Agents of Artifice by Ari Marmell

Agents of Artifice is a fun, clever story about one mage’s struggles to find his place in a multiverse of worlds inhabited by all manner of strange and wonderful treasures and ambitious men and women with penchants for manipulating all those within their reach. The book is best approached a rollicking adventure of narrative twists and turns rather. At times, it hints at being something more but only to disappoint later.

The basic story is pretty simple. Jace Beleren is a gifted slacker who uses his mind reading powers to blackmail the wealthy for a living as he mostly drifts aimlessly through life. His drifting comes to an end when Tezzeret forces him to join his Infinite Consortium – an interplanar cartel whose only real goal is to wrest wealth and power from others and consolidate it in Tezzeret’s hands. Jace’s skills improve as his moral center disintegrates.

Eventually, Jace reaches a breaking point and flees the consortium, taking his friend Kallist with him. At this point, Liliana, another planeswalker, enters Jace’s life, appearing as a fellow consortium fugitive. In actuality, Liliana has her own agenda which involves controlling the consortium for herself. For that, she needs a mindreader.

It takes a while, but Liliana eventually manipulates Jace into confronting Tezzeret (unfortunately Kallist had to die along the way). In the process of vanquishing Tezzeret, Jace learns of Liliana’s deceit and makes sure that the consortium dissolves rather than fall into her hands. Jace finds himself almost at the same point he was at at the beginning of the book, though with a new goal – to find out who Liliana really is and what he can do to help her achieve her goals (which involve paying off a few demons she made deals with) in a different way.

The best feature of this book is the vivid, back and forth feeling of the many magical duels that are described. The dynamics don’t quite match what it feels like to play a game of Magic, but they do create a sense of a battle of wits where the winning mage’s ingenuity is rewarded. The best fights are probably the two between Jace and Tezzeret towards the end of the book. The first feels like a series of haymakers with Jace pummeling Tezzeret but ultimately coming up short as Tezzeret uses his familiarity with the surroundings to outmaneuver Jace. In the second, Jace turns the tables on Tezzeret in dramatic fashion by appearing to waste his resources battering harmlessly against Tezzeret’s defenses, when in actuality he was distracting Tezzeret as he called on Tezzeret’s other enemies to come to his aid.

Great descriptions of magic use in Agents of Artifice are not confined solely to the fights. Magic is used in other situations in various clever ways that make it feel as though there’s more to magic than just creating a jar of water when you’re thirsty or a fire when you’re cold. When Jace is trapped inside a magic denying cage and poisoned with a magic poison that will become potent as soon as he leaves the cage, he has Liliana summon a vampire to drain his blood and then uses healing magic which he learned from his elf friend Emmara to regenerate himself. When Jace is injured and too weak to make it to Emmara’s for healing, Liliana summons a specter to possess him and thus move his limbs for him.

At times, the magic use feels a bit too clever. Jace and Liliana find Tezzeret’s secret hideout by planting the specter inside a box bound for Tezzeret. Liliana then summons the specter back and has it possess Jace. The Jace-specter then planeswalks back to Tezzeret using the specter’s knowledge and Jace’s abilities. The rules of planeswalking are not explicitly laid out in the book, but this feels a bit like cheating. The defenses of Tezzeret’s sanctum are somewhat laughable – Jace simply tricks the guards to open the door and then uses mind control to compel a guard commander to grant him and Liliana permission to enter the stronghold without setting off any alarms. There is another planeswalking situation involving “infinity globes” and breaking the traditional rules of the Blind Eternities (a place without really any rules), but let’s just say that again it feels like cheating.

On the topic of the Blind Eternities, another great feature of the writing is the quality of physical description. Ravnica and Grixis are given exiquisite detail, being provided with imagery that makes them easy to visualize as well as plausible explanations of the mechanisms which allow the worlds to exist as they are (eg the fungus farms of Avaric, the rich mana of the sea beneath Favarial). The Blind Eternities are dizzyingly psychedelic; the detailing of alternate realities rippling off of Tezzeret and Jace as they fight inside the Blind Eternities is a nice touch.

Lastly, I want to touch on the writing of the characters. I really like the way the story is set up with Jace as the slacker mage thrust into the crossfire of the ambitions of planeswalkers Tezzeret, Baltrice, Liliana, and Nicol Bolas as well as thugs like Semner and Paldor. The struggle for Jace’s soul has the potential to be a great, inspiring story. Unfortunately, it’s not the one told in Agents of Artifice.

Jace faces two dilemmas while working for the consortium: Tezzeret’s demanding demeanor which will inevitably destroy all those around him if given enough time and remorse at the evil acts he is required to perform in Tezzeret’s service. Jace is forced to weigh his growing magical abilities and his comfortable life against his fear of Tezzeret and his moral center. I found the resolution of these conflicting forces to be disappointing given my estimation of their potential.

Part of my problem with Jace’s development is that it is left in ambiguity to some extent. Jace leaves the consortium after he fails to complete mission which involved taking over the mind of the August Quest of the Chuch of the Incarnate Soul. Jace gives two reasons for his failure: he can not go through with manipulating a mind as pure as the August Questor’s and he can not trust Tezzeret with the power he would gain from the church. It’s not clear which of these motivations is primary. Because he did not fulfill Tezzeret’s commands, he has no choice but to flee or be killed by Tezzeret. There is no cathartic moment of choice really (Jace only recounts the moment with the August Questor after he returns).

