The Relic Master was the first book I wrote as a full-time writer, and I think a lot of pent-up energy went sweeping into it. It takes place on Anara, a planet colonised and terraformed in the past by a group known as the Makers, now thought of as semi-divine, rather like archangels. But the work was never finished, vast swathes of the planet are chaotic, and the Relic Masters, an Order of men and women able to communicate with trees and deal with the remnants of technology are being hunted to death by a sinister organisation called the Watch.
There are four main characters; Galen, the Relic Master himself, a bitter, reckless man who becomes the mythical Crow: his assistant Raffi, scared, weary and trying to keep himself and his master alive; Carys, a clever orphaned girl brought up in one of the Watchouses and now secretly their spy; and the Sekoi, one of the seven-fingered catlike creatures that once had the planet to themselves and still want it back.
I enjoyed the complexity of this world, and this was the first time I imagined a whole back-story, with all the scriptures and histories and flora and fauna to go with it. It was also fascinating to be able to develop the characters to a greater depth than any I’d invented so far; four books gave me a lot of space, and by the time I wrote The Margrave I had lived with these people for several years.
There are many real places mixed in with the imaginary landscapes of Anara. Certainly Glastonbury, Wells, and whole swathes of Mendip are in there somewhere; Taskeron is a mixture of Oxford and a lot of Rome, and the Broken Hills can be found along the Amalfi coast of Italy.
I think The Margrave is my favourite of the set; at the end of it I really felt I had achieved something that-you never know- might outlast me.
