Literature / The Cemeteries of Amalo

He speaks for the fallen.

The Cemeteries of Amalo is a sequel trilogy to The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison.

It stars Thara Celehar, a witness for the dead newly assigned to the city of Amalo. It follows his life as a clerical witness as he deals with political squabbles, outbreaks of the ravenous dead, and more than a few murders.

No sooner does he arrive in Amalo that he finds himself unwelcome by the local Corrupt Church, involved in murders that he must solve, as well as constantly having his abilities as a medium challenged. It doesn't help that supernatural horrors like ghouls, ghosts, and other creatures are very real as well as prone to haunting the living. Both figuratively and literally.

Thara's simple, straightforward devotion to his god as well as his skill at logical reasoning give him an edge in solving the various crimes he encounters as well as navigating the complex politics of the city. While not as prone to making friends as Emperor Maia, he soon develops a number of contacts that give him an edge more valuable than his power to summon the spirits of the dead.

The series so far consists of The Witness For The Dead (June 2021), and a sequel, The Grief Of Stones, released in June 2022. The third book, The Tomb of Dragons, does not yet have a release date.

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The Cemeteries of Amalo contains examples of:

• And I Must Scream: Celehar is horrified to realize that the spirits of the revethavar's victims are trapped in their remains and still experiencing the horror of their deaths, despite some being hundreds of years old when normally a spirit will fade within a few days or weeks after death.
• The Apprentice: Velhiro Tomasaran in The Grief of Stones is apprenticed to Celehar upon discovering her calling as a Witness, since she is considered too old to go through the normal novitiate period.
• Arbitrary Skepticism:
  • Somehow in a city that has a very famous ghost infestation in one of its churchyards, there are some who honestly doubt that witnesses for the dead can actually speak to and gain information from spirits of the dead.
  • Ghouls are less common in the south, so there are quite a few people who think the entire idea is a northern folk tale that can be safely ignored.
• Blackmail: Shelsin had a habit of extorting people to support her gambling habits. Ultimately leading to...
• Blackmail Backfire: What gets Arveneän Shelsin in the end. She had found out the identity of a coworker's secret lover and tried to extort a vast amount of money out of them in exchange for keeping the secret. The coworker reasoned that she would never stop at just one demand and decided to throw her into a canal to drown.
• Blatant Lies: "Isolate devotion is not a punishment."
• The Bluebeard: One of the more disturbing cases Celehar deals with is a serial killer who murders his wives with poison. He had been moving between the districts of the city for at least seven years, and was on his fourth wife (that they know of) when he's caught. The women are all unsociable, plain looking, and easily lured away from the protection of their families after marriage. He started so he could murder a specific young woman without suspicion, but there's usually a hefty inheritance involved by the time he's finally caught.
• Boarding School of Horrors: Osmin Temin's school for foundling girls, which apart from being generally unpleasant is also a front for an underage pornography ring.
• Body Horror: Ghouls clothe themselves with bits and pieces of the bodies they eat. The ghoul Celehar encounters in Tanvero also doesn't have a real face, just a gaping mouth full of jagged bones.
• Bothering by the Book: Several of Celehar's colleagues resent his appointment from outside of the usual channels and seek to make their displeasure known in various obnoxious ways. Unfortunately his exact placement is not a trivial matter in the political tangle of the city's temples and almost everyone has incentive to pursue the question until a definitive answer is given, despite their superior's hope that the dispute will blow over if he ignores it for long enough and Celehar's best efforts not to engage in the argument.
  Celehar: I was forced to argue for standing I did not want, for the alternative was to agree I had none.
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: In The Grief of Stones, Celehar defeats the revethavar (a murderous Undead Abomination) and lives, but sustains so much psychic damage that he loses his Witnessing powers. A healer specializing in such psychic injuries is impressed that he's still sane.
• Call-Back: While traveling to put down a ghoul, Celehar meets an old man who had been banished to an out of the way rural town. Celehar briefly wonders if he had been banished by the previous emperor or his father.