The lack of character development for Jace is further reinforced by the fact that he kills far more people of varying levels of innocence after leaving the consortium than he did while a member. At least, as described in the text he does. Another weak point of the book that the passage of time is not demarcated clearly. Because none of the characters undergoes any evolution (except perhaps Tezzeret growing more ridiculously intolerant of failure as the story progresses), there’s no way to distinguish between the large and small jumps in time. While Jace works for the consortium, he only participates in murder under duress – wiping out one man’s mind that Tezzeret threatens to kill otherwise and crushing nezumi shogun’s in self defense.

At some points, the description does not seem to go far enough, especially as regards Jace’s mind magic. Jace appears horrified by the way he treats the minds of Tezzeret’s man and the shogun, but the description of Jace’s experiences does not match this level of intensity, which I feel Marmell is capable of.

Jace’s mental anguish is well articulated in one scene in a market place in Favarial though. In this scene, Jace makes a mental link with everyone in the market place, forming a loose web of awareness to alert him to danger as he tries to elude the consortium’s forces. Jace summons a steam drake to protect him and is forced to call on it for help at one point when he is attacked. The drake responds with a blast of steam that takes out twenty bystanders, flooding Jace’s mind with final thoughts of many innocent people simultaneously. Only the presence of Kallist which Jace can sense in a way that is beyond physical brings Jace back from the catatonic state he is reduced to following the drake’s blast. Unfortunately, Jace continues to kill with abandon after this point and never questions the nature of his friendship with Kallist or Liliana, both of whom also kill with regularity.

The character of Baltrice provides a nice foil to Jace – she has all the ambition within the ranks of the consortium and loyalty to Tezzeret that Jace lacks. However, this foiling is hampered by the lack of any depth to her character. At times, the antagonism between Jace and Baltrice feels strained, especially at their first meeting, where the dialogue is just awful.

Perhaps it’s time I addressed the dialogue more directly. It’s mostly terrible and is probably the biggest real detractor from the quality of the book. While I can quibble about the moral quagmire that Marmell slogs into, the book would be a great adventure story if not for the stock, often juvenile (think MTV’s Real World in the later years) exchanges between characters which drag the whole effort down to merely “good.” There’s one joke Jace makes about what’s in his pocket that’s just ridiculous. Those errants remarks aside, it’s mostly the clunky wordiness that weakens the dialogue.

The dialogue does have a few bright spots. Nicol Bolas is spot on as an ancient demigod who has seen everything before but doesn’t really have anything better to do now any way. Tezzeret waffles between a badass ripping Jace with awesome jibes and a cartoon caricature of a supervillain. Liliana has her moments – one of my favorites being when she responds to Jace by saying that she does not do anything like a man.

Lastly, I’d like to address the nature of Jace’s friendships. Jace’s relationship with Kallist begins well with a great set of scenes infiltrating a local merchant’s manor. The chemistry between the two complementary operatives, fighter and mage, is right on. Unfortunately, the story drags when they flee the consortium and hide out in Favarial. The strain actually begins when Jace convinces Kallist to leave the consortium with him because Kallist was Jace’s friend and would be punished in place of Jace. Tezzeret is vindictive, but Kallist is so opportunistic and such a valuable agent that I don’t buy that Paldor and Tezzeret would really feel compelled to waste him out frustration with Jace. I’d like to think that Jace’s arguments were really just a pretext and that the real reason Jace asked and Kallist consented was the bond of the friendship between the two, which neither wanted broken. After this decision though, Kallist becomes worried about money to the point of ruining the friendship with Jace. This break feels totally forced by the need of the narrative for Jace and Kallist to be driven apart.

Sadly, the Jace and Kallist friendship ends with another Marmell’s clever moments. Jace attempts to save Kallist from his life of mediocrity by taking Kallist’s mind into his own. Unfortunately, Jace realizes too late that he can not hold two minds in his head at once, and the end result is that two switch minds. Everything before the mental exchange is actually told through an extended flashback after the story begins by following Kallist who turns out to be Jace.

Marmell is asking a lot from the reader with this conceit. It really threw me off the first time I read the part about Jace and Kallist swapping minds back. It was not just my confusion in trying to work out the plot that was my problem. It does not make any sense for two people to switch minds and not notice it – what exactly is swapped and what retained? Marmell takes the easy way out of just not making any effort to explain it other than Liliana saying that Jace’s soul did somehow tricked his mind into noticing the switch.

Despite screwing up the Jace/Kallist friendship with the mind swap, Marmell does allow the Kallist to be well remembered at the end of the book. In his last battle with Tezzeret, Jace uses the fighting skills he learned from Kallist to mask his weakened magical state as he communicates with the nezumi through telepathy to ensure their aid. I like how Marmell brings this element back into the story at the end and likewise how he brings Emmara back in Jace’s use of her magic to heal himself from his vampire bite. This expression of the power of friendship is one of the few positive moments in the book (from a spiritual perspective).

Overall, Agents of Artifice is a good fun book. It was challenging for me to read because I wanted there to be more to it than there was. I felt there were the makings of a great book here, but it was not to be. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes fantasy and is looking for an entertaining casual read.