as Gabriel realizes this, he also realizes that the way to deal with Max and not go the way of his last handler is by treating him like a person.

Gabriel stepped up close to him. He reached for [Max's] neck. "I'm not going to hurt you," he said, unnecessarily perhaps. Max made no movement. Gabriel unbuckled his collar. "Shall we continue?" Max's throat moved as he swallowed. "They'll make you put the collar back on when you return me to the kennels." Then he turned and resumed sniffing.

(It's worth pointing out that Max is not actually doglike in any way except a heightened sense of smell. He's a human being whose legal status is "dog.")

Understandably, he's an enormous psychological mess.

Gabriel descended the stairs with Max trailing him. Max moved tentatively. "You're used to leading, not following," Gabriel said. Max looked at him. "You can walk ahead if you want." "I don't know where I'm going," Max said. "If you're not going to keep me on a leash, you could at least tell me where we're going." "Fair enough. But can you tell me one thing?" "I can tell you if I know it. I don't know much. I'm a hound." "Why did you kill your last handler?" Max's answer came without a moment of hesitation. "I wanted to die." Gabriel found himself frozen, halfway down the stone steps. In the dim light, Max's eyes were the brightest things in the stairway. "Why, Max?" "I thought I already said, Inspector Argent. I'm a hound." "Do you still want to die?" "Not before I've had a chance to pee," Max said. Gabriel nodded. "Then you have something to live for. Come on."

Gabriel files paperwork indicating that he needs Max for the current case and Max isn't going back to the kennels and his scheduled death until Gabriel is done with him, however long that takes. He also gives Max normal clothes (a spare set of his own, technically) and ordinary food (hounds in the kennels are fed a "nutritionally balanced slurry") and basically, well, treats him exactly as a partner instead of a dog. Max continues to be a sarcastic nihilist with a death wish.

"Is my time up?" Max asked. "Are they coming for me?" He still didn't seem to care much whether he lived or died. "They better not be. I filed all the right paperwork. You just stay here and keep working on our problem while I see what's going on. And if anyone asks, we are doing *anything* except contemplating the death of our leader." "What leader?" Max said. "Good ..." Gabriel checked himself. He'd almost said "Good dog." "Good," he said again, shutting the office door behind him.

Things go on like this until Gabriel gets himself on the bad side of the regime (basically by scrupulously following protocol and not taking into account that he's working for a horrifyingly corrupt dictatorship) and they end up on the run, being hunted by the authorities. When it becomes clear that the police are killing and terrorizing everyone Gabriel's ever known to get him to give himself up, Gabriel tries to do the noble thing for once, but Max is having none of it.

"What are you doing?" Max snarled. He sensed Gabriel's intentions before Gabriel could even act on them. "I'm going to turn myself in." "They'll kill you." "Not right away." He took a step down the sidewalk. Max gripped his shoulder and spun him around. "You don't have to come with me," Gabriel said, calm, despite the painful pressure of Max's fingers. "While they're busy arresting me, you can hide." Max tightened his grip. "I have no friends. No money. No place to go. Without you, I'll be tracked down and killed. With you, I have a chance. A very small, very sad chance. I need you."

SO YEAH. I mean, I'm not going to spoil the entire thing (this takes us about halfway through the book) but they are absolute id catnip for me, especially as Gabriel increasingly develops a very weird, nerdy, rules-obsessed version of a conscience and starts to act on it, and from the spoilers I've gotten from fic, there is a ton of excellent loyalty kink ahead for them as well, in the books I haven't read yet. Not that I'm checking several times a day to see if my holds have come in yet or anything.

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