• Camp Gay: Iäna Pel-Thenhior, the principal writer and director for the Vermilion Opera House.
• Catchphrase: "It is my calling" is Celehar's go-to response to any conversation where he feels the need to respond but does not want to engage in the topic. His acquaintances catch on to the fact fairly quickly.
• Cerebus Retcon: The families of the crashed airship's crew in The Goblin Emperor seemed overly worried about erecting a gravestone for their deceased relatives and excessively grateful to Maia for taking care of this issue for them. Revelations about ghouls and the unquiet dead in this series demonstrate that this was actually a very pressing concern.
• The Coroner: Ulzhavar, the Master of the Mortuary, is a distant relative of an Impoverished Patrician and is often found conducting autopsies for investigative purposes and/or to instruct his new subordinates in how it's done. Thara consults him in multiple cases when he needs to exhume a body and determine if someone was poisoned. In an interesting coincidence, one of those victims turns out to be Ulzhavar's own great-aunt by marriage, and Ulzhavar's report helps catch her killer.
• Corrupt Church: It's mostly limited to infighting between various factions, but the churches of Amalo are highly dysfunctional and every issue, no matter how trivial, has the potential to set off a screaming match between someone and their rivals. Celehar's appointment from outside the normal structure upsets just about everyone, but at the same time the nature of his appointment insulates him from the worst of it, as he's directly accountable to no one from the established factions.
• Crusading Widow: The first mystery in The Grief of Stones involves an aristocrat who rightfully believes his wife of fifty years and only source of happiness has been murdered and passionately requests official action to avenge her. After the killer's trial and conviction, he commits suicide due to feeling he has nothing left to live for.
• The Dandy: Iäna Pel-Thenhior is quite a fashion plate, appearing a variety of stylish suits that he coordinates with his jewelry.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Photography is a decidedly unrespectable profession, being officially banned from the imperial court for unexplained reasons. It doesn't help that it is closely linked with the pornographic trade, which carries a sentence of six months hard labor if convicted. This is also the same society that has officially sanctioned organized prostitution with dedicated guilds.
• Depower: Celehar notes in The Witness for the Dead that this happens to all those who can speak with the dead eventually because of the emotional toll it takes, and that he estimated he had no more than five years or so before he'd lose his own ability. While defeating the revethavar in The Grief of Stones, Celehar suffers extensive psychic damage which destroys his ability to communicate with the dead sooner than he anticipated. It remains to be seen whether the damage can be cured.
• Doomed Predecessor:
  • In The Witness for the Dead, Thara arrives in a rural village to put a ghoul to rest and is told that a local clergyman who doubts the power of the witnesses for the dead has set out to do the job himself. Everyone else in the village views the amateur Hunter of Monsters as an idiot who is certain to get himself killed without accomplishing anything, and Thara does indeed find the clergyman's mangled corpse minutes before his own fight with the ghoul.
  • In the second book, a major antagonist who needs money to flee town forces Celehar to try and uncover treasure in a haunted crypt. She mentions that many other treasure hunters have vanished in the crypt through the years, although a few made it out alive but empty-handed. Celehar finds the skeletons of the missing treasure hunters (a dozen altogether) shortly before he and his captor are attacked by the evil spirit that killed them.
• Doorstop Baby: The Vigilant Brotherhood is largely made up of foundlings and abandoned babies who no one else would take in. They're rather shabby and dour, but they have a paternal interest in the male orphans of the city. Sadly, they only take in males and there is no analogous group that looks after the welfare of female orphans.
• Driven to Suicide: Tura Olora decides to jump to his death rather than risk revealing the identity of his secret lover during questioning for the murder of Arveneän Shelsin.
• The Eeyore: Celehar is always absolutely convinced that the worst outcome of any situation will come to pass, no matter how frequently he is proven wrong. He is quite clearly suffering from deep depression.
