Bacon-Smith’s background for the daemons and their relationship to humans is set up as a series of forewords to each chapter, which explain the seven spheres of creation and read as though they were taken from the Qabbala; the Princes, each composed of a quorum of daemons, occupy the Second Sphere, in which only space exists; Badad and Lirion are lords of the Prince Ariton. Earth and humanity occupy the First Sphere, which contains both space and time – hence, mortality. We learn, in the course of the story, that Evan, as a daemon halfling, is a wild-card, a being of immense power who works in both time and space. By the mere fact of his existence, he could cause the destruction all seven spheres; other halflings have been insane, and either killed themselves or been killed early in their lives, and so have never posed the threat that Evan does. Evan has had his own bit of hell to live through, centered around a club in New York called the Black Masque, run by the demon Omage, which figures in the present tale. He was rescued by his father, who, given the choice of destroying Evan or taking responsibility for him and allowing him to live, chose the latter. He is at a loss to explain his motives, except perhaps that he has spent too much time in human form, and the “meat thinking” starts to take over. Badad and Lirion have also been, in essence, exiled to the material plane to keep Evan under control until his natural death as the price of his life. Kevin has taught his son to control his wanderings between the planes. The reader also begins to become aware of anomalies in the natural world that seem to be tied to Evan’s moods.
The firm of Bradley, Ryan and Davis specializes in cases requiring a great deal of discretion – recovery of stolen art, for example. They are distinctly high-end. The story begins when Marnie Simpson, a wealthy horse-breeder, comes to Bradley, Ryan and Davis about her missing brother. He has been kidnapped, and the ransom note – burned into the top of her dining-room table – leaves no doubt that the case is one for Kevin Bradley: the note demands the return of the “Eye of Omage,” or her brother will spend eternity wishing for death, and specifies the firm of Bradley, Ryan and Davis as the ones to handle the exchange. Omage is a lord of the Prince Azmod, a rival prince to Ariton – or, to the daemon way of thinking, Asmod never makes alliances with Ariton -- and an enemy especially to Badad, since Omage is the daemon who almost destroyed Evan. After Evan’s initial research turns up some surprising connections between Marnie Simpson, her husband Franklin, and the Black Masque, Kevin and Lily decide that they will handle the case; Evan is overdue for a vacation, so he will spend some time in Europe, relaxing.
Early on, it becomes apparent that this case is a trap, but who is the target? The Eye of Omage, it appears, is a large topaz that Lily had brought back from Venice with the stolen Picasso, and for which Evan feels a strange affinity. Evan, staying with his friends in London, Claudia and Jack Laurence, friends from the Black Masque days, runs into the client for whom they had recovered the Picasso, Charles St. George, in a small bookstore in which Claudia works, and the three have dinner together. The next day, Kevin is visited by another daemon lord of Azmod, Pathet, who burns Jack to a cinder and tries to implicate Evan in the murder. Within the hour, the bookstore in which Claudia works is firebombed and she is kidnapped.
This is a fair mystery story, with its share of plot twists and revelations – no one is telling the truth, no one is who they seem to be. It is even more a story that explores the mysteries of relationships between sons and fathers, in the persons of Badad and Evan. Do generations ever really understand each other, even without the twist of a daemon father? Mature men are in authority, and there is always that tension between mature man and young man, who needs to move into his own power, his own independence. Even, as in this case, when father says, simply, “It’s up to you,” there is the question, “Will he save me this time?” in balance with the question “Can I do this alone?” Evan, after surviving the nightmares of his childhood and the nightmare of his early manhood, has a father who is a daemon, and is, at least in theory, as incapable of feeling love as he is of understanding death – and how many of us have felt that way about our fathers?
Evan is a damaged man – he had been well beyond the bounds of sanity when found by his father, and even with the healing he has managed, he still suffers from exaggerated feelings of guilt and inadequacy. Evan’s feeling of guilt sometimes come very close to getting in the way of the story; Kevin’s ruminations about his feeling for this son, on the other hand, are illuminating. (It would seem that the daemon Badad, having spent so long in human form, has fallen prey to the human propensity to wonder “Why?”). Lily, by contrast, is very direct, almost elemental; she never bothers to worry about her feelings for Evan, if any – she calls him “monster” and her “toy.”
About binding daemons: Bacon-Smith has set up a strong contrast between the bindings under which Pathet and Omage are held, based on greed and the desire for power, and the binding that Evan places on Badad and Lirion, proposed and agreed to purely as a means to protect them from whoever is controlling the lords of Azmod – they understand the danger to Badad and Lirion early on. This contrast opens up another, tangent question: the impossible tangle of human motivations, particularly our capacity for self-sacrifice, which is incomprehensible to daemon-kind – humans barely understand it themselves. The final confrontation is intense – Evan is held in check only by his humanity – and is actually two confrontations: Evan has to deal not only with the daemons Omage and Pathet and their human captors, but Count Alfredo da Costa – art thief and something more – whose duty at this point is to kill him. (Da Costa’s character, which comes into prominence only at the end of the book, never really gels – he has a duty, but manages to drag out the execution of it long enough to give Evan the chance to defy him.)
Bacon-Smith has made an absorbing story, although it suffers from a little bit too much self-examination on Evan’s part; its sequel, Eyes of the Empress is better in this regard. She is, however, a good writer, with a unique presentation of daemon’s in a modern urban fantasy.
(DAW Books, 1996)
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