The third best assassin. A second rate mercenary crew. One terrifying demon. As Sharaam crumbles under siege, a mercenary crew hires an assassin to kill the king. For Tash, it’s a chance at glory—to be the best blade in the dark Sharaam has ever known. For Pitt, it’s a way to get his cutthroat crew past the Tsarii siege and out of this hellhole, maybe even with some gold to their name. For Iananr the Bound One, it’s a dream of shadows and human blood.

This novella has all the wise-cracking cynical observations and lyrical flowing prose that you would expect from any prior experience with the authors all rolled into one compact volume. The setting reminded me a bit of the beleaguered St Malo from All the Light We Cannot See, there is the same sense of a city well on the way to hell with characters scrabbling for untold riches and survival in the shadow of a ruinous bombardment.

I am curious about the collaborative writing process, and that might be a subject of a separate post. However, in this demonic tale the authors appear to have passed the narrative back and forth between themselves with Smith-Spark providing the demonic point of view while Fletcher toys with desperate humans doing desperate deeds – including trying to evade said demon. This division of labour helps ensure their differing authorial styles complement each other nicely. One can’t say it’s an exactly happy story, nor that the heroes ultimately triumph – in any conventional sense (mainly because all the characters are pretty much anti-heroes) but it does make for a fun and thrilling well-told tale.

The story opens with Tash, somewhat irked at his moniker of 3^rd best assassin in Sharaam, in mid-assignment to kill the king, but things go awry when he discovers the king has some remarkable additional protection which is where the Demon with a mission comes in.

That should add enough narrative tension and plot complications for most people, but the authors throw more chaos into the mix with the fact that Sharaam and its fast-decreasing population is enduring a siege from the fanatical and overwhelmingly numerous Tsarii, so events play out against the backdrop of a continuous bombardment.

“A dozen flaming balls of pitch arced over the distant city wall to fall, sputtering somewhere on the Taharishae District where all the politicians and masters of Industry lived.

Couldn’t happen to nicer people.”

To be fair the bombardment does slip from backdrop to frontdrop as the great balls of fire and magic from the Tsarii take centre stage in the unfolding story.

I’ve read Fletcher’s Successive SPFBO Finalists, Blackstone Heart and Norylska Groans, and In the Shadow of Their Dying gives him more scope for evocative descriptions of grim tortured settings and deeply compromised characters.

“The sky cracked, a jagged scar of blinding light forking across the heavens, illuminating an impenetrable dome of iron grey.”

“Every footstep squelched like a sucking chest wound.”

“Even the buildings, leaning as if straining against their foundations, looked like they were getting ready to leave.”

There is also a nice stab at the utter senselessness of war – or at least its senselessness to those suffering beneath its bloody and oppressive weight.

“It was a thing that would get him the hell out before the Tsarii put everyone’s head on a spike for not believing the right thing about something he wasn’t clear on.”

If Fletcher’s chapters probe the depths of human iniquity and desperation, Smith-Spark’s explore the alienness of another way of being, of thinking – she inhabits the demon Iananr’s mind with compelling conviction as it rails against the “word-chains” that bind it to service, searching for a route to freedom even as it serves its summoned purpose.

“If I was free of these word-chains, I would kill them. My master bound me with word-chains to its weak vile will. I am a hunter. Kill.”

The plot revolves around the impetus to escape, in Tash’s case not just from the demon, but from the besieged city whose defences are at the point of imminent collapse. He is sure that salvation – or at least a ticket out of Sharaam – lies with the mercenary Pitt who hired him for the job. It was Pitt who labelled Tash as the “3^rd best assassin in Sharaam” to “drive down his price” – although he tells an associate that “If anything I was generous. That panty-stain wasn’t even top ten.”

The contrast with Pitt’s eclectic band of hard-drinking, crude-swearing, cheerfully-murderous individuals does help make Iananr – herself the essence of demonic evil – a somewhat sympathetic character.

The chaotic context of the siege seems to suit both writers’ styles with the plot unfolding in an organic way – as indeed do several of Iananr’s victims. The roller-coaster narrative experience, with constant switchbacks, does make it hard to predict what is coming or to work out which characters to root for. However, I do have a couple of favourites within Pitt’s cabal. There is the enigmatic Wint – who is a strange kind of being known as a Shroud, a creature that seems to roll Scrooge’s ghosts of past, present and future into a single time denying entity. Fletcher keeps Wint’s powers relatively mysterious – perhaps because a novella didn’t leave scope to explore them, perhaps because he hadn’t worked them all out. However, I would certainly like to see more development of Wint in a subsequent, or previous, story! The other character that caught my eye is the weary spy Lashiahar – her sheer ennui at trying to still do a thankless job in a world that is rapidly going to shit would resonate with wage-slaves the world over!

Overall, In the Shadow of Their Dying is a brisk, grim but entertaining tale that weaves together stylish prose, sharp wit, and inventive anarchy in an effective collaborative narrative.

In The Shadow of Their Dying is due for release March 19th 2024