130 years ago Val Kedić fell to the Keda. The new rules renamed the city, forced the population to build them an island in the middle of the city and proceeded to treat them as almost slaves - almost everyone is kept without anything while the rules live in splendor. And in order to keep the population calm, the Keda use the children - every child with a family is sent to work in the mines between the ages of 11 and 18. That makes sure that they come back with broken spirit - and any time when a parent does anything which the rulers do not like, it is their kid that gets punished.

And if that was not nightmarish enough, the Keda do not seem to be able to speak (later in the book, one of the characters dreams of making the Keda learn tonguespeak (aka actual speech) but that seems like an impossibility from everything else we are told). They communicate with what the citizens call fingerspeak - a touch language where the fingers of the speaker touch, squeeze, tap and so on the forearm of the listener, with 2 metal bands on the arm to assist with the possible words. That requires someone from the population to understand and translate (or how would you rule them?) in both directions so the guild of the translators was born.

When the novel opens, we meet Razvan - one of the best translators in the Guild (there is a very limited number of them for various reasons), with a son in the mines and who is just trying to survive. Before long another tribe/peoples show up intent on defeating the Keda and getting the city and the stage for the novel is set.

So what happens when you rule a city where you cannot hear and speak (let alone understand) the language of the streets and the streets decide that it is time for revolution, using the disruption of the enemy coming in? You rely on your translators. And then some of them decide that they had enough - nothing like a bit of a linguistic subterfuge to kick start the revolution - and things start unraveling. But even in the middle of all that, there is an enemy at the gate and they don't seem to care much about who is who - they want the city. Where would your loyalties be in that situation - the evil you know or the one you don't?

The world has no modern technology (the city does not, it does not seem that the horde that shows up has any either) but there is some form of alchemy so the whole novel has a medieval feel to it. The parts which deal with the language are fascinating (no brushing away the fact that a touch language's grammar works very differently from a spoken one). The sections when Razvan showed us the past and his own history added to the build-up of the novel nicely. A lot of the twists actually worked and did not feel either too expected or coming out of the blue.

And yet, something felt off in the novel as a whole. Part of it is the almost invincibility of the people who had to survive for a plan to work (characters died but... they were never that important). Part of it is that the good guys seemed too good to be believable in places (plus the whole "noone trusts me but I do the best and now everyone does"). It almost felt like a great setting for a novel which just did not have an interesting story to tell - the story felt almost formulaic if you remove the fingerspeak. And yet, I am happy I read it - despite its deficiencies, the linguistic part of the world is fascinating. ( )