I loved this story. Everything about it was riveting. A great plot, great characters, great setting... I will probably get the ebook.
On a slightly less enthusiastic note, Fitz's and Hereward's reactions to the death of "hundreds of pirates" was bad. And I mean, there was no reaction. At all.
Oh sure, I appreciate the irony of villains and such helping them to achieve their goal and rid the world of a deadly otherworldly menace, but guys, come ON! Spare a few seconds and grieve for those who helped you accomplish your mission and saved your asses! Really! It would have been within character (IMO) for Hereward to be a little sad and wistful and for Fitz to be all business-like.
Also, the ending was a little bit too cheesey for me.
I'd rather supplant it with this:
Hereward looked about him at the mass carnage and winced a little. The death toll was surely much more than he had anticipated, and it didn't help to think that these were just pirates. After all, they'd saved their lives! And hundreds of dead people, regardless what they did in their lives, is a heavy burden on one's conscience.
Fitz looked up at Hereward and caught the man's heavy sigh. "Cheer up, at least they died doing a good deed."
Another thing that bothered me was the three-moon system.
I can get behind magical puppets, and even understand the cannibals, it's just what their society does, I shouldn't judge them.
But a three moon system? Come
on!
I have nothing against having our planet with more (or less) than the usual number of moons, but you need to know how these things work. If you have three moons then you canNOT have predictable tides. It's impossible.
Today, the three body problem can only be solved only in approximation. That means that a system involving three bodies who influence each other gravitationally cannot be fully predicted. Under some assumptions some things can be ascertained, but not everything.
A
four body problem (Earth and three moons) is (for all intents and purposes) impossible. There is no way that they should be able to predict the tides so precisely.
Furthermore, if these three moons were more or less the size of our current moon, then the whole Earth-moons system would be screwed up beyond belief. The center of gravity for that system would not be somewhere near the center of the Earth (like it is in reality) but might even be somewhere in mid-space. Which means that the Earth would orbit around that center of gravity, and probably make the surface uninhabitable due to too much fluctuations in the seasons.
AND, if that's not enough, the tidal forces involved would make for a much more volcanically active planet, which would make even the temperate zones (assuming they are habitable) uninhabitable.
And if the moons were significantly smaller, small enough to not have such adverse influences on the planet, then they wouldn't be so visible.
So, yeah.
Great story, not so good ending, and my science brain almost ruined it for me. I just chose to ignore the three moons and got on with the story.