The Tainted Cup

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Themes

Powerful and Corrupt Social Elites

When Fayazi tells Talagray investigators the (mostly fabricated) tale of her father’s death and its aftermath, Ana rolls her eyes and calls Fayazi “This smug little bitch” (302). Ana’s disdain for the Hazas extends beyond the plot detailed in the novel; as Din learns, she has clashed with the powerful clan before, leading to her supposed banishment to the provincial backwater of Daretana. Meanwhile, the novel’s ending implies that Ana and Din will continue further investigations designed to bring down corruption amongst the Hazas and other powerful clans. While the novel is unwaveringly against corruption as perpetuated by privileged social elites, how that animosity is presented offers insight into the status of antagonists such as the Hazas, and the gentry more broadly.

As Ana’s gendered insult implies, the novel’s primary investigator sees the Hazas as powerful, but not in a way that inspires awe (in contrast with, for example, the titans). Instead, Ana views the concentrated privilege that the Hazas have amassed through wealth and land possession as contemptible. In a novel that praises service to something bigger than oneself, self-dealing is an unforgivable sin. Despite their far-reaching grip on the Empire, the Hazas are neither omnipotent nor brilliant schemers, but are vulnerable to being unmasked. Ana’s revelation of Kaygi’s role in the destruction of Oypat puts the entire family in jeopardy, as all its major scions are arrested for their complicity. Moreover, their twitch assassin (under clan orders) makes foolish mistakes that lead to the clan’s undoing. If the Hazas have power, the novel thus contends, they wield it like a blunt tool, not a precise one.

The novel’s attitude toward the Hazas is only vaguely applied to the rest of the empire’s gentryfolk. While the other gentry are implied to be involved in the same corrupt workings as the Hazas—valuing money and privilege over human life or the overall success of the imperial aims—they are not discussed directly nor introduced by name. Additionally, Captain Strovi’s status as Din’s love interest provides a hiccup to the characterization of all gentry as corrupt, as he comes from a gentry family. This aberration may, however, serve to underscore the general view, as Strovi is framed as going against his family’s wishes—specifically by putting himself in danger and seeking to serve the empire as a Legionnaire.

Moreover, there is one elite figure whom the novel does not put in doubt: the Emperor himself. Though he does not appear in the novel, the Emperor is framed as being broadly on the side of justice as Ana and Din see it. When the Hazas’ crimes are revealed, for example, the clan’s scions are deposed under imperial orders, though they have been powerful allies of the Emperor. Ana and Din’s journey inland at the end of the novel suggests that the Emperor may become more personally relevant in future installments in the series.

Empire-Building and the Everyman

If the novel argues against elite corruption, it argues for the too often overlooked value of the commoner when it comes to building a nation. Khanum’s motto, “Sen sez imperiya” (78), which translates to “You are the Empire,” is echoed by various characters at various points in the text. Yet, for all the assertions—from characters that the novel treats as suitable moral authorities—that the true heart of the Empire is in the inglorious, quotidian work of maintaining roads and baking bread, the novel pays little attention to this everyman figure.

One point of tension between the novel’s valorization of the lower classes and its limited engagement with such people’s lives comes from the distinction between civilian and military workers. Ana, who is posited as narrator Din’s main source of information, claims:

Oh, people love the Legion, with their swords and their walls and their bombards. But though they receive no worship, it’s the maintenance folk who keep the Empire going. Someone, after all, must do the undignified labor to keep the grand works of our era from tumbling down (134).

While her contrast between Legionnaires and maintenance workers could, in theory, encompass the Engineering Iyalet, multiple characters frame Engineers as the all-important builders of the world—not those who maintain what they build. Ultimately, Ana’s comment appears to refer to civilian workers.

What few examples of these workers the text portrays rarely prove helpful and often emerge as obstacles to the main characters’ goals. In Chapter 39, for example, civilian residents of Talagray devolve into chaos as the leviathan approaches the city, making evacuation impossible. Suberek, the fernpaper miller, is the only named civilian in the text, and he is presented as an unwitting dupe, pulled into machinations beyond his control as the powerful Hazas enter a battle of wits and might with the Iudex. While the novel may disdain corrupt collection of power and privilege, it prizes cleverness—and its few civilian characters do not demonstrate mental aptitude on their rare opportunities to do so.

Miljin’s self-assessment as a relic of a bygone era, someone only suited for the Legion and not the Iudex, offers another possible interpretation of how the novel casts the everyman. For Miljin, this difference is a function of intellect. He sees himself as separate from the Sublimes who are mentally augmented, as he only has physical augmentations that make him large and strong. Miljin thus becomes the novel’s only suitable everyman: Miljin might not be an engraver, and he might not have Ana’s bizarre brilliance, but he is loyal, and reliable, and craves justice.

Ultimately, however, the novel offers its highest accolades neither to the elite, nor to the people who do “undignified labor.” Instead, it gives most of its narrative admiration to people who are somewhere in the middle. Din and Ana, for all their willingness to break minor rules, work within the established Iyalet system. As an Immunis, Ana holds the exact middle rank in Iyalet hierarchy. She is, in short, middle management—and this, the novel argues, is who gets things done right.

The Idealization of the Past

The Tainted Cup posits that it is easy to idealize the past, from Ana’s complaint about over-reliance on magic, to the fear that wet seasons are growing worse and that titans are growing ever larger, to disgust at the ossification of power among social elites like the Hazas. Many characters, it suggests, are right to view the past with nostalgia and see modern conditions as a corrupting influence on the present. At the same time, it suggests that idealizing can obscure the problems that occurred in the past.

Ana complains about people’s conflation of augmentations with personality by lamenting, “That’s the problem with the damned Empire these days” (98). Multiple characters reference a looming dread of “these days” in the text. The implied contrast to “these days” emerges as a past—one that is never described in any great detail—in which characters imagine that conditions in the Empire were better than they are in the novel’s narrative present. The text does suggest that augmentations (in many ways an analogy for modern technology in the real world) divorce humans from their real selves, “dancing in your blood, altering your brain, making you see and feel and think differently” (98). Indeed, Ana and Din aim to solve crimes using logic instead of magic. However, the vagueness of the repeated references to “these days” suggest that it is easy to view the past as something better than what one has now.

Several other characters resist the advances of magic. Uhad advises Din to “begin living ascetically” in response to the side effects that afflict Engravers (395). His solution is as extreme as the sensory inputs themselves, therefore viewing the past as a time of little sensory input even while he idealizes a time before enhancements. This reinforces the text’s sense that there are things to idealize about the past, but that idealizing doesn’t always mean that things were perfect. Miljin, who is not a Sublime, also laments the complexities of the Empire. At the same time, he doesn’t not acknowledge things like medical advances—for example, that “medikkers” can grow new limbs.

The modern rendering of the fantasy genre in the text itself reflects this theme. Fantasy is often conflated with pre-industrial settings—a perception anchored by such genre-establishing classics as J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The presence of magic or the supernatural is often presented in historical medieval analogues. In his novel, Robert Jackson Bennett separates fantasy and the Middle Ages, thereby suggesting that much fantastical worldbuilding can shroud the past in a sense of idealized magic.