• Exact Words: When challenged on who requested him to witness for an orphaned girl, Celehar replies "We found a friend". The implication being a friend of the girl requested his services, but in fact it was a friend of Celehar's who was outraged that a murder investigation might not proceed simply because of a technicality of custom.
• Failed a Spot Check: In The Grief of Stones, Celehar spends a lot of time and effort trying to figure out who poisoned the Marquise Ulzhavel. Even though he knows the name of the poison, it still takes quite a while into the book for him to remember to ask how long it takes for the poison to kill after it's ingested. Once he knows that, the culprit is obvious.
• Fantastic Racism: Less prominent than in The Goblin Emperor (Amalo is a more cosmopolitan environment than the Court), but still enough of a factor that even in a multiracial city like Amalo, an opera with a goblin protagonist is both unusual and controversial.
• Forging the Will: One of the cases Celehar has to witness for involves the oldest son forging his father's will to gain ownership of the family business. Unfortunately for them, the man's spirit remembered very distinctly dying content in the knowledge that his second son will be the one heading the company after he passes. All straightforward so far, but then Celehar gets accused of being bribed to falsify his witnessing and has to undergo a public test of his faith to prove his innocence and divine favor. Which he passes nicely.
• Gaslamp Fantasy: It's a fantasy setting with ghosts, ghouls, Interrogating the Dead, the printing press, streetcars, airships, factories, photography, and the beginnings of verismo opera.
• The Ghost: A villain of the second book, an exploitative pornographer, is frequently mentioned but never physically appears.
• God Test: Celehar has to undergo one after being falsely accused of falsifying his witnessing. The traditional test for the region involves drinking a horrifically toxic concoction made from a local flower which kills the imbiber as often as not. Luckily, the current Prelate responsible for determining such tests favors one that actually proves someone's faith, and Celehar is challenged to spend a night locked in the Hill of Werewolves, a temple ground famously haunted by the ghosts of a bloody massacre. He passes.
• Hunter of Monsters: One of the many duties of a witness for the dead is to respond to ghouls rising from the grave and put the spirits inhabiting the recently dead to rest to stop them from acting on their hunger for human flesh. In the first book, a local churchman without the ability to speak to the dead attempts to defeat a ghoul by himself before a witness can arrive, which ends badly for him.
• I Know Your True Name:
  • Keeping a legible tombstone at the grave site is one of the ways to prevent a ghoul from appearing, and a priest invoking their name is how to disperse them. Celehar makes a point to observe that the name does not belong to the ghoul, as the dead body is just a vessel the ghoul is puppeting.
  • Knowing someone's name also lets a mage divine their location. This is how they find Broset Sheveldar before he can strike again despite not knowing his current alias.
• I Was Young and Needed the Money: The second book features a murder suspect who posed for a pornographer when she was "desperate and destitute" after her father died and is willing to do anything to keep her potential employers from knowing this including murdering her employer who was attempting to get photography banned from the city because it was being used by pornographers.
• Implied Love Interest: Iäna Pel-Thenhior, for Thara Celehar. There's a clear mutual attraction, and Pel-Thenhior even takes Celehar out to dinner and introduces him to his mom, but between the homophobia of the surrounding society, Celehar's lingering grief, the fact that Pel-Thenhior is technically a suspect in a murder Celehar is investigating, and all the other responsibilities they both have on their plates, the relationship never crosses the line into the openly romantic.
• In-Universe Catharsis: Thara in the Orshaneisei corn maze, at the end of The Grief of Stones.
• It Gets Easier: Celehar tells Tomasaran that it won't always be so hard to set spirits free after she does her first one, although this seems more about knowing the mechanics and not because she won't be affected emotionally every time she does it. Witnesses for the Dead apparently lose their powers when they become sufficiently numbed by the horror of death that it actually doesn't bother them that much any more. Celehar says this happens to all of them, eventually. He expects to only have a few more years before his abilities fade, despite only being in his late twenties, although the encounter with the revethavar seems to have stripped him of his abilities prematurely.
