The Hyena and the Hawk (Adrian Tchaikovsky)

The Hyena and the Hawk
The Echoes of the Fall series, Book 3
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Pan Books
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: With the Plague People - soulless foreigners with strange weapons and translucent wings whose very presence drives away the gods and spreads soul-stripping terror - colonizing the shores and spreading rapidly inland, the end of the True People is nigh. As former enemies unite in the face of this new threat, they quickly realize that all the spears and arrows in the world, every god and stepped animal or Champion form the people can take, will be as smoke in the wind before the Plague People's destruction... and the invaders don't even realize they're destroying anything but animals, unable to comprehend the True People, their souls or shapes or gods or ways. The northern Champion Maniye Many Tracks, the Serpent priest Hesprec, the southern Champion Asman of the Sun River Nation, the Bear man Loud Thunder, and others - including unlikely allies in the Pale Shadow People, who came to this land many generations ago in flight from their cousins, the Plague People, and long now for souls of their own - race to discover a weakness, a way to fight back... but it may already be too late, and soon the only god of this world or any other may be the monstrous bone-gnawing Rat of death.

REVIEW: The conclusion to the (probable) trilogy of shapeshifting Bronze Age tribes fighting soulless faelike invaders maintains the epic sweep and active pacing of the first two installments. The battles grow bigger and more desperate, even as Maniye and the others learn that there is more to their enemy than meets the eye. Victories are few and far between, increasingly meaningless as the overall war (which the Plague People hardly see as a war, as the majority of them simply do not understand that the True People are in fact people - a clear parallel with real world colonizing forces sweeping away native tribes and practices without truly acknowledging the humanity of those they exterminate, or rationalizing the loss to insignificance) tilts against the tribes, spawning a despair from which a new threat arises: the cult of the Rat, who might kill the tribes as surely as any Plague weapon or magic. Worse, their tame arachnid and insectoid beasts of burden are escaping, an ecological disaster in the making as they spread across a land where they have no native predators or checks on their numbers. But the characters are not the same as they were when we met them, all tested by combat and the gods Themselves many times over. It all comes down to an epic confrontation on two fronts: the mortal plane and the realm of the gods, now a devastated wasteland. Significant sacrifices mark a satisfactory conclusion that leaves hints of future installments in the series, or at least the potential for them; the characters and the world are plenty big enough to support more adventures. It made an enjoyable, imaginative diversion.

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