I'm actually surprised I finished this book, considering the dislike I feel for it now I'm done. But I wanted to see where it would end, and whether it would actually get any better.

Hekat, a slave, rises through the ranks of an army, catching the attention of the warlord himself. Hekat is awful - arrogant, manipulative, psycopathic - and for the most part, she's the character we follow throughout the novel. The world Hekat lives in seems to revolve around blood - the religion involves animal sacrifice, and bathing in blood to commune with the god, the warriors in the army barracks use animals for target practice, and because apparently the amount of meat used to feed the army is so great, the army needs to employ slaughterers to kill yet more animals. Honestly, the sheer number of animals killed in this novel is ridiculous - I wouldn't have minded if there was some explanation or mention of where these vast herds of beasts are coming from, and where the money comes from to pay for them. But there's no explanation, and after a time I began to roll my eyes when yet another pure white goat kid was sacrificed at the temple.

So, putting that inconsistency to the side - we have Hekat, "godtouched and precious", or "beautiful and precious", as both she and other characters call her monotonously throughout the novel. "I am Hekat, beautiful and precious!" she will bellow. "She is Hekat, godtouched and precious!" the warlord will say in reply. Bah. Also, too much use of the word "smite".

"Godtouched" means that god speaks to Hekat, and it certainly appears to - Hekat believes it does, and the godspeakers (priests) believe it does. The god of this world demands a world-conquering war, and endless sacrifice. And there's no opposition - every character in the book is eager to do god's will, and slaughter thousands of people because they happen to disagree. Right at the end, one character appears to move away from this, but only because he heard a voice he believed to be god telling him "Enough". It's boring to have a book where all the characters do things only because god tells them to, even if that god is a lunatic. But then we have these two completely inconsistent voices - one bloodthirsty, the other kind. WTF is going on? I don't know - there's never any explanation for it. Presumably that might come in later books, but I have no appetite for them - I've had enough slaughter for now.