Entries Tagged 'Books' ↓

For some novels, mixing tropes from different parts of the spectrum of science fiction and fantasy can seem indecisive or inconsistent.  Not so with Charlie Jane Anders\’ All the Birds in the Sky, which blends numinous urban fantasy with physics-and-rocketry science fiction in a way that allows the strengths of both to complement each other.  One of our two protagonists, Patricia, discovers early on her potential as a witch, foreseen and challenged by the Parliament of Birds to solve a riddle to realize her power; her path through adolescence as she tries to rediscover her power separates her from those around her.  The other, Laurence, is a technical wunderkind, his skill with science and engineering both motivated by and contributing to his isolation from his schoolmates.  Their orbits intersect in school, and like a pair of eccentric planets in an unsolvable three-body problem, their trajectories fling them far apart, only to fall back into each other\’s gravity wells again and again, even as they are recruited into opposing factions in a conflict between science and magic that is prophesized as both inevitable and catastrophic.

Their interweaving coming-of-age stories combine with a broader plot involving climate change, which in the near-future (or perhaps alternate-present) of this story is already responsible for some major disasters that are alluded to in geographic shorthand, the way we might reference \”Fukushima\” or \”Katrina\”.  The reader doesn\’t need to know the details to know that the effects of those disasters are still reverberating.  With the world on the precipice of an apocalyptic-level disaster, Laurence\’s technical institute (led by a vaguely Elon-Musk-esque figure convinced that we must get a significant fraction of humanity off-world) and Patricia\’s community of practioners (which through a series of cautionary tales about the dangers of arrogance has eschewed any strong structure of leadership) each have their own ideas of how to address the global threat.  These ideas are themselves incompatible, of course, which ultimately pits Laurence and Patricia directly against each other in a conflict neither of them ever wanted.

While the cycle of successes and failures of Patricia and Laurence\’s ability to relate to each other form the emotional core of the story, their individual stories are each important as well.  Patricia goes off to a school of magic while Laurence follows the stereotypical Silicon-Valley-genius path to knowledge and success, but despite their differences, their stories still feel like two parts of a unified whole.  The numinous sense of powers beyond our ken, typical to the fantasy tropes of Patricia\’s story, are echoed in Laurence\’s story as bits of technology that seem only mildly remarkable within the story but appear magical to readers – the two-second time machine, the supercomputer rewriting its own code, the network of smartphone-like gadgets that subtly guide their owners to serendipitous occurrences.  Meanwhile, the science-fictional tropes of Laurence\’s story – the sense of a framework of physical laws that must be contended with, and the characters\’ search for knowledge and power within that framework – weave through Patricia\’s gradually deepening understanding of her magic, and the strict rules imposed on it by both her peers and by the rules by which she can conduct her witchcraft.  The result – and, perhaps, the moral of the story – is the idea that trying to save the world using only one side of that dichotomy between the concrete and the spiritual is an effort doomed to failure, but by seeking the synthesis of, and balance between, two opposing but not necessarily contradictory forces, we can accomplish far more than we could with either one on its own.

My only complaint about the story is the abruptness of its ending.  The novel\’s conclusion promises far greater things than we actually see before the story ends, so I really hope there\’s a sequel coming – but I went in thinking this was a standalone novel, so the amount of plot left open or unresolved was a little surprising.

Next up on my Best Novel rundown is N.K. Jemisin\’s The Obelisk Gate, sequel to last year\’s Hugo-winning novel The Fifth Season, and middle book of the Broken Earth trilogy.  I didn\’t read all the Hugo nominees last year, so this year I read The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate back-to-back, and I\’m going to discuss both of them here, though I\’ll try not to spoil too much of the plot.

Overall, I think Broken Earth is one of the most inventive works of epic fantasy in years.  Jemisin combines the post-apocalyptic setting, familiar from near-future SF, with a pre-industrial fantasy world prone to seismic instability.  Orogeny, a form of magic that can manipulate the earth, is used to keep earthquakes to a minimum across the continent known semi-ironically as \”the Stillness\”.  On the other hand, its practitioners, orogenes, are feared, reviled, and placed under the control of a caste of \”Guardians\” – if they\’re not murdered first.