• Living Shadow: The revethavar's shadow is the only part of it that can be clearly seen, as the rest of it is impossible to focus on.
• Loophole Abuse: A witness for the dead is sworn to help any who come to them asking for their aid on behalf of the deceased. While it's traditional for a family member or close acquaintance to be the one to request their services, there is nothing preventing a witness's friend from petitioning them on behalf of a lonely orphan girl who died under mysterious circumstances, even if the two had never met before.
• The Lost Lenore: Celehar continues to be affected by Evru's death and his role in the circumstances surrounding it.
• Maybe Ever After: The Witness For the Dead ends without any clear resolution for Celehar and Pel-Thenhior, although they do keep in touch. By the end of The Grief of Stones, they've advanced to using informal pronouns and holding hands, but it's still all very slow-burn.
• Mind Rape: Although Celehar does defeat the revethavar, their mental battle leaves Celehar broken in spirit and haunted in his dreams. A spiritual healer examines the damage and expresses surprise that Celehar has not gone completely insane.
• Noodle Incident: For some reason, Varenechibel IV took a dislike to photography and banned it from the imperial court, staining the practice in the eyes of polite society forever after.
• Not So Harmless Punishment: The punishment for producing pornography is six months of hard labor in the quarries. This doesn't sound too bad, until a photographer mentions that the harsh working conditions of the quarries and various monster attacks kill most workers within six months.
• Occult Detective: Clerical Witnesses have the ability to "speak" to the dead and glean an insight into their last thoughts while alive. The information they gain is rarely helpful, and even more rarely what the people asking for their help want to hear, so a large part of their job is to investigate using more mundane methods.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: There are several varieties of ghosts in the books. The most commented on ones are the two thousand year old ghosts on the Hill of Werewolves that replay their deaths every night and a vengeful specter created by those same priests using elf-sacrificial Black Magic to guard their hidden compound. There are also the spirits of stillborn children that haunt their mothers and sap their life, and the city's catacombs are forever short-staffed due to the dozens of minor hauntings that infest the tunnels and cause mischief.
• Our Ghouls Are Creepier: Ghouls in the setting are malignant spirits that inhabit neglected corpses and rise to find more flesh to consume. They tire of dead flesh quickly and start to target the living if not put down. Unfortunately, since neglected graves are the ones most likely to produce ghouls, they can sometimes take awhile to notice, especially in more sparsely populated areas. By the end of The Witness for the Dead, Celehar has put down a total of six in his time as a clerical witness, only one of which got to the "devour the living" stage. For whatever reason, they only appear in the north, and southerners have a tendency to treat the very idea as a backwoods superstition, often to their peril.
• Police Psychic: Thara Celehar is a Police Necromancer.
• The Prima Donna: Arveneän Shelsin, both figuratively and literally.
• Proof Dare:
  • Broset Sheveldar makes a few token efforts to deny the evidence he murdered his previous wives, but his main defense relies on the difficulty of proving he had changed his identity throughout his life and was the man they were looking for. The judge isn't convinced by this argument in the slightest and has no qualms about ordering his execution.
  • Tura Olora also says this when confronted with the evidence that he killed Shelsin. Unlike with Broset, he decides to jump off a balcony rather than try the argument in court.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Subpraeceptor Azhanharad of the Vigilant Brotherhood is an uncompromising man who doesn't like Celehar and is a little incredulous of his abilities as a clerical witness, but he respects him in a professional capacity and is willing enough to support him when prevailed upon.
    Very well. We will come arrest Broset Sheveldar for being Broset Sheveldar.
  • Prince Orchenis may not be happy about Celehar getting himself into trouble, but he listens and usually takes a reasonable course of action within his limits.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: A political troublemaker in the temples overplays her hand one too many times and is politely "advised" to spend a few months in solitude and reflection at a particularly remote mountain monastery. In the middle of winter.

