Who is Eberhardt Jax, and what does he want?
Eberhardt Jax. Billionaire. Nightmare artist. Philanthropist. A man who wants to make his mark on the world.
We first meet Jax, as he prefers to be known, in Ruin of Angels, where he’s entangled with the Iskari plot to rectify Agdel Lex; he is swayed by Kai to help her break into his launch facility, so long as the launch into space still goes ahead. We see him again early in Wicked Problems, and get some pages from his POV for the first time.
It’s clear he’s integral to the overarching plot of the Craft Wars quartet, linked to the skazzerai, the gray men, and the end of the world.
But who exactly is he? And what does he really want?
Who is Eberhardt Jax?
“He was older [than the other nightmare artists], and darker, and he looked good in a suit. He wore his hair short, a simple, expensive cut, jet black. He laced his fingers in his lap, and when he raised one eyebrow, his skin did not wrinkle. His features flowed to accommodate. His accent sounded vaguely Schwarzwald, polished smooth, matte and deep as the shoes he wore.”
This is our initial introduction to Eberhardt Jax, in a meeting with Kai Pohala when she is seeking organisations in which to invest. Jax is notably different from the young techie start up types she’s met so far, and ultimately doesn’t want investment from her - the meeting was set up for other purposes, which we’ll get into later.
Some key facts we learn about Jax in Ruin of Angels include:
He is a wealthy businessman who has made and lost countless fortunes.
He knows the world is dying due to extractive technologies and Craft, and intends to be its saviour. He plans to make history.
He currently runs Altus, focusing on a project to send a rocket into orbit for the first time, and is working with the Iskari Rectification Authority in Agdel Lex, alongside Alethea Vane and Tara Abernathy in an uncomfortable alliance.
He is extremely controlled, and prefers to enter interactions with the upper hand and all relevant information. He hates being on the back foot.
Learning that the Iskari had kept him in the dark about the purpose of the launch infuriates him, but he is unwilling to sabotage the launch itself. He is, however, willing to give Kai Pohala access to the rocket to sabotage the payload, so long as the launch goes off without a hitch.
He doesn’t currently want to leave the planet (as Denovo does), but he does want it to be an option if they can’t save their own world; in the meantime, he wants to get his hands on resources from space. He believes that at this point he’ll have so much soulstuff that he will be, functionally, a god.
He is a trans man who has given birth to two sons (and nearly died in the process), and who has not gone through physical transition like Kai has.
He wants to push himself to his limits to prove that he can, and ensure his body is as well-oiled a machine as it can be.
He smokes to calm his nerves.
Visually, he is described as darker than the other start-up founders Kai has met, with jet black hair and ‘very’ blue eyes.
He wears expensive suits, owns expensive boats, has an expensive haircut, but says he finds observation tiring and prefers to go unseen where possible.
Jax is only in a handful of scenes, but has an outsized impact on the plot. Without him letting Kai into Altus, the launch would have gone ahead with Alethea Vane rectifying the city. As it was, Alikand was saved - while Tara got her recording of the skazzerai, legs skittering across the stars.
What does Jax know about the skazzerai?
It’s not clear whether or not Jax is aware of the skazzerai during Ruin of Angels. We don’t see anything from his perspective, and he plays his cards close to his chest. When he shows Kai that he plans to go out into space, she thinks, “Myth after myth told of the dangers of heaven. Monsters waited there, watching, hungry, their webs spun between the stars,” but there is no reference to Jax himself having any knowledge of them.
This all changes in Wicked Problems. Jax appears at the spirecliff site to meet Caleb Altemoc and see the shard that caused the transformation. After the disaster (tl;dr - Dawn managed to steal the shard, which then almost killed her and Sybil, and is kidnapped by Mal Kekepania on behalf of Mr Brown), Jax hosts our main characters on his yacht as they plan next steps. He claims he was modelling markets and saw an anomaly (Dawn/Sybil) travelling south to Ajaiatez, and thus followed her.
Later that night, Kai breaks into a secret room in his yacht and finds a model of stars - and the skazzerai.
“The room was full of stars.
She recognised them. And she recognised, too, the chittering footsteps that issued from that utter darkness overhead, which even the Lady’s sight could not breach.
“Terrifying, isn’t it?”
She spun, and stared at the star-dappled figure of Eberhardt Jax. He wore a tapestry robe of purple so deep it was almost black, worked with dragons in gold thread. He smiled a cool cool smile.
“Please, Kai. If you wanted to know something, you could have asked.”
Kai felt her heart jump, and couldn’t name the feeling. Her voice, at least, was her own, still and always. “Would you have given me an honest answer?”
He stepped toward her and to one side, arms spread. “Try me.”
“What are you really doing here?”
“Philanthropy. What are you doing here?”
“My job.”
“Which job, exactly? Are you fulfilling your responsibilities to your clients, or are you pursuing your…avocation?”
