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The Language of the Night: Entering the Temple of the White Rat [1]
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Date: 2025-03-31
Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon;
burgstede burston, brosnað enta geweorc.
Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras,
hrungeat berofen, hrim on lime…. from “The Ruin,” MS 3501, Exeter Cathedral Chapter Library Well-wrought is this wall, wyrds broke it; The city wall shattered, the work of giants destroyed. Roofs are ruined, towers destroyed, The gates crumbled, rime on the plaster….
And Old English poet visits a Roman ruin and the lovely poem, “The Ruin,” recorded in only fragmentary form in one manuscript, the famous Exeter Book, is the result. It’s an evocative meditation on what came before and an attempt to make sense of the wonderous remains of an earlier culture (and my on-the-fly translation is awful so go seek out better ones because surely they exist).
The Old English poet looked at the ruins and concluded they must have been built by giants.
This is my introduction to the next few weeks or months, folks. In T. Kingfisher’s Temple of the White Rat series, the characters live in the shadow of a civilization that left no records, but plenty of artifacts. And the artifacts are, by and large, deadly.
People said that the Dowager’s keep was built on the ruins of an older building. People said that there were rooms no one had opened in a thousand years, filled with old wonders from civilizations dead and gone. — Clockwork Boys, page 9
Do you wonder now why my thoughts went to “The Ruin”? By the way, these few sentences echo, not often, but enough, throughout the series that they bear keeping in mind. We all live in the ruins of earlier cultures, but sometimes we don’t see them. They’re still with us, though.
Since life is insane and almost all the news is terrible, I want us to embark on a journey, to some place where the world is still terrible and dangerous but the people are mostly okay. There’s a little magic. And paladins, demons, and gods. Lots of gods — well, a decent number of gods and their acolytes. And romance. But mostly the universe of the White Rat is peopled by regular folks doing their bumbling best.
The series opens with Clockwork Boys, and introduces us to Slate, a professional forger, Caliban, a paladin of the Dreaming God with a dead demon in his soul and a mass murder on his record, Brenner, a jealous assassin worthy of the title, and Learned Edmund, a brilliant, misogynistic, naive, 18-year old scholar. This worthy quartet sets out to learn the secret of the Clockwork boys, three of them felons who carry flesh-eating tattoos (guess which three and you win a prize).
What are the Clockwork Boys? No one knows. But a neighboring city-state is sending them to destroy its rivals. They’re enormous and almost impossible to kill; all the respectable spies have disappeared, and the Dowager is down to the dregs of what she can throw at the problem: the dregs being a forger, an assassin, a paladin who’s been through unspeakable ordeals, and a prissy scholar. It’s the ultimate DnD quest. If they win, they get full pardons and the scholar gets a lifetime’s worth of arcane knowledge. They just have to succeed where entire armies have failed.
“Here.” The Captain dug through papers and came up with a hunk of debris. It looked like a cross between the inside of a clock and a piece of driftwood. Tiny gears and cog-wheels encrusted the sides like barnacles. The knight took the object and turned it over in his fingers. “What is this?” “Part of a Clockwork Boy. It used to move, but we boiled it for a few hours and it finally stopped.” — page 25
Two points anchor the whole series, which includes the Saints of Steel books and is yet to be finished: they are the mysterious unknowability of the past, especially the civilization that bequeathed the Clockwork engines, and the conviction that the world rests on the shoulders of ordinary people who are just doing their best, muddling through, improvising, doing good whenever they can.
What magic there is in the novels appears to be more a cross between advanced engineering and alchemy, with a touch of special sauce. When Slate, whose grandmother was a wonder worker and bequeathed her a small talent, encounters something she needs to pay attention to or is around something magical, she gets a whiff of rosemary — well, more like an overpowering snootful, like an allergic reaction on steroids. She follows her sneezes to Caliban and, when she springs him from prison, no one is happy about it, especially the authorities.
The warden didn’t stop them. Slate hadn’t expected him to. Once papers were signed, people seemed to give up. It was a strange sort of magic. — page 21
This is the best kind of magic in the world of the White Rat — the magic of practicality, of normalcy.
Romantasy is a much bandied phrase these days, covering everything from chaste YA crushes to cozies to vampire porn. This series falls about in the middle — there’s enough spice that you wouldn’t want to read it aloud at story time, but sex doesn’t drive the plot (although desire sure does at times) and the romance is grounded in everyday lived realities, with (shall we say, unusually ) flawed protagonists and women who have lived long enough to harbor no illusions about Happily Ever After.
When Slate opens his cell door,
A tremor went through Caliban, barely there, but Slate’s eye for detail was finer than most. She looked away, because unlike Brenner, she had never liked the sight of pain. Caliban took several steps, and then a final one over the threshold. He swallowed, and seemed briefly at a loss for something to say. — page 17
He’ll find his voice soon enough, but his transition from captivity is sensitively-rendered. Kingfisher’s eye for detail is also finer than most, and her blend of humor and compassion is spot-on.
I once heard someone say that Romance is the only genre devoted to making people happy — making readers happy, making protagonists happy, drawing an end to a story where, if people aren’t living happily ever after, at least they’re making do. I think we could use some of that. I do not believe we’re living at the end of things; it’s just a dark part of our story that we’re in. Therefore, mindful of ruins and giant-built walls as much as on hope and just doing our level best every day, next week I want to open discussion on Clockwork Boys.
It’ll be fun: a suicide mission, implacable murder machines, and a protagonist with hay fever. You can’t do much better than that.
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