Essay · Book 4, The Gate of the Feral Gods

The arc of the story

The Gate of the Feral Gods is one floor — the Bubbles, floor 5 — and one bubble: number 543, a bowl of sand on top of a tomb, an island in a ring of sea, a maze beneath, and a floating castle above, with about 150 crawlers in it and fifteen days to take all four castles before anyone's stairwell opens. Book 3 was a puzzle solved by a network; book 4 is four locked rooms solved in the wrong order, and the book's real subject is what Carl decides to do with the key he finds.

The book-level entities: Carl, Princess Donut, Katia Grim, Mordecai, The Bubbles, The Gate of the Feral Gods, Juice Box, Chris, Emberus.

Act I — Hump Town (Chapters 1–8)

A sandstorm, doubled bounties, a brothel town of camels under striped sails, and a castle that is a speck against a dome four kilometres up (ch. 1). The fourth floor's achievements arrive with the best loot Carl has ever had (ch. 2); a changeling orphan's telescope shows a floating junkyard with a fuel-air bomb slung beneath it (ch. 2). The quadrant's other crawlers are two drunks and six car salesmen who all chose Archer (ch. 3, ch. 5); a goose boss is dropped dead on the party as a clue (ch. 3); Carl and Katia build a tracked chariot at the new tables (ch. 4); the recap shows Lucia Mar kill Ifechi through her lover's own gun (ch. 4). Breaking into city hall reveals that the guards are changelings and the hostage a starved gnome, whom one of five strangers spears before the quest to free him is five minutes old (ch. 6, ch. 7). Second sponsors arrive: a pacifist non-profit, and a toy company (ch. 7).

Act II — The Wasteland (Chapters 9–13)

A missile test on a cyborg hawk names the floor's treasure and ends with the water castle taken by Chris Andrews 2 (ch. 9). The hostage code, the watch, and the changelings' place in the town are explained by a tired old man in a camel's shape (ch. 10); forty children go into the personal space to watch Toy Story; the AI bets Carl cannot save the town (ch. 10). The con on the sand — Katia as the chair, the corpse and the hostage; Donut as a healer with Mountain Dew — gets Carl into the gnomes' balloon, and missiles fired into its bombs bring the dreadnaught down to a suburban house on one balloon (ch. 11, ch. 12). The AI turns on him over a gerbil, and he steps on one (ch. 13). A rock creature with three skulls says hello.

Act III — Maggie, and the first step (Chapters 14–19)

The rock creature is Maggie My inside Chris, with a grenade that summons the god of pain; Chris, awake inside, asks to be killed; Donut drops them both into the tomb instead (ch. 14). Juice Box tells the truth about her people and the Gate; a biplane's balloons carry Carl and Donut to a house (ch. 15), where a child is making lemonade over her father's body, and a goose with teeth for shot dies in a garbage disposal with one second left (ch. 16). In Hump Town, leaving the orphan sobbing in Juice Box's arms, Carl decides (ch. 17). In a shielded trailer, with a dead crawler's notes as his manual, he leaves a self-destructing toy beside an admin who has just told him what was done to Zev's family, and writes 'One.' (ch. 18). A Syndicate liaison with a worm in his face applauds and cannot prove it; five days are gone (ch. 19).

Act IV — The sandcastle and the sea (Chapters 20–27)

Katia has flown the house down and has been fighting with Gwen (ch. 20). Lightning opens a glass castle: a mage in a bathrobe married to an ooze, a fictional bard's sex doll in a fountain, letters from a college and from Tish, and the winding box (ch. 21); Carl burns the ooze from the ceiling, the roof falls, and a drain washes the castle, Carl and Donut into the ocean (ch. 22, ch. 23). Ghazi's note explains the artifact; the doll's head wakes up as half a goddess (ch. 23, ch. 24). Five hundred metres down, the submarine, the last watch on a dead changeling, a court freezing the world over the pieces, and Lusca, level 82, swallowing the boat whole on a live stream (ch. 25, ch. 26). A berserker potion in a minifridge, a shield spell as a bullet, a buzzsaw through a brain, and the Gate's first use (ch. 27).

Act V — Gods (Chapters 28–32)

Seven factions sue over the Gate and lose to Carl and the AI, co-defendants; a patch jacket; Drakea's kerchief (ch. 28). A blind fire god walks the Lacuna looking for his dead son's puppy; the puppy is in bubble 543, filling half of it, being shocked and bitten (ch. 28, ch. 29). The tomb's guardian is electrocuted the moment a cable is connected, at the cost of the two men who get it there; the bubble pops (ch. 29). A biplane flies off a house; a Meat Hooks scroll leads the puppy out; a world quest offers a million gold to kill him (ch. 30); Quan Ch tries twice, Carl takes Emberus as his god to throw a grenade, the plane explodes on the god's nose, and Quan loses his arm on the ground (ch. 31). Acolyte, tithe, two god-quests; the first five hundred people gated out of their bubbles (ch. 32).

Act VI — Phase four (Chapters 33–35)

Fifteen hundred saved; Borant lets it stand; Florin thanks a man he never met; Katia says she is leaving; the changelings and the children go to the sixth floor in a flying house (ch. 33). A decoy in the sand, a demon of the Nothing, a sex doll's head thrown fifty kilometres, a worm pulled from a friend's skull, and — the real gate opened under the sea by Katia — the faction market of Larracos drowned with sharks. Number one. 'I will break you all' (ch. 34). The epilogue (epilogue) is three scenes Carl never sees: the pacifist sponsor is Porthus, the Cookbook's second author, spending more than a sponsorship on a man his partner expects to die; two trackers in Seattle's freezing rain are hunting a cat; and Bea is alive, singing to a stray she calls Ferdinand, until Lexis walks into the tent with a shotgun and Odette, on the line, decides what everyone is for — Bea is not for sale to Borant, "we have a much better use for her."

The shape underneath

Every quadrant has a cheat, and every cheat is also a trap: the bombs under the castle, the drain by the sandcastle, the lightning tower, the shark that can only be escaped by loosing a god. The floor is built to force the Gate into Carl's hands and then to force him to use it, and he knows it — 'that, I knew, was exactly what they wanted me to do' — and uses it anyway, and then uses it for something they did not plan. Underneath the locked rooms is a book about what the fourth floor's manual costs: Coolie's notes buy an admin's death; Priestly's warn what caring too much does to a mind; Justice Light's warn what killing an innocent costs; Porthus's deal turns out to be funding the whole thing from outside. While phase two is still ahead Carl sets himself against the first two — 'Coolie would do exactly what you’re doing. Priestly would not.' — and goes on with the plan. Katia leaves to gather the former Daughters before Eva does. Donut opens a hole rather than let Carl kill a friend, and Carl drowns a city and calls it a favour: the emotional abuse of NPCs such as little Bonnie had been 'enough to nearly break my sense of resolve', but saving them from a war eases him. Staying human is argued by the people around him now, not by him; The mobs are victims becomes his reason for killing them; and Entertainment as machinery gains a court, a liaison, a lending fund and a kidnapping list. The floor ends with the AI as Carl's co-defendant and a god he worships, and with a pledge, on his life, to break the hunters one by one.