Deadhouse Gates

Deadhouse Gates, the second volume in Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series, is an even better book than the first one. Beautifully structured and written, the novel offers an incredibly pessimistic story with a wide range of tragic characters, whose arcs always come back to the same question: how to face the horrors of violence?

The story in Deadhouse Gates takes place on a continent different from that presented in Gardens of the Moon, introducing new characters and environments. The focus is the Seven Cities, a region surrounded by a vast desert, whose mythology is all sustained by the notion of rebellion. Having been conquered by the Malazan Empire years ago, the cities are at a boiling point when the old historian Duiker is assigned to work for General Coltaine to help avert civil war.

Besides Duiker’s, there are several points of view in the book: Felisin Paran is a young woman of the nobility who has to deal with the shock of being sent by her own sister to a distant mine, where she begins to work as a slave; Mappo and Icarium are extremely powerful creatures who have to face a dilemma capable of jeopardizing their old friendship; and the assassin Kalam travels with his colleagues, Fiddler, Crokus, and Apsalar in order to assassinate his empress, Laseen.

The book’s prologue is very effective in establishing the tone of the story and introducing its main themes, accompanying the journey of a bewildered Felisin during the purge of her city by the Empire: nobles are being sentenced by a jury of beggars and drunken judges to be dumped into a kind of arena for the violent catharsis of the poor, who will push, trample, and kill them. The Malazan Commander in charge of the event is precisely Felisin’s sister, Tavore Paran, who is punishing Felisin in an attempt to clean up their family name. Anticipating the impending lynching, the girl ends up talking to a monk named Herboric and the assassin Baudin about their chances of survival. Baudin’s answer comes with a sudden, but lengthy execution of a noblewoman, whose head is thrown to the crowd to cause a distraction.

Deadhouse Gates’ characters are prone to outbursts of anger, intimate with hate speeches, and capable of the most repulsive acts. Gore is a constant element in the narrative, always overwhelming us with the horrors that one human being can inflict on another. The climax in the prologue is a terrifying execution, but the events that follow are even more shocking. Erikson works with graphic violence by progressively intensifying the level of brutality while creating visual metaphors to mark it on our mind. He often makes characters seem eternally imprisoned in a last moment of agony, incapable of dying, seeing death as a form of salvation. On the very first page, for example, one can hear the desperate howls of a dog close to passing away, “but not close enough.”

One of the many atrocities that Kalam encounters on his journey is a crucified child. The scene follows the same pattern of intensifying horror: first, he observes a bloody hole in the place of one of the boy’s eyes and notes that his nose is also destroyed. Then, the assassin boggles at the sight of several other children in the same conditions behind that one. His gaze, then, follows the moths devouring the boy’s flesh – so many that it makes the child’s arms look like wings – until Kalam finally realizes that the child is still alive.

And Erikson makes a point of highlighting the human element behind the tragedies: it’s not enough to describe that hundreds of women were raped while they were hanged by the guts of the men who laid around them; there’s also a pause, indicated by dashes, to register that such men were their husbands, brothers, parents, and children.

The novel works with the concept of anger and aggression not only with visceral imagery but also with sound. The characters in Deadhouse Gates don’t “talk” or “say” stuff, they don’t simply “smile”; they “grunt“, “growl“, and “groan“, they “grimace” and “grin“. With a plethora of verbs starting with “gr”, the narrative produces the constant noise of a growl: an excellent use of alliteration that both complements the story’s suffocating atmosphere and adds a bit of dark humor, since Coltaine’s group is called “Chain of Dogs”.

Faced with so much violence, characters in Deadhouse Gates tend to be hopeless, often taking a cynical, pessimist stance on the future of humanity. In this sense, the protagonist, Duiker, finds himself in a special situation for being a historian. His aim is to record the events that are transpiring during the withdrawal of Coltaine’s army from the Seven Cities, when the outburst of civil unrest forces them to flee through the desert with more than fifty thousand refugees. Coltaine’s journey bears many resemblances to the 300 of Sparta: his men are far fewer in number than their enemies but resist due to their discipline, union, and ferocity. Each battle takes place in a situation more disadvantageous than the previous one, but each time Coltaine comes out victorious nonetheless – even if with a smaller number of survivors.

