Air Logic

Air Logic is a novel that's been a long time coming, finishing off a quartet of novels by Laurie J. Marks that began back in 2002 and whose third volume came out over a decade ago. I haven't been waiting nearly that long - I read Fire Logic back in 2016, and finished Earth Logic and Water Logic last year. However, this series captured my heart, and I've been following the progress of this final instalment for quite some time. I'm so glad that Small Beer Press has brought it to completion, releasing some very pretty new editions in the process. Enough attempting to sell books by their cover, though - how does this final volume match up to the rest of the quartet?

Air Logic picks up where Water Logic leaves off, in the aftermath of the declaration of peace between the people of Shaftal, a sparsely populated and cold country that has spent the past two decades under occupation, and the Sainnites, the colonising army who have been effectively abandoned by their own homelands and living in increasingly precarious circumstances. At the heart of this new political dawn is Karis, the ex-drug addict and blacksmith who is now the G'Deon, or leader of Shaftal, and her motley found family of mystics, ageing warriors, defected soldiers-turned pacifist chefs and objectively horrible magic children in the middle of their judicial training, but she's under increasing threat from a rogue group that doesn't recognise her authority, and their powerful magic leader. A hunt to neutralise the threat of this group turns into a hunt to reclaim some of their lost family members, as the rogue witch deploys increasingly terrifying measures to take Karis and her forces down.

Shaftal is one of those fantasy worlds that just has something a bit special going on, and there's a lot that goes into that. Its big, queer, multi-adult family structures are a particular delight, justified by the subsistence farming structure required to stay alive in the land. So too is the feeling of time passing, of seasonal difference and of generally "lived-in-ness" that the characters' lives exude, even as political elites. But the central attraction is the Elemental logic system, which manifests differently with different characters in a way which nevertheless defines their personalities, outlooks, talents and ways of thinking about the world, and how compatible they are with the other people around them. Fire witches, like Karis' wife and born "boundary-crosser" Zanja, work on intuition; earth bloods like Karis herself offer straightforward, grounded thinking; rare water witches can move through time and have a profoundly different outlook on causality; and air witches tend to embody full rationalism without empathy. Because this is "Air Logic", its the air witches who take centre stage here: whose most magical members are trained as Truthkens, empowered to enact the law and pass judgement on wrongdoers through their ability to detect lies but universally disliked by the people around them and frequently cast out or killed by their own families for their additional ability to control and manipulate the minds of others. Its a system that's never fully explained, and defies easy characterisation, and yet Marks' talent is such that the constant references that characters make to their elemental alignments, their meanings, and their explanatory powers, never feel forced or ridiculous - its just another element of this particular fantasy world...