“Of all the millions of broken places in the world, your philanthropy brings you to the spirecliffs. On the same day as Dawn. And I suppose this”—she swept her hand through the floating stars– “is just another coincidence?”
He drew a breath, held it for an odd length of time, let it out. “When we first met, I told you: only one thing is happening. The world is dying. To survive, we must accept that truth. Like a disease-riddled patient, its final death may take many forms. This is one.” He indicated the hole in the sky. “Ms Abernathy works in her ways, and I in mine. I seek understanding, and I seek weapons. If we are to fight them, we must learn how they fight. They were here before. They left traces: artifacts we can study and reverse engineer. I suspected the scrap of iron that ruined the spirecliffs was one of theirs, but it seemed inaccessible. But then the anomaly veered this way. I did not know what would happen, but I could place myself on the scene. Not that it made much difference.”
“Did you think you could stop her?”
“I hoped to shape events.”
He wasn’t lying, that was the maddening thing. He did not even seem frustrated–just surprised he hadn’t been enough to save the world with only his brain and his checkbook. “You should have called someone.”
Lots of information for us to dissect here!
First of all, Jax has clearly known about the skazzerai for a while. I assume he heard the recording Kai took after the launch in Ruin of Angels, which was approximately two years before this conversation. Kai recognising both the visual and the aural representations of the stars and skazzerai implies to me that it is precisely what she has seen and heard before.
So, Jax was already focused on the end of the world and resource mining the stars, and then found out there are great powerful spider-like demons out there. He correctly surmised that they have been to the Domain before, left some relics behind, and that one of these relics was the shard that led to the formation of the spirecliffs. He noticed the anomaly that is Dawn/Sybil going in that direction, and beat her to it.
Kai is certain that Jax isn’t lying to her. But Jax holds things close to the chest. He may or may not be lying to her, but he’s definitely withholding information.
What is jax hiding?
Before the confrontation scene, there’s a line that could be innocuous, but absolutely is not.
“Sorry I’m late. An associate made a hash of one of our subsidiary projects. It’s all herding plates or juggling cats.”
Jax is late to Caleb’s interrogation, and gives this as his excuse. The man’s busy, true. We see in Ruin of Angels when he reaches the Altus Spire that his assistant has pages upon pages of things needing his attention.
But.
This scene takes place directly after Dawn and the Arsenals destroy the first Mr Brown and fly off across the world to find Temoc. Based on later information, it is fairly undeniable that the ‘associate’ in question was that Mr Brown, and the subsidiary project was getting the shard.
And, of course, Jax all but confirms that he is hiding his real actions and motivations after sending the main gang off on their missions, and remaining behind to “continue to model the anomaly.”
We get Jax POV, after all:
“Kai Pohala believed—he hoped she believed—that he did this work to save the world or the human race. That was a fine reason, and even somewhat true. But out here, beneath that hole in the sky that he carried with him even in his nightmares, he felt, at last and once more, sane.
He became aware of a cultivated anticipation behind him. Not a presence. A presence insisted on itself. An anticipation wondered if it might be useful. “Sonja. What do you have for me?”
“We are losing oracles.” The voice had a gem-polished accent, vaguely Camlaander, though she was not. “Fast, sir. They are. Ah. Screaming.”
“Anything useful?”
A pause, as a clipboard was consulted. “More of the same. Spiders. Footsteps. Hunger. The girl, the tower, the fire, the tree. The Prophecies Department says—” Another consultation, the pause required to reframe a blunt message. “The data stream is too disparate for integration. The primaries have reached the limits of superposition. We’ll burn out the whole crop if we continue. We’ve identified a few useful trade patterns, but the triggers—”
“What about the Arsenal analysis?”
“Fragmentary, sir. Suggestive impact patterns, tracework in the, ah, the bugs. The other wreckage was reduced to ash. Vane says she needs more to work with, even for threat modeling.” A page turned. “She says it at considerable length.”
“Naturally,” he said. “And the Tellurian investigation?”
“Underway. The extent of the destruction, and the Crack in the World, precludes total—”
“Of course. I understand.”
He explicitly tells us that what Kai believes about him is false. That maybe he used to want to save the world, but now he knows about the skazzerai, he wants something else.
The aforementioned modelling of the anomaly? Appears to be killing his oracles - who, to our best knowledge, are people. He is working with ‘Vane’ - Alethea Vane from Ruin of Angels, who wants power and has few, if any, morals. As well as analysing the Arsenal (fair enough, he sent Caleb and Abelard there), he has people doing a ‘Tellurian investigation’ - the Tellurian Annexe, where Denovo captured the Craft-God that merged with Dawn and became Sybil.
Any of these elements on their own would be suspicious but circumstantial.
However, we get around 200 more words from Jax's POV throughout the rest of the book.
