The story so far... Three Parts Dead
Last time on ‘Craft Sequence Story So Far’… demons infested the water of Dresediel Lex, and Caleb was convinced his manic-pixie-dream-Mal wasn’t involved but of course she was. Shocker. Read the article here, and then join us for THREE PARTS DEAD.
This post contains extensive spoilers for Three Parts Dead, some spoilers for the rest of the series, and expects the reader to have already read all currently published Craft Sequence books.
Three Parts Dead
“The Church is not the only group interested in Kos’s revivification. Your god was one of the last in the New World, and his influence extended around the globe. Gods who wish to deal with Deathless Kings pass their power through Kos to do so, and Deathless Kings who deal with gods do the same. People around the world are invested in his survival. When these groups realise Kos is no longer alive to honour his agreements, they will choose a representative and send him here, to ensure Kos’s pacts are fulfilled. If the representative discovers something we didn’t know, some sign, say, that the Church made unwise bargains in Kos’s name, he’ll use that to gain more control over your god’s resurrection.”
Dramatis Personae
Craftsfolk
TARA ABERNATHY - Junior Craftswoman and recent graduate from the Hidden Schools out to prove herself. Stands up against injustice no matter the consequences. Exploited by Alexander Denovo and determined to bring him down.
ELAYNE KEVARIAN - Craftswoman at Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, representing the Church of Kos. Old enemy of Denovo, playing the long game to get revenge. Cool, calm and collected - at least on the surface. Has an underappreciated humour.
ALEXANDER DENOVO - A well-respected Craftsman teaching at the Hidden Schools after being blacklisted from major firms due to his unethical experiments in mind control. Academia is more okay with this, and protects Denovo over his students (like Tara). Wants to become a god. Misogynist.
Priests (of a sort)
ABELARD - Junior priest in the Church of Kos. Present when Kos ‘died’, ongoing trauma. Precious cinnamon roll with a chain smoking habit (which is not unhealthy as a priest of Kos, promise). Childhood friend of Cat.
CATHERINE ELLE - Blacksuit (AKA cop AKA sort of priest of Justice), vampire bite addict. Just trying to get through life.
SHALE - Gargoyle, child of Seril. Been on the run since she ‘died’ in the God Wars, recently returned to Alt Coulumb with his flight. Able to change form into a startlingly attractive young man.
CARDINAL GUSTAVE - Senior priest of Kos who calls Elayne Kevarian to represent the Church. Up to Something.
Gods
KOS EVERBURNING - Fire lord of Alt Coulumb, stayed neutral in the God Wars and has reaped the benefits since. Lover of Seril (not a euphemism). A nice kind of god.
SERIL UNDYING - Lady of Alt Coulumb, goddess of the moon, thought to have been killed in the God Wars.
JUSTICE - Constructed from Seril’s corpse to keep the justice system of Alt Coulumb running. Blinded by Alexander Denovo.
Assorted others
RAZ PELHAM - Vampire pirate (vampirate) and friend of Elayne Kevarian.
AL CABOT - Craft priest, old contact of Elayne Kevarian. Deceased early in the book (for real).
DAVID CABOT - Al Cabot’s son, bleeding heart who left Alt Coulumb to help the Old World recover from the God Wars. Came into contact with Seril and her gargoyles.
What happens in Three Parts Dead?
A couple of years after the last book, we rejoin the story in THREE PARTS DEAD. We meet TARA ABERNATHY, a young Craftswoman who has just graduated from the Hidden Schools - and promptly been thrown thousands of feet from the flying college after a battle with her former teachers. She survives, barely, drinking the life of an oasis in the Badlands. She drags herself, broken and bleeding, to her hometown of EDGEMONT, where she attempts to forget her studies and life as a fledgling Craftswoman. An uneventful few months pass.
Meanwhile, in the city of ALT COULUMB, a young priest, ABELARD, has the graveyard shift worshipping his god, KOS, and the eternal flame, but Kos isn’t answering. Abruptly alarms ring out, and Abelard realises the eternal flame is gone - and so is his god.
Back in Edgemont, Tara makes the not entirely wise decision to resurrect a couple of townsfolk killed by Raiders - basic, beginner level Craftswoman stuff. Unfortunately, her neighbours don’t agree and descend on her with pitchforks. Luckily help arrives in the form of the inimitable ELAYNE KEVARIAN, pinstriped and unruffled as usual. Elayne hires Tara for a new case: they’ve been hired by the Church of Kos to resurrect their god.
They quickly become embroiled in a plot that goes much further than they first thought. They are brought into the city by Elayne’s old friend, vampire pirate CAPTAIN RAZ PELHAM. The fact that nobody calls him a vampirate is absolutely shameful, but we move. Tara goes to meet an old contact of Elayne’s, who has been quite brutally murdered; a shape-changing gargoyle, SHALE, appears to have been set up as the culprit and is taken into custody by the Blacksuits, a hivemind police force, so Tara steals his face to be able to interrogate him later. Elayne is working with CARDINAL GUSTAVE and sends Tara off with Abelard to do document review (in the form of a fun vision quest).
It becomes clear that Raz Pelham is involved in the mystery, and in hunting him down Abelard gets in touch with an old friend, CAT ELLE, a Blacksuit by day and vampire-bite-addict by night. They track down Raz right as some distant Craftsperson is wiping his memory of a past deal. In saving him, Tara and he both end up hospitalised.
