Okay, here goes. I'm going to go back to the Chapter 3 scene with Mayor Nolathreal and Tern, because it is vivid and memorable. Hold that in your mind.
It is a principle taught to instructors that you Tell Them What You Are Going To Tell Them, then you Tell Them, then you Tell Them What You've Told Them. The magician's version is that you Tell Them That You Are Going To Amaze Them, then you Amaze Them, then you Tell Them That You've Amazed Them.
This doesn't work for storytelling, except in very limited cases and ways, and it is more and more frowned upon. The reflective preludes and prologues that novelists wrote before the 1930s are long out of fashion. (In fairness, the best writers could still do it, and don't need to. The others probably never should have done it. Hindsight is a bear.)
The analysis that follows has come to me over the last few months, so it's far from settled dogma.
When we write a story, we're not simply telling a story. We're writing a story that engages the reader by telling the story that we really mean to tell. Hence "Show, don't tell," which means to stay in that outer-story frame. (It can be applied too far. Some things are better told by the narrator, except possibly in Russian novels.) There's another level: the story that the reader takes away from the story, which is where the theme and thesis business comes in.
Here's the harsh criticism. In this framework, I would say that you aren't telling a story that tells a story. You're telling us a story about a story that's telling a story. You're showing and telling, and providing a commentary on the process.
By way of example, let me take a section from that confrontation between Nolathreal and Tern, with Talmas the thing at stake:
Tern showed only a face of calm towards the Mayor. He had earlier been dismayed at the loss of his valuable magical construct. The sense of victory, now in his grasp, did much to calm him. Within himself, Tern silently cackled. If this chief of peasants were foolish enough to accompany him to the royal court, it was certain Cardakas would be in need of a new mayor, he thought. They would be continuing this contest at the royal court within his center of power. He had no doubts at all who would come out on top as the winner.
Let's take this much.
Tern showed only a face of calm towards the Mayor. If you wrote "Tern's expression was steady," or "Tern faced the mayor with a calm superiority," you would be showing us what Tern is doing. But you're telling us that Tern is putting the expression on, as well as what the expression is.
The modern reader expects to be trusted to draw that conclusion, or miss it, in order that the events flow at a speed that feels lifelike.
The Mayor sighed heavily and looked over at a now visibly shaken Talmas.
When you tell us that Talmas is "now visibly" shaken, you open the possibility that you might talk about another time--in other words, you remind us of the distance between the narrator-recounting and the events-recounted. And unless we're in Talmas's PoV or maintaining a true omniscient PoV, we won't see anything that our PoV doesn't show us. Telling us that Talmas is "visibly" shaken opens the possibily that you would tell us something not visible, again reminding us that the narrator chooses to tell us this but might have chosen to tell us something else. You're showing the narrator telling, rather than using the narrator to show.
Walking a short distance away to one side of the road, the Mayor beckoned to Tern to join him with a raised hand.
Okay, this is a different issue. You have two verbs here, one in the predicate ('beckoned') and one in a participle clause ('walking'). Both are gravid with modifiers. You're painting the scene in exquisite detail, and sometimes that's called for. (C. S. Lewis's Perelandra, the chapters detailing Ransom's arrival up to the meeting with the Queen.) But when you do that, you slow the action; you pay a price. What are you buying with that payment? (Lewis immersed the reader in Ransom's experience and showed us the nascent world, in ways that would pay back later thematically. We discovered the world through Ransom's eyes, fingers, skin, and ears.)
What if we had instead
The Mayor stepped to the edge of the road and waved Tern over to join him.' -- ?
You have twenty-four words. I have sixteen. I trust the reader to interpret 'stepped' as 'walked a short distance', and 'the edge' as 'one side of'. The latter change doesn't quite match the meanings perfectly, but I suspect you mean 'near the edge' rather than 'on one side of the centerline'. Likewise 'waved' for 'beckoned with a raised hand'.
Vigorous writing is concise, and when conciseness is achieved by well-chosen verbs it can be more exact and more evocative, even if only by keeping the reader in the moment.
And that too hides the seam between the narrator-recalling and the event-recalled, because the reader does less work with a single verb than with a verb heavily modified.
I also chose two coordinate, conjunction-joined predicates on the subject, rather than making one of the actions a participle phrase. It's hard to express why I chose that; the nearest I can say is that they actions seem balanced in their weight, both in words and in importance. It cost me a word, but I saved nine by choosing more exact verbs.
Filled with anticipation, he walked over to that side of the road thinking perhaps the Mayor wanted to make a deal or was about to admit defeat. He likely did not want the boy to hear in an attempt to stave off damage to his reputation. Any deal that the mayor was willing to offer was going to be rejected, as Tern had already decided nothing he heard would sway him from prey.
Tern approached the Mayor, hoping that Nolathreal would admit defeat or try offering a deal, out of the boy's hearing. Tern had no intention of accepting. Talmas was his.
Compare "Filled with anticipation ... hoping" with "expecting". In the first, the narrator spells out affect and cause. In the second, the narrator gives us a verb, 'hoping (that)' which covers the link from cause to affect. (Yes, Affect, not Effect; the Affect here is an effect.)
"Talmas was his" gives us Tern's planned outcome without explicitly repeating the predator-prey relationship. It can reinforce the relationship, and it expresses Tern's certainty, justifying (in his inner logic) his attitude toward the offer he expects from Nolathreal.
And because these connections are implicit in the statements, and especially in the verbs chosen, the reader does not have to paint-by-numbers in the outlines provided by the narrator. The narrator disappears, and the reader has the story the narrator presents, rather than the (story of the) narrator presenting a story.
I've labored and belabored here, and I'm sure that reading this has been rough, since it goes to the way the story flows from you. But I think it explains most of why your narrative is sluggish in spite of good action, fair-to-strong character writing, and a vivid and imaginative world filled with terrific power moments.
I hope it helps you.
