The Tomb of Dragons is the third and final book in The Cemeteries of Amalo Trilogy, a subset of the Chronicles of Osreth, the larger world of books that includes The Goblin Emperor. The trilogy has followed Mer Thara Celehar, Witness to the Dead, who had a pivotal role in The Goblin Emperor. Having relocated to the bustling city of Amalo, he has now solved murders, quieted ghouls, trained an assistant, and attended many hours of opera.
As with the other books in this trilogy, a story that could have been a simple adventure instead becomes a meditation on grief, trauma, and, especially, responsibility. What do we owe to our friends? What do nations owe to their people? Does responsibility for a crime stop when the people who committed it are dead, or does it carry forward into future generations?
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The Tomb of Dragons
Book 3 of The Cemeteries of Amalo
The Tomb of Dragons
Book 3 of The Cemeteries of Amalo
Book 3 of The Cemeteries of Amalo
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[Some spoilers ahead for the series]
Mer Celehar’s ability to Witness for the dead was taken from him in the previous book, Grief of Stones. While battling a revethavar (a vampire-ghost hybrid) the creature reached inside his mind and, apparently, poisoned much of what it touched.
It would be bad enough if that meant he could no longer act as a sort of spooky private eye, but it’s also a heavy spiritual loss. Part of his connection to his god, Ulis, is gone, most likely forever. While he knew he’d burn out eventually, as Witnesses always do, his abilities were taken from him in a violent assault—one that he now has to explain to people over and over again, each time they innocently ask why his assistant Tomasaran has taken over his old job.
And on top of that, it means that he’s lost his source of income.
What do you do with a Witness for the Dead who can no longer Witness, has been disowned by his family, and is absolutely dependent on an Archprelate in another city? You assign him to a gargantuan administrative task no one else will ever agree to do! In this case, it’s sorting through an office literally stuffed, almost to the ceiling, with un-filed paperwork. This seems trivial and unglamorous… because it is. But also, since the cleric in charge of the cemetery has refused to deal with his predecessor’s hoarding problem, the work of what is meant to be the main cemetery for Amalo’s poor has ground to a halt. The clerics can’t process the new bodies they receive, so they’ve bagged thousands of bones—literally bagged, in neat linen sacks—and stored them in the rabbit warren of basements under the building. They haven’t buried a body in fifty years.
So yes, Addison has given us a thick fantasy novel whose main narrative arc is the importance of paperwork.
Or at least it’s supposed to be the main arc, until another murder happens, and then Celehar runs into some miners who need him for a job (they aren’t inclined to accept his “No” as a complete sentence) and he runs afoul of one of the most powerful families in the Elflands.
But even with all the drama swirling around him, Celehar makes sure the paperwork isn’t neglected.
Tomasaran, meanwhile, now has to learn the job on the fly. The Witnessing aspect is never easy, but at least she’s gotten used to that—traveling the city and interrogating strangers about murder, especially as a woman in a fairly misogynistic society, is a whole other challenge. Unfortunately, she immediately ends up in a murder case that might just go most of the way to the top!
And speaking of the top…
If you’ve been waiting for Emperor Edrehasivar VII, possibly better known to readers of this site as Emperor Maia Cinnamon Roll, to make another on-page appearance, wait no longer! He shows up a couple times, and hoo boy does he still enjoy causing chaos by actually being a decent person.
The book’s title, The Tomb of Dragons, implies a couple things about this world. But as usual, Addison takes the book in a very different direction than what you might expect. To talk about it, I’ll have to get into heavier spoilers for several paragraphs—skip down if you haven’t read the book yet.
HERE WE BEGIN OUR TREK UP SPOILER MOUNTAIN
In most books I think the fact that there’s A DRAGON GHOST would take center stage. Instead, the fact that Mer Celehar speaks to a dragon’s ghost is only the beginning of two emotional threads. First, the fact that Celehar can suddenly speak with the ghost means that his ability to Witness has come back—he and the reader understand this at just about the same moment. How did the ability come back? Was it the clerics who attempted to heal his mind? Or was it, as he tends to believe, a miracle of Ulis? But in Grief of Stones he explicitly says that Ulis is not a god of miracles—what does it mean that He’s apparently made an exception for Celehar? That question weaves through the rest of the book, as the man slowly, quietly tries to understand that he might be worthy of such a thing. (Of course, the fact that he would never think that if his friends didn’t cajole him into it is part of what makes him worthy.)
The other thread is that the dragon’s ghost, whose name is Ithalpherix, only allows him to live in order that he might act as a Witness, not just for him, but for all the 190 dragons who were massacred by the Clenverada Mining Company mining company. The same Clenverada Mining Company that practically runs the entire city of Amalo.
Celehar, being Celehar, immediately agrees to Witness. But will the other humans of the Elflands agree to see the dragons as sentient being worthy of Witness?
