Nostrum and Emaculum

Wrapping up my Kindle Unlimited experiment, I conclude Roberto Calas' Scourge trilogy with Nostrum and Emaculum, in text rather than audiobook format.

Nostrum picks up two days after the end of The Scourge, as Sir Edward Dallingridge decides that faith and prayer and patience aren't working to heal his plagued wife and sets off in search of the alchemist who is rumoured to have found a cure. Reunited with Tristan and joined by the sassy nun Beliscensia, he seeks out the island fortress where the alchemist works, hunts a dragon, is captured several times and continues to be menaced by his nemesis Sir Gerald and to experience greatly varied success in the employment of hand cannons.

Emaculum sees Sir Edward, cure in hand, struggling to return to St Edmund's Bury through the increasingly splintered jurisdictions of the many mad kings of the new England (one of whom is the actual mad king of England.) With the cure in hand he has a chance to save Elizabeth, but the Virgin Mary and St Giles have trials yet in store for their apparent favourite, now sworn to be the champion of the plagued, defender of those who can yet be cured of their malady.

As in The Scourge, Calas merges his zombie horror with a loving recreation of the approximate history of the period as it might have played out given the rise of a zombie plague in the wake of the Black Death. He keeps the source of the plague (god, the devil, ground up saints' bones) uncertain, and likewise the means of repelling them (holy relics, lichens and lepers) are never explored in anachronistic terms. The focus is on Sir Edward and his increasingly obsessive quest to save his wife or to die with her.

Sir Edward is brutal and Sir Tristan, his closest ally, seems almost inordinately pleased each time he manages to spike an enemy with the plague tincture. On the other hand it was a violent age, and their enemies are almost monstrous, which kind of makes them seem okay by comparison.

The Scourge trilogy is a decent historical zombie romp. It's more or less my first - at least in written form - although I'm sure the kindle store is full of the bloody things by now. It is thus my benchmark for the subgenre moving forward.