Empire in Black and Gold (Shadows of the Apt)

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It falls upon his shoulders to open the eyes of his people, before a black-and-gold tide sweeps down over the Lowlands and burns away everything in its path.

After drawing you in it skips ahead a few years and introduces the main cast of somewhat unlikely protagonists and the journey begins. Throughout the first third of the book, I was confused because there were many concepts that seemed new but weren’t adequately explained to me.

Some of the dialogue and interpersonal interactions also felt a bit stilted, as there were times I wondered why a character didn’t ask the obvious question or react more strongly to a situation.

Fundamentally, though, Empire in Black and Gold is a good beginning for an epic fantasy that promises all the pleasures one usually finds in such books. Enough of them remain however to take action when Stenwold works out that Thalric and his people are going to seize the steam-train Pride and use it to spearhead a surprise attack on Collegium.If all I had to go by was the cover art (Tor 2008 edition), the title of the book and the synopsis, I probably wouldn’t give Adrian Tchaikovsky’s debut a second glimpse. Empire in Black and Gold is the first novel in the Shadows of the Apt series by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published in 2008.