[3] Beguilement establishes a fictional space inspired by the part of North America Bujold grew up in: the country south of the Great Lakes.
Recovery from a grand collapse of a prior high magical culture has brought population and technology back to roughly the state of the early 19th-century American frontier—minus gunpowder.
A malice feeds on "life force" or, in the novel's terms, ground—which includes not only the internal order of living beings, but also the structural integrity of all matter, the emergent properties of form and function.
This they do with knives made from the thigh bones of their own dead, "primed" in the suicide of a mortally wounded or aged Lakewalker so that their death may be "shared" with the otherwise immortal malice.
With this, it is possible to detect and read details of all living things, as well as innate qualities of inanimate objects—the underlying truth of the world—to a distance varying with individual talent and training—including the presence of malices.