Duiker witnesses Coltaine’s victories with bewilderment, shocked by the amount of savagery happening on both sides of the battlefield. Violence in Deadhouse Gates is framed as ultimate consequence of hate speech: if it’s shocking and nauseating, it’s to function as a warning of what can happen the binary mentality of “us versus them” is left unchecked for too long. Dismayed, Duiker notices how, when it’s already too late, history, science, and reason are abandoned, condemning everyone to a tragic end. When Duiker attests – like Kalam – that even children are not being spared, he declares, unbelievingly, “Children are dying” – a sentence that is immediately complemented by a nearby soldier, who puts the function of his colleague in perspective: “That’s a succinct summary of humankind, I’d say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words. Quote me, Duiker, and your work’s done.”

Felisin doesn’t deal much better with the horrors she witnesses. Following the events of the prologue, her reaction to the world around her becomes a tragic one: to move away from reality, finding a reason to live only in her desire for revenge against her sister. Numbness is a term constantly related to the character while she works in the mines: Felisin is numb by her hatred to Tavore, being no longer able to feel anything else, as if anger anesthetized a person. Such lack of feelings leads to a social numbness, a resignation that, although justified, doesn’t exempt her from her growing complicity to the horrors of the world.  At one point, Erikson – who loves to work with symbolism – constructs an intense visual metaphor by temporarily blinding the girl to everything that is happening around her. It is a heavy scene, for the insects that are assaulting Felisin are trying to enter her ears, mouth, eyes, and even between her legs while she defends herself with mud until she is completely immersed in it, deprived of all her senses…completely numb.

The girl’s character arc is even more tragic than Duiker’: he never stops being bewildered by the violence he witnesses and so he never stops condemning it, seeing it as the anomaly it is. Felisin’s struggles, on the other hand, end up leading her precisely to embrace violence, making it as an important part of herself. Hate, in all its forms, whether political or personal, at the level of discourse or action, is treated as a dehumanizing tool, something that removes the individual’s capacity for empathy, transforming them into another animal blinded by rage.

The story finally gains a lighter mood in the interwoven journeys of Kalam, Fiddler, Crokus, Apsalar, Mappo, and Icarium. The plotline that follows the assassin is the most serious one of the group, from which he separates early on, taking a path of his own to reach Laseen. His journey through the desert is punctuated by scenes of action and persecution, forming several important events in the story. He is a character divided by his alliances – he was born in the Seven Cities but works for the Empire – who sees in the Empress’s death the solution for the war. Kalam, therefore, wishes to end all the violence with a gesture of violence, which makes the anticlimax of his plotline absolutely fitting.

The rest of the group, meanwhile, meets Iskaral Pust, a High Priest of Shadow who follows Kruppe’s characterization in Gardens of the Moon: a character that functions as a mysterious comic relief due to the contrast between his seemingly illogical lines and the immense power that they nonetheless imply. Pust, however, has his own traits, like the habit of seemingly speak his thoughts out loud involuntarily, leading to hilarious situations in which he ends up exposing to others precisely his desire to betray or manipulate them. He injects a great deal of humor into the narrative, which is crucial for it not to become too draining and unbearable with all the violence, providing us moments such as this great exchange between him and Mappo, when the Trell asks the priest:

“Where is the library?”

“Turn right, proceed thirty-four paces, turn right again, twelve paces, then through door on the right, thirty-five paces, through archway on right another eleven paces, turn right one last time, fifteen paces, enter the door on the right.”

Mappo stared at Iskaral Pust.

The High Priest shifted nervously.

“Or,” the Trell said, eyes narrowed, “turn left, nineteen paces.”

“Aye,” Iskaral muttered.”

Finally, Mappo and Icarium are responsible for another emotional load of the book. Their friendship, born of a tragedy, seems destined to end in the same way. Icarium suffers from amnesia due to his involuntary outbursts of fury, a torment that his companion sees as a blessing: it’s a way of forgetting all the violence that he perpetrates. Their friendship, therefore, moves us because they may be honest, kind people, but also violently tragic ones, who are walking towards an inevitable fatality.

If Gardens of the Moon was a great start, Deadhouse Gates is a brilliant novel that reaffirms Steven Erikson as one of the greatest authors in the fantasy genre. Working with the concept of violence, the novel offers several possible answers to the source of such hatred, but one is especially poignant in its simplicity: “Difference in kind is the first recognition, the only needed, in fact. Land, domination, pre-emptive attacks – all just excuses, mundane justifications that do nothing but disguise the simple distinction. They are not us. We are not them.”

January 22, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on August 01, 2016