In Ontario fantasist Guy Gavriel Kay’s seventh novel, Sailing to Sarantium, the title refers to reaching the civilized heart of an extensive empire in an age of hippodromes and bathhouses. Metaphorically, these sails power the vessel of life, bringing many of the tale’s main characters – the mosaicist Caius Crispin, his companion, and his queen – to a new life as well as a new city.

Sarantium (Kay tips his hat to William Butler Yeats’s Byzantium in the acknowledgements) can be read at several levels. Returning to the universe of Kay’s previous novel, The Lions of Al-Rassan, it builds off extensive research to re-create Byzantine glories and passions. It has much to say as it dusts off and makes accessible – through the language of fantasy – the intrigues and forces of the sixth century.

Those familiar with Al-Rassan will enjoy the delicious shift in the point of view of the narrator, whose people may have been sun-worshipping infidels in the last book, but are most pious and reasonable when chronicled by one of their own here. Sarantium also harbours intriguing elements of magic, adding the chiaroscuro of pagan blood-worship and alchemic transmutation to this tale about a people terrified of darkness and night.

Involving plot notwithstanding, Sailing to Sarantium has its weaknesses. Its writing, it must be said, is workmanlike. There is a hypnotic sameness to the rhythm of the characters’ introspection that mitigates Kay’s laudable (given the genre) attempt to give women strength and men tenderness. Nonetheless, his frequent intercutting of long introspective passages followed by terse, decisive assertions grates, and the writing is too often clichéd. Also, though not strictly a weakness, the happy regularity with which figures of authority recognize and reward the cleverness of underlings offsets the credible historic research, even as it gives the book slacker cachet, a Generation X-meets-I, Claudius kind of thing.