Tara and Elayne’s mutual old enemy, ALEXANDER DENOVO, shows up as opposing counsel and Tara confronts him in court for the first time since she destroyed his laboratory and was thrown out of the Hidden Schools in retaliation. She wins their first encounter, but much more is to come.
Tara manipulates Cat to be able to give Shale his face back so she can follow him to where other gargoyles are hiding; meanwhile Elayne is hypnotised by Denovo. Tara finds the gargoyles and learns a huge secret: the goddess SERIL, Kos’s consort thought to be killed in the God Wars, survived weakened. Kos had recently discovered this and tried to transfer power to her in secret. He was killed when he was at his weakest, and the transferred power had disappeared.
At that moment, Cat and the Blacksuits appear and haul Tara, Abelard and the gargoyles off to be tried for conspiring against the city. Tara takes over the clearly biased proceedings to reveal the secret plot. Denovo and Elayne arrive and corroborate her story; Tara realises Elayne is under Denovo’s power, and that Denovo wants to take Seril’s power for his own. As a fight breaks out, Cardinal Gustave appears in flame - he had betrayed Kos to work with Denovo against Seril. Abelard is killed. At the battle’s climax, Elayne regains some control over her body, creates a resurrection circle not for Abelard, but for Kos, who had escaped into Abelard’s cigarette at the moment of his apparent death. With Kos resurrected, Seril somewhat restored to Herself, Gustave dead and Denovo in custody, the main Alt Coulumb plot ends.
As Elayne prepares to leave the city for their next assignment, Tara decides that she wants to remain in Alt Coulumb as Kos’s in-house counsel, to rebuild what was broken. Before Elayne leaves, she visits Denovo in his cell, which is warded against Craft or divine interference. As a Craftsman, he is destined for immortality and is happy to wait for the tides to change. However, before he was captured Elayne managed to pass a curse into him that she now uses to kill him once and for all.
“She raised her hand, fingers crooked into a claw. He felt a sudden tightness in his chest. Something many-legged and sharp moved within his gullet.
“I did not employ the shadow against you in the Temple of Justice,” she said, “because it was more poetic to use Kos. Besides, as Tara’s mentor, I feel compelled to set a less bloodthirsty example. Call me a sentimentalist if you must.”
“Elayne. They’ll know. Kill me here, and they’ll know.”
“You said it yourself. No Craft of mine can penetrate that iron mesh. I’ve given you no food, no water, no poison. Prisoners die of heart attacks all the time.”
“Elayne.”
Her tone remained cool. “You murdered one of the few gods in this world who never hurt a single Craftsman. You’ve broken countless people to your will, and you enjoyed breaking the women most of all.”
“You bitch! You fucking—”
She closed her hand.
The world stopped without slowing.
“Goodbye, Alexander.”
The importance of Three Parts Dead
Three Parts Dead is most people’s introduction to the series, and I maintain that it’s the best place to start no matter which book you go to after. It’s a perfect introduction to the world of the Craft without too much expository info-dumping, with relatable characters and a city that, whilst magical and a bit weird, is more recognisable than some other locations the series goes to.
The book is all about things not being what they seem. Neither Kos nor Seril are dead, despite appearances. Denovo’s jovial country gentleman exterior hides a vicious, abusive reality. The city Abelard thinks he knows is not actually the one he lives in, as Elayne explains when they meet with Deathless Kings. The terrifying gargoyles of myth are protecting their broken goddess. The Craft, the power Tara has been seeking her entire life, is not entirely good in the way she initially believes. What she thought she wanted out of life might, in fact, not be what she really wants.
This theme continues throughout the series. Characters are woken out of complacency and gain a new sense of urgency to fight injustice and try to make a difference in whatever way they can. This is true for almost all the characters in Three Parts Dead, for Caleb, for Kai, for Izza and Ley and Zeddig and Raymet and even Kopil, of all people. Characters who are part of powerful institutions feel this even more deeply.
Three Parts Dead also shows positive sides of both the Craft and religion. We know that Craftsfolk and gods have fought a bloody century long war, that many on both sides were killed, but we see how they can, in fact, work together. Kos is, ultimately, a good god. Despite fighting in the God Wars, Elayne can happily deal with the Church of Kos and priesthoods in a way that feels more genuine than many other Craftsfolk. Tara decides at the end of the book to turn down the career of her dreams and instead work as in-house Craftswoman for the Church - demonstrating how the two can and should work together. Her budding friendship with Abelard exemplifies this too.
“I enjoyed that work. All of it. I was at least as manipulative as you. More so, in some ways: I stole Shale’s face, I warped Cat’s mind, while you barely used any Craft at all. But in the end I’m not sure either of us is any better than Denovo. We’re leaving behind us a broken city, and two resurrected gods. Alt Coulumb doesn’t yet know the depth of the changes we have wrought upon it. And soon we’ll be gone, because we’ve done our job.
“I know you’ve risked yourself to help me, to give me a chance at the firm. But I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here, and finish what we’ve started. The Church needs a Craftswoman. I can be that person. They need me.”
People are happy to run away from the consequences of their actions. The world of Craft as a whole is happy to ignore the destruction it has wrought on the world. Gods and their faithful are happy to ignore the world outside their narrow lane. But that won’t work for much longer.
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