The Empire will collapse without the mining company literally fueling its economy. The miners themselves need their jobs to feed their families. What are those needs when weighed against the anger of the dead? Any dead, let alone creatures who aren’t even human? For Mer Celehar, who has spent his life among the dead, the answer is immediate and unambiguous. Close all the mines, honor the dragons’ wishes, close all the mines, suffer the consequences of the sins of a past generation. But Addison as ever shows us several angles of the argument, even including a Witness for the Mountains, who points out that the mountains really just want to be left alone.
WE ARE NOW PAST SPOILER MOUNTAIN
One of the interesting things about this series is the way Addison subverts the detective genre. Thara Celehar is his city’s equivalent of a gumshoe, in that as a Witness for the Dead he often investigates suspicious deaths—politically motivated murders, murders that were made to look like suicides, crimes of passion—but at the same time he’s a priest, and has to live by the rules of his priesthood. The only reason he’s a “detective” is his ability to commune with the dead. But he has to wear an official coat, no matter how shabby it gets. He has to rely on his order for his income, no matter how tiny that income is. And he is not permitted to lie. If someone asks him a question, he has to tell them the truth, no matter if that puts him in danger, or compromises the case he’s working on. So where in a regular noir, the detective would keep his cards as close to their vest as they can, and possibly bend the truth, and even manipulate those around them, to get at a bigger truth, Mer Celehar has to spill his guts to anyone who asks. This creates a fascinating rhythm to the book, as Addison builds suspense not through Celehar having to maintain lies, but in how much trouble telling the truth might get him into.
Rather than giving us a simple detective story, or even a simple story of Celehar taking the job that seems like an obvious fit, Addison keeps reminding us that life is more complicated. Celehar doesn’t want the job that seems like the easiest solution to his precarious freelance lifestyle. He isn’t looking for romance in the most obvious place. And like her hero, Addison doesn’t take the easy way out. She writes a story of the need for reparations, but transposed into a breathtaking fantasy trope. She gives us a bleak discussion of climate destruction. She gives us a traumatized man who is realistically traumatized, who doesn’t just “get better” on a convenient schedule, but who has moods and setbacks and good days and bad, who pushes beloved friends away because he simply can’t see, yet, that they love him. In a book like this, when the hero gives a little, and admits that maybe he’s not a complete waste of life, it feels like a victory. When he allows himself happiness it’s like the sun breaking through days of clouds.
But I think I need to come back to the crux of the book for a moment. Growing up I’d always hear the cliche that fantasy is conservative and sci-fi is progressive. I never understood why that had to be true—weren’t fantasy and sci-fi simply containers for stories, the same way mystery, romance, or litfic were? Couldn’t you use any genre to tell any story? People are simply containers for stories, after all, and we come in a wide and ever-changing variety of genres.
Addison has taken a mystery container, set it carefully inside a fantasy container, and used both to tell a story about a society’s need to reckon with a bigoted past as it charts a course for a future.
There were hints back in The Goblin Emperor that Edrehasivar VII was going to be a new kind of ruler for the Elflands. Having grown up with poverty and abuse, he had a choice to make when presented with wealth and nigh-absolute power: do you take vengeance on the people who hurt you when you were vulnerable? Do you build walls until you forget that you ever were vulnerable? Or do you remind yourself how it felt to be powerless and afraid as you deal with people who depend on you? But of course the very nature of Maia’s position, the extreme power and privilege he is suddenly given, changes these questions.
With the more street-level Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy, Addison has been able to ask them of people who don’t have Maia’s cushion of wealth and comfort—or the golden cage that surrounds him—and it was exciting to see how she brought the threads together here in Tomb of Dragons. It was especially exciting that she chose to do this with a character who is inexorably tethered to the dead.
How can a society change? How can it make reparations to those it’s wronged? Or, let me back up a moment: should it make those reparations? Me, I’m for reparations. I think labor is inherently sacred, and should be compensated fairly, and any society that shorts its workers and makers and craftspeople will find itself in a state of collapse pretty quick. But that’s in this world. What does that look like for a fantasy world?
Addison has given us a world where the dead can speak to the living—not in a metaphorical sense, or through the legacies they leave behind, but in literal, conscious, purposeful language.
When they speak there is no mistaking their message.
This one change brings the question of reparations into a much brighter focus than most people allow it in our world, because ignoring the voices of the dead also becomes a conscious choice. The living have to decide to reckon with their past, to ignore it, to desecrate it—and they aren’t allowed any illusions when they make that choice.
I try hard to look for timelessness in art. I don’t believe that art should be swallowed by the current moment, no matter how dramatic or dire or jubilant. Having said that, in this current moment, a fantasy trilogy that celebrates people who would be background or side characters in many stories, that reiterates again and again the importance of art, that circles around the need for empathy, is not simply a nice escape. It’s a vital reminder—both of the possibilities of this genre, and of what’s actually important and lasting in society.
The Tomb of Dragons is available now from Tor Books.
Read an excerpt here.
