Nearly three months after I started, it’s finally time to say goodbye to the Death Gate Cycle. I’m a bit torn to be honest. I wouldn’t describe any of these books or the series as a whole as amazing, but on the other hand, I can’t at this point think of a single other series I’ve read that’s this long, this cohesive, and that maintains this level of quality throughout. And I guess maybe that’s amazing in its own way.
The final entry is a story of love, redemption, and the nature of divinity. It brings together vast forces of unimaginable power in an apocalyptic confrontation, casts down proud and powerful leaders, stymies the machinations of devious foes, and ultimately is resolved by a dog biting a dude in the junk.
As for this review, well… I’m going to do my level best not to write about any of that.
Last book ended with Haplo abducted from the battlefield by his lord, Xar, and Alfred apparently fallen in battle against a swarm of evil dragons. So we’ve got Marit, Haplo’s former and obviously future love interest, and Hugh, the human assassin who was forcibly granted immortality in exchange for a complete inability to kill things, running a rescue plot.
Alfred’s fairly easy to find, as is Haplo. Unfortunately, Haplo is mostly dead. And playing ghost while tethered to his pet dog, which we finally learn explicitly is the physical manifestation of his soul. With evil serpents, good dragons, a starving army of Sartan necromancers, a besieged city of recently defrosted OG Sartan sorcerers, a pair of Patryn cities left leaderless by a champion with delusions of divinity, and a sentient death-maze world raising untold hordes of monsters to cast down the last light of civilization and usher in an eternity of despair, we are very definitely within the final book of a series.
And as with many fantasy series, the true resolution to the epic confrontation between good and evil happens far away from the battlefield.
I enjoyed it. I liked it my first read, and I liked it again on the reread. The series is a large enough time investment that it’ll probably be at least another decade before I reread it, but I don’t regret any of the time I’ve spend within its pages.
In my previous reviews, I’ve talked a fair bit about the Sartan. The Sartan are Alfred’s people, the proud sorcerers who consider themselves benevolent demigods meant to guide the lesser people of the world with their wisdom and might. They’re terrible.
It’s finally time to talk about the Patryn, Haplo’s people.
By now we’ve learned quite a bit more about the history of the Sartan and the Patryn. The Sartan emerged from humanity in the aftermath of a nuclear war at some point in our future. They had vast magical abilities and worked closely with each other towards common goals. The Patryn emerged from the Sartan themselves, dissenters whose interests were much more personal. Where the Sartan cared about society and the world as a whole, the Patryn cared about themselves, their families, and their friends and left the world at large to its own devices.
The Sartan were convinced that the Patryn were working against them in a grand conspiracy to overthrow them and to conquer the world for themselves. That’s why the Sartan ultimately destroyed our world and built the interconnected worlds of the Death Gate Cycle in its place, at the cost of countless lives. In the epilogue to this final volume, it’s obvious that Alfred accepts the basic assumptions behind the Sartan decision. Which is a bit sad really, because the rest of the history he gives us shows exactly why the Sartan fear of the Patryn was never anything but baseless paranoia.
When the Sartan finally went to war against the Patryn, they won easily, quickly, and with almost no meaningful losses. Why? Because the Patryn were never a unified force. When a Patryn positioned themselves as the adviser to a mortal ruler, it wasn’t part of a grand conspiracy, it was pure personal ambition.
It took the Sartan to teach the Patryn to think of themselves as a people or as a nation. It took the Sartan to teach the Patryn how to judge others for their race or their nationality.
And still, through all of it, in the midst of being targeted for a genocide, the Patryn held out their hands in friendship to the many Sartan who were cast into hell alongside them as punishment for dissent. After a thousand years trapped in a death maze, fighting for every moment of peace, every scrap of food, and every sip of water, the Patryn have held onto their basic decency and compassion so strongly that the only reason there are even jail cells in the Patryn city we see is to keep the dangerously insane from hurting themselves or others while they receive treatment.
These are the people who were presented to us as villains at the start of the series.
These are the people who think of themselves as villains. But that seems to be as much of a coping mechanism as anything else.
We only really get to see inside the head of three Patryn over the course of the series. There’s Haplo, of course, who starts the series as a cynical and manipulative racist but is rapidly ‘corrupted’ by his bad habit of getting to know and like other people on a personal level and comes to extend that compassion and empathy well beyond the people who have directly touched his life. Then there’s Xar, the leader of the Patryn, whose main flaw is that he sees his own people as his children and thinks he knows what’s best for him. The entire reason Xar becomes a villain is that he’s blinded to his own flaws by his desperate need to be good enough for his adoptive children. And finally, we get Marit, the nail in the coffin of the idea that Haplo’s unique among his people. With Haplo, Hugh, and Alfred beside her, Marit goes through very nearly the same path of character growth Haplo did, but she does it in two novels rather than five.
The Patryn aren’t evil, they’re that grumpy neighbor who scowls all the time, but will drop whatever they’re doing to help you at the first sign you’re in trouble and never even have it cross their mind that you might feel obligated to repay them somehow.
I’ll wrap up by calling out a part of the epilogue as nice little form of fanservice. Normally that term describes gratuitously erotic content, but occasionally like to use it to describe a work of fiction giving its audience what they actually want. In this case, it’s a few paragraphs where Alfred records that Haplo and Marit have made several trips into the Labyrinth to find their daughter Rue and have come back with ‘numerous’ daughters and ‘several’ sons who all call Alfred their grandfather. And, we’re told, Haplo’s even gotten a new dog to replace the one he lost when he re-integrated his soul.
Maybe I’m just a big softie, but there’s a part of me that just has to smile when I’ve been following a group of basically decent characters through a long and difficult ordeal and at the end I get to hear that they really did live happily ever after.
Of course, while the implication is that many of Haplo and Marit’s new daughters are named Rue and Haplo at least goes around saying that any one of them could be his child by birth, a part of me can’t help but picture a little Patryn girl named Rue who by some bit of magic or other means has lived her whole life knowing faces of the parents she never met but secretly hopes will one day come to rescue her. And that part of me has to cringe just a bit at what her face might look like when she finally meets her parents as a teenager or an adult only to learn that they’re busy raising an entire village of Rues that aren’t her.
rising at the gate
winter sun spreads little warmth
sharing its wisdom
Kim M. Russell, 2017
Image found on Pinterest
My response to Carpe Diem #1304 The Seventh Gate
Chèvrefeuille tells us that, as he was reading the Rubaiyat, there were several quatrains he didn’t understand, which sounded magical and mysterious. Today’s Quatrain XXXI is such a quatrain: it puts into a visual of the universe…
Like a drop in the vast ocean, each of us causes ripples as we move through our lives. The effects of whatever we do - insignificant as it may seem - spread out beyond us. We may never know what far-reaching impact even the simplest action might have on our fellow mortals. Thus we need to be conscious, all the time, of our place in the ocean, of our place in the world, of our place among our fellow creatures.
For if enough of us join forces, we can swell the tide of events - for good or for evil.
