Infernal Battalion

Final-volume rules: this essay assumes the campaign so far and discloses nothing past the muster. The library shelves the concluding book of Django Wexler's Shadow Campaigns, and the desk takes the opportunity to introduce the whole series to readers who have not yet enlisted, because Infernal Battalion is the payoff volume of one of modern fantasy's best-kept secrets — flintlock fantasy conducted with real military intelligence, Napoleonic in its bones and demonic in its metaphysics, and unusually serious about what revolutions do after they win.

For the uninitiated, the series' pitch runs as follows. Muskets and bayonets instead of swords, grand tactics rendered with a wargamer's honesty about logistics and a novelist's honesty about fear, a revolution that curdles and reforms in believable stages, and, threaded through the powder smoke, the Thousand Names, an occult inheritance of bound demons that turns the theological cold war under the politics into the series' true battlefield. At the centre stand the series' fixed stars. Janus bet Vhalnich is the general whose genius has always been the story's most double-edged asset; Marcus d'Ivoire, the decent soldier promoted repeatedly past comfort; and Winter Ihernglass, who enlisted disguised as a man and rose, by competence and terrible necessity, into the series' emotional spine and one of the finest soldiers in the genre. The final volume opens with the series' worst possible news, which the jacket announces and the desk therefore repeats: the Beast is loose, the war has become one for the world's ownership, and the army marching under a beloved banner is the instrument of something that wears loyalty as a skin. Every debt the series has run up comes due, on the march, in the snow.

What the desk admires is the conclusion's discipline. Wexler pays his arcs in the currency each was written in — Winter's in endurance and love, Marcus's in duty, the revolution's in compromise — and the demonology resolves by rules the series laid down volumes earlier rather than by convenient thunder. The queer relationships at the series' heart, always written as fact rather than feature, hold their weight to the last page.

Honest notices: not an entry point, stated plainly — start with The Thousand Names and arrive here properly provisioned; content guidance for war in full. The ending closes clean.

Who is this for? Readers who want their fantasy to smell of powder rather than incense, veterans of long campaigns awaiting honourable discharge, and every quiet soldier who became the spine of something. Fall in at book one. The battalion is worth the march.