“Jax hovered among constellations and knew their names: the Shining Empire. Chartegnon. The Chikal Commodities Exchange. Dresediel Lex. They sang to him, and he heard the song shift key.
“There,” he said. “Sonja. Get Prophecies on the line. Now. Focus on Dresediel Lex.”
...
The prophets were screaming. Eberhardt Jax hovered in the constellation embers, in the whirlwind the markets of Dresediel Lex had become, and still he could not see. Stars winked out beneath his gaze. He reached, and the light receded. “Sonja. Get us more.”
“Red lights across the board, sir. Even Vane’s department is warning–”
“This is the crux, Sonka. I need resolution! I need–”
And then there was light.
...
Far away, a man blinked himself awake and remembered that he was Eberhardt Jax. The stars were gone. He lay on a tile floor surrounded by burned wires and broken glass. All around he heard the silence of dead prophets’ screams. He blinked blood from his eyes. Sonja knelt over him, scared, not quite touching his face. “Sir?”
He sat up and seized her arm. “Did we get it?”
She drew back, as she would have from a flame. On her clipboard, the worm-screen turned. He snatched it from her. Blood dripped from his eyes onto the worms. He heard a strange and broken sound, and realised he was laughing.”
Dead prophets. Burned wires and broken glass. Blood tripping from his eyes. A strange and broken laugh. His assistant drawing back as though from a flame.
This isn’t a good guy. Jax isn’t a good guy.
(Of course he isn’t. He’s a billionaire in a series about the exploitations of capitalism, written by Max Gladstone. Come on now. The billionaire was never going to be the good guy.)
The crux and light he mentions are the moment Ajaia agreed to merge with Dawn and Sybil. Quite what he ‘got’ is unclear at this point - I imagine we’ll find out in Craft Wars #3.
Oh, and of course, he’s working with Clarity.
What does Jax want?
Jax is working with Clarity, the ancient vampire who killed Grimwald and Tiffany, who fought in Chartegnon alongside the gray men, and in Tara’s words “taking pieces off the board. Everything that might help against the skazzerai, all at once. The Grimwald. The Iskari. And… the Serpents” (WP 372).
Clarity was on Jax’s yacht at the start of the book, when the main gang came together to plan. And then she’s in Chartegnon, able to find Grimwald and the Iskari squid saint - because Jax sent her after Tara and Kai, knowing they would lead her to them.
Which means Jax is the one taking pieces off the board.
Jax was also the one who sent Mr Brown, and thus Mal, after the shard, and subsequently Dawn. He sent the gray men after Zack the golem, Dawn and the Arsenals, the Serpents.
When writing the article about Grimwald and the skazzerai, I posed a question at the end. It felt unlikely to me that Grimwald was truly the one shipping the skazzerai shard which then infected and infiltrated the land that became the spirecliffs. At the time, I thought it was Jax who shipped it.
I’m now less sure that it was Jax shipping it - but I do think Jax might have been behind the shipwreck. Remember, Dawn and Mal were nearly killed by a kraken attacking their ship en route to the Arsenal, which could be coincidence but likely is not. We don’t have a precise timeline for when the shipwreck happened (do correct me if I missed it), hearing only that the Two Serpents Group “had worked in the spirecliffs for years” (WP 10) - which could mean two years or ten. However, Kai does tell us that she didn’t represent Star Apple / Grimwald at the time of the accident, inheriting that portfolio after Full Fathom Five, which was about four years ago.
If Jax was behind the shipwreck, with the intention of getting his hands on the shard, he would of course have known about the skazzerai prior to Ruin of Angels, but that’s not a key part of this article just an interpretation so doesn’t really factor into the timeline. When he finally sees that shard (having arranged for it to be stolen during his visit) he is in awe.
“Jax drew a sharp breath. The expression on his face surprised Caleb. Awe and wonder were so close to weakness.”
Jax doesn’t show emotion. He doesn’t let anyone see behind the mask - when he is surprised in Ruin of Angels he doesn’t let Kai see his face while he collects himself. But the shard pulls that from him. This is something he’s been after for a long, long time.
So, my theory is thus: Jax arranged something to spook Grimwald (or whoever held the shard originally) to transport it, then caused a shipwreck with the intention of getting the shard then and there. However, the seal on its container broke and the spirecliffs were formed, stopping Jax from taking it. But he was ready with a plan when the opportunity arose - like the anomaly that is Dawn travelling towards it. It didn’t take him long to arrange for Mr Brown and the Arsenals to show up and steal it, after all.
Jax wants power. Does he want to become a skazzerai? Does he want to try and kill one and take its power? We know he wants power, wants to be functionally a god, and mine natural resources from beyond the stars. The skazzerai are potentially the greatest natural resource out there.
Guess we’ll have to wait until Craft Wars #3* to find out.
(*Gladstone, Tor, hear my prayer - give me a title so I can stop referring to it this way. I’m begging you.)
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