  Isolate devotion is not a punishment.

• Right for the Wrong Reasons: The Grief of the Stones has Thara investigate the murder of an aristocrat who got a threatening note saying to stop doing something. One of her frenemies claims the killers are a conspiracy made up of the city's photographers, who the marquise wanted to ban because several of them were making porn. Thara thinks the man's logic is "insane". The actual culprit is someone completely different, but someone connected to one of the city's photographers did send the threatening note, along with a photo of the marquise's secretary from when she'd been a nude model, causing the panicked secretary to kill the marquise so she wouldn't tell everyone about the photo. So a photographer is partially responsible for the marquise's murder, but didn't kill her directly to stop her crusade like the frenemy thinks.
• Screw the Rules, They're Not Real!: Broset Sheveldar points out that there is no law against abandoning your identity and changing your name at the drop of a hat. The unanimous response is that no one thought there needed to be a law against doing something so blatantly suspicious, unethical, and potentially hazardous.
• Secret Ingredient: Not all of Thara's petitioners are interested in solving murders, and one in The Grief of Stones is a baker who wants to find out the secret ingredient for his recently deceased business partner's prized scones.
• Serious Business: Names, for various cultural reasons. The topic is especially important since ghouls most frequently come from graves without a headstone for the deceased. The fact that someone was willing to change their name so casually is one of the more scandalous and commented upon parts of Sheveldar's murder spree.
• Slice of Life: In between the dire murders, ghoul hunts, and political intrigues, the books go into the more mundane aspects of Celehar's life. Things like waiting in an office for petitioners, helping find hidden recipes for a bakery, and the feeding habits of some of the city's feral cats.
• Supreme Chef: Merrem Pel-Thenhior, Iäna's mother, is a very good cook.
• Suspicious Spending: The headmistress of a school for foundling girls is awfully well dressed and bedecked for someone in her position. This is because she has been pimping her charges out to a pornographer and keeping the profits.
• Taking You with Me: When Anvina Renthelar is caught and charged with murder and aiding the pornography ring he endeavors to implicate as many people as he can remember in their schemes. Whether he's hoping to avoid a death sentence, is honestly contrite, just acting out of spite, or some confused muddle of the three is not clarified.
• There Are No Therapists: Zig-zagged. After Thara's Mind Rape by the revethavar, he does see a specialized spiritual healer to treat the psychic damage. But nobody does anything for his depression and apparent PTSD.
• Too Dumb to Live: A local man truly thought anyone could put down a ghoul just by reading from a holy book despite the commonly accepted knowledge to the contrary. He's one of two people the ghoul in question ends up devouring.
• Tragic Stillbirth: Merrem Pel-Venna, a relative of Pel-Thenhior, suffers one, which makes her vulnerable to the attentions of a vampiric spirit that appears to belong to her dead child. She recovers thanks to Celehar's intervention.
• Undead Child: One of the dangers of a stillbirth is that a vampiric spirit can be attracted by the mother's grief and drain her life force in her sleep. The only cure seems to be moving to a new home until the grief begins to ebb and the spirit's attention shifts. As with ghouls, there is debate if the spirit belongs to the dead person or is merely a malicious spirit that is attracted from elsewhere. As with ghouls, Celehar declines to bring up this point of academic ambiguity with the laity.
• Unproblematic Prostitution: It's still not exactly a high status job, but licensed sex work is a perfectly ordinary profession for a woman to have, and nobody judges an opera singer for showing special attention to rich men in exchange for expensive presents. Unlicensed sex work is not so great, but that's because of the poverty and the bad working conditions, not the nature of the job itself.
• Was Once a Man: The revethavar is a terrifying undead creature guarding an ancient tomb. It was created by the head of the heretical sect which the tomb belonged to committing ritual suicide as part of a forbidden death ceremony.
• Warrior Monk: The Vigilant Brotherhood are cops, not soldiers, but their religious devotion to Anmura and use of terminology like "chapterhouse" and "praeceptor" gives them a vaguely Knights Templar flavor.
• Wham Line:
  • During Thara's hunt for a ghoul, he and his companions find a Too Dumb to Live prelate dead in the cemetery where he tried to catch the monster himself. Then, as he tries to determine what to do next to find the ghoul, he makes a startling observation.
    It was as I was turning away from the terrible remains of Othala Perchenzar that I realized two things. First, that the Clestenada cemetery, with its elaborate fence, did in fact make a perfect trap. Second, that this ghoul was smart enough to figure that out.
    It was blocking the gate.
  • Two plot lines; Thara being accused of lying by a man who forged a will and the murder of a blackmailing opera singer turn out to be connected when Thara attends the reading of the real will and learns that one of the opera singer's coworkers is due to inherit money from the dead man and thus might have been a special target of the blackmailer.
    Lawyer reading the will: And to our grandson, Tura Olora, child of our favorite child Daleno, we leave five thousand muranai. ^note A bit over a year's wages for a star opera singer
• Workaholic: Quite a few of Celehar's acquaintances have picked up on his extreme devotion to his job and are worried it will one day be the death of him.
• Worthless Treasure Twist: An unhinged woman briefly takes Celehar captive and compels him to help her find the treasure hidden in a haunted catacomb. If she hadn't been killed by a vengeful spirit on the way there, she would have been disappointed to learn that the famous treasure was in fact the first-hand chronicles of a banned heretical sect. Played With, as the city's historians are thrilled with the discovery and strongarm their university into taking responsibility for the site at some considerable expense.
• Would Hurt a Child: When one of their victims unwisely talks about how she'll expose their child pornography ring, Renthelar and Temin murder her by throwing her off a bridge.
• You Are Not Alone: Celehar isn't as bad as Maia was, but he seems genuinely confused whenever people express concern for him.

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