Humans by Lamplight (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018)

Humans by Lamplight winds up The Enchantments with a revolution that takes a strange turn. Its principal agent is the fifteen-year-old Boughrabwa, though she cannot use language nor even stand steady without support. She begins in the house of a Mistress of Imbeciles. Boughrabwa and several other characters, all connected by ties of kinship, get caught up as heirs named in a will. In that document Madame Lula (Lhool from The Broken House) bequeaths to each of them one of her subject znoon (malevolent demons; singular: zinn, zinniya). These she has taken captive and lodged within her own body as her “tenants.” Proud of her strength (she forced her znoon to perform degrading tasks, as sex workers and servants), Lula wishes to test that of her legatees.

The znoon, however, have plans of their own. Bred and educated Under the Mountain, znoon desire nothing but to make mischief for their human rivals. In many respects znoon resemble humans, but they live much longer, and they can manipulate their bodies, even changing gender if they must. To them history is a spectacle in which znoon play the most attractive roles, while humans play the clown, fools, and victims. Led by Dish, a high-ranking zinniya, Lula’s tenants begin by following their late mistress’ will: possessing and tormenting her heirs. Humans, we learn, have multiple souls with diverse tastes and drives that are normally subjugated to one overmastering soul. This identity can come about naturally, but often znoon take possession by inserting an artificial soul, a machine constructed from images, powerful enough to marshal the humans’ natural souls to do its bidding.

But most of Lula’s heirs live outside Fiyashi, the capital city, where Lula’s tenants lived luxuriously in her mansion. They don’t want to leave. One in particular, Mamselle Minx, sent into the desert, comes up with a plan that will return her to Fiyashi. She reads up on a shamanistic spectacle, the Ghost Dance, that amounts to an uprising on behalf of an indigenous princess. Minx knows that one of Lula’s heirs, Ahelen, is really her daughter whom she bore and then sold to the childless couple ruling that country, to be their heir, the Infanta Anna, and to shore up their tottering régime (The Broken House). After they were assassinated and the country taken over by a Protectorate run in the interest of foreign capitalists and religious bigots, “Anna” was saved and carried off to a distant city, to be raised as Ahelen (Maznoona), till she returned to Fiyashi and married a bookseller. Lula’s will assigned Ahelen to two other znoon, but Minx intends to take possession of her and shape the mousy bookseller’s wife into the princess Anna. Minx’s superior, Dish, goes for this plan, seeing enormous potential to make trouble for humans and to draw attention to herself.

From there the plot proceeds through the Ghost Dance, which ends in a massacre; the hoarding of a staple grain mainly consumed by the poor; the launch of a scholarly journal (The Review of Znoon & Human Studies); a general strike, and a staged comedy. Lula’s former slaves all return to Fiyashi. The human heirs, freed from possession, use what powers they have to thwart the history envisioned by the znoon. The weakest of them, Boughrabwa, turns up an unexpected weapon.