Qiro Anturasi is the royal cartographer of Nalenyr and the magically gifted architect of its superbly accurate maps. Qiro has made Nalenyr the richest of the Nine Principalities. But Qiro is missing, his granddaughter has been butchered by unknown hands, and his two grandsons, the leaders of Nalenyr's two great exploratory missions, are lost. Qiro's grandson Jorim has discovered a new continent, where he is hailed by its people, the Amentzutl, as the incarnation of a god. The Amentzutl subject Jorim to rituals that may transform him—or kill him. Jorim's brother, Keles, has been captured by Prince Cyron's most dangerous foe. Their sister, Nirati, has been raised from the dead by their grandfather, Qiro—perhaps because he's gone mad. And his map-making magic has reached such unimagined heights of power that he has created an entire continent, Anturasixan, and revived a long-gone hero, the Empress Cyrsa's stepson, Nelesquin, to lead an army formed of the new races Qiro is profusely creating to populate his continent.

Potentially limitless in number, this demonic army swiftly overruns the principality of Erumvirine and invades Prince Cyron's land, which is already breaking under the plots of his many internal foes. He hasn't enough loyal troops to defend Nalenyr's southern border. And his archenemy, Prince Pyrust of Deseirion, cares nothing about the invaders, save how they might help his imperial ambitions. He attacks Nalenyr from the north. Now, with inhuman foes poised to overrun two continents and near-immortal enemies of humankind gathering in the magic-warped land of Ixyll, the only hope for humanity lies in reviving the Empress Cyrsa, who sleeps in an unknown location, waiting to save her people in their worst hour. But Cyrsa may have been no empress, but a bloody-handed, manipulative usurper. And her stepson and foe, Nelesquin, leader of Qiro's endless army, may be even worse than Cyrsa. ...

A question of characters

As the summary suggests, Cartomancy has many characters and subplots. Veteran author Michael A. Stackpole deftly interweaves the actions and intrigues of this vast (and not always human) cast, with its princes, pawns, magicians, bureaucrats, swordmasters, nobles, cartographers, inventors, reincarnates, courtesans, serial killers, assassins, spies, double-crossers and schemers. Many characters engage in political intrigue, and their plots and counterplots are ambitious enough to rival those in the Chinese movie Hero. Stackpole handles these machinations masterfully and makes his plotters (save for the occasional soon-killed fool) fully as intelligent as their plots. These intricate intrigues turn Cartomancy into a powerfully compelling page-turner.

However, it necessarily takes considerable time to develop complex intrigues among numerous characters, and Stackpole doesn't slow his hotly paced plot with info-dumps to explain the characters, settings or situations. As a result, readers unfamiliar with A Secret Atlas, the first book of The Age of Discovery, will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of people and places in its sequel, Cartomancy. Even some fans of A Secret Atlas will become lost, because the character and setting names and other neologisms are apparently derived from numerous sources, ranging from the author's imagination to several languages, including—but not confined to—Aztec, Afghani, Celtic, Chinese and Greek. On top of the bewildering diversity of linguistic patterns, some characters, groups and places have confusingly similar names (such as Nirati, Nelesquin, Nalenyr and the Naleni).

Cartomancy has other problems. Because of the large cast, few characters can be fully developed, and the better-developed characters take a long time to flesh out. The title, Cartomancy, promises more map-related magic than the novel delivers. Some readers will be disappointed that Jorim's journey of exploration is now almost exclusively internal, and readers who took up The Age of Discovery for its Patrick O'Brien-esque sea adventures will find almost no sailing in Cartomancy. Most significantly, the culture of the Nine Principalities resembles the Far East, from the clothing styles and silks, to the rice paper and artistic pictograms, to the samurai-and-Hong-Kong-movie-style sword fights and the belief that, if a martial art is practiced to a sufficiently high level of skill, it will grant supernatural powers and abilities. The novel's Asian inspiration is, of course, fine in itself and makes for a welcome switch from the innumerable pseudo-Scando-Celtic epic fantasies. But the pseudo-Asian culture jars with the characters' blue eyes and fair hair. As a result, many readers will spend the whole book distracted by attempts to figure out how a Euro-ethnic people independently invented East Asian civilization. Perhaps A New World, the sequel to Cartomancy, will resolve this mystery.