Bringer of Dust: The worlds of the Talents collide

Bringer of Dust by J.M. Miro

2024’s Bringer of Dust, J.M. Miro’s second book in the trilogy of THE TALENTS, finds our survivors from Book One, Ordinary Monsters, scattered across Europe. Maybe “scattered” isn’t the right word, because their locations are purposeful, as they seek to find an orsine they can open, to return to the world of the dead and rescue Marlowe, the Shining Boy.

A quick review of the magic: Clanks can manipulate their own flesh, like making it so dense it will repel bullets. Casters manipulate the flesh of others (usually, not always, the dead). Oskar, for instance, has created a “flesh giant” companion. Turners can change their appearance (Eleanor Ribbons can turn invisible). Haelans can heal from nearly any wound or illness. Dustworkers like Komako draw and shape dust, and it appears in extreme situations they can do one other thing.

Talents, generally, only do one thing. The First Talent, a powerful person who could manipulate more than one talent, was imprisoned by the others in an act of self-defense.

Glyphics are something else; long-lived, able to see the past and the future, usually not in human form, their main purpose seems to be guarding, or holding closed, the orsines, thin places that open into the world of the dead.

Komako and Oskar have joined Miss Davenshaw in an abandoned villa in Sicily, rumored to have been a sanctuary for the talents centuries before. With them are the talented children they rescued in the final battle of Cairndale Manor. They seek to decipher the writing on the walls of a secret room, writing believed to have been left by the Agnoscenti, ancient guardians of the talents. They all believe the drughr who attacked them originally to be dead, but stories appear of other drughr attacks. Soon the group discovers that there were originally five drughr. They were originally the talented, sent into the world of the dead to guard the prison of the First Talent. The First Talent sought to absorb all the talents in the world to achieve power. He was imprisoned and sleeps, but over the centuries his dreams infected his five guards and changed them into drughr.

Alice Quicke, a private detective, and Eleanor “Ribs” Ribbons, seek another orsine in in Paris. In London, Charlie, who had his healing power ripped away from him in a confrontation with Dr. Berghast, ends up with the aging alchemist Caroline Ficke, who hides one final secret of Cairndale. Charlie’s quest will lead him into a phantasmagorical underworld beneath London, called the Falls (a play on words in a couple of ways). Meanwhile, Marlowe is trapped and hunted in the world beyond the orsine, and it force to rely on someone he knows is not to be trusted.

Bringer of Dust introduces a new talent character, Jeta, who is a bone witch. As he did in the first book, Miro introduces adversarial characters and characters whose motivations are suspect, and some of them kept me guessing up until the end.

Despite the heft of the book, (600+pages) the story moved along briskly, in part because we finally get some backstory. As with the first book, it’s hard to know who and what to believe, a problem the reader shares with the characters. Has Jeta been lied to? What is the real story of Marlowe’s mother? Who is, or was, the First Talent? Who is the Dark Talent, and are they good or evil? These questions propel the story rather than bogging it down.

Bringer of Dust read more conventionally like a trilogy’s second book; things are resolved, riddles are solved, but the answers bring more mysteries. As with the first book, certain landscapes and descriptions captivated me. The Falls, an underground society of “exiles,” those who lost their talents and turned to crime, is wild, perfectly conceived and precisely described, as is the “dark glyphic,” and the trio of tiny murderous siblings, Micah, Prudence and Timna. Connections are made that reach back to the first book, and while they weren’t surprising they were satisfying. Miro has artfully laid the groundwork for a battle between the ideas of good and evil, and a final confrontation of worlds.