Teaser Tuesday: “Smoke & Summons”

So this week I was reading Smoke & Summons, by Charlie N. Holmberg:

This is a fantasy novel, although I don’t quite have the world figured out yet; yes, it has magic and artifacts, but it also has factories (the source of the “smoke” in the title) and firearms. I suppose it’s similar to the titular city in China Miéville’s “Bas-Lag” novels, which are essentially fantasy steampunk*, despite the fact that this, like all the other Charlie N. Holmberg books I’ve read, is a zero** on my “China Miéville” scale for fantasy novels***.

Anyway, the premise of this book is that the main character, a young woman named Sandis, is what’s known in-universe as a “vessel”; her skin has been illegally branded with a magical script (filled in with gold, no less!) that allows her owner—Sandis is a slave—to use her to conjure up some kind of fire spirit (the source of the “summons” in the title) to use for his own nefarious ends. At least until Sandis runs away. And just when she’s about to be caught, a local burglar named Rone intervenes, with the help of an artifact which I at first thought stopped time, a la the gold watch, but actually just makes Rone immortal for a limited time, like in that Rush song. Now, you may be asking yourself, “Self, why would a burglar get involved in fighting a gang of dangerous, well-armed thugs for a someone he doesn’t even know?” Well, I’ll just let Rone answer that in the Teaser:

He turned his head toward her. She wore a simple dress—why Kurtz owned a dress Rone didn’t know and didn’t want to know—and lay facing away from him, her single blanket pooling at the dip of her waist, highlighting the curve of her hip.

If she’d been ugly, he never would have gotten involved in this.

Is this a rare moment of fantasy hero self-awareness, or simply saying the literary quiet part out loud? The answer is left as an exercise for the reader.****

* Before I get comments from angry China Miéville fans, I understand that this is reductive.
** It would be less than zero if that were possible.
*** I love China Miéville but I have friends with otherwise-similar tastes to mine who detest him, so some time ago I adopted the “How Much Does This Book Remind Me Of A China Miéville Book?” scale to warn them off of books I rated highly that they would probably hate.
**** Both.