The Stillness is rather apocalypse-prone, having suffered tens of \”Fifth Seasons\” (or simply \”Seasons\”) – continent-spanning disasters – in recorded history.  Society has been organized around the idea that disaster may strike at any time, and the fact that certain people and skillsets become more valuable during a Season has resulted in a \”use-caste\” system combined with a restrictive notion of community membership.  When a Season occurs, communities are expected to implement a form of martial law, and anyone not belonging to a community is probably not going to survive.

The Fifth Season opens with an orogene tearing the planet open, causing a Season that is likely to be worse than any that came before.  From there, we follow three orogenes in what the reader gradually realizes are three different timelines (as the Season that begins in one of the timelines clearly isn\’t occuring in the other two).  One orogene is a girl being taken away from her family by a Guardian; one is a member of the Fulcrum, an institute that trains and restrains orogenes; and one is a mother who has managed to keep her orogeny a secret in her small community, until the moment her secret – and that of her children – is discovered.

From there, in reading The Fifth Season we realize how these three people relate to each other, and we see a little of the mysterious floating obelisks that wander the planet.  At the end of the book, we learn of something that has the potential to end the Seasons forever.  Then, in The Obelisk Gate, we learn of a conflict surrounding that possibility, which has gone on for generations.  The conflict has multiple factions, some of which are not human, but the core point of contention is over the earth itself, and the incident that caused the Seasons to start happening.  We learn more about the depth and breadth of orogeny, about the Guardians, and many of the mysteries introduced in the first book are deepened and fleshed out.  The book concludes in a tense readiness for an attempt to fix the Seasons forever.

The Obelisk Gate is a perfect middle-of-a-trilogy book.  It picks up all of the plot hooks left over from the first book, and resolves a couple of them while tying the rest of them together into a more complex network of relationships that is poised to collide and entangle further during the last book.  Orogeny is a mysterious force throughout the first book, but in the second book we understand more of how it works and what its potential is, setting us up to appreciate some truly epic uses of the magic in the conclusion.

If The Fifth Season had not already won an extremely well-deserved Hugo last year, or if the four other books had not all been as excellent as they are, The Obelisk Gate would be at or near the top of my ballot this year.  But in this field, there are other books and series more deserving of a first Hugo than Broken Earth is of a second one.

Welcome to a new series of posts, in which I talk through this year\’s Hugo nominees in a few of the categories.  I\’m going to start with the novels, and I\’ll go through them in reverse order of my ballot – i.e. saving my top choice for the category until the end.

This has been one of the hardest Hugo votes I have ever had to cast, because any one of these six novels would be well deserving of the award against a slightly weaker field.  One thing that makes it a little easier is the fact that two of the novels come from series where previous works have already won a Hugo.  In my opinion, a sequel to a Hugo-winning work has to be better than any of the other nominees by a large margin for me to prefer awarding that series another Hugo, instead of giving it to a novel from a series that hasn\’t won one yet.  Think of it as trying to maximize the amount of recognition shown to great novels; a second Hugo for the same series doesn\’t mean as much as a first Hugo for a different one, all else being equal.  Accordingly, we\’ll start with one of those sequels: Death\’s End, by Cixin Liu, the final volume of the Remembrance of Earth\’s Past trilogy.  The first book of the series, The Three-Body Problem, won the Hugo for Best Novel in 2015.

I read The Three-Body Problem as part of the Hugo reading that year, and found it entertaining but paced kind of oddly; it is mostly concerned with setting up the historical context of the ensuing conflict, and so little happens and less is resolved in the first book.  I just this month read the rest of the trilogy, The Dark Forest and Death\’s End, back-to-back, and I think if I\’d read 3BP along with the others I might have enjoyed it a bit more as well – reading it simply as the first third of a story and not as a novel on its own.

The Dark Forest introduced the concept of \”dark forest deterrence\”, akin to the threat of mutually-assured destruction that sustained the Cold War, as well as various game-theoretical deterrence scenarios.  In Death\’s End we see the failure mode of those ideas, and the ensuing breakdown of the detente that ended The Dark Forest, together with some classic SFnal \”big ideas\” (dimensional physics! light-speed travel! space habitats!), drive the trilogy\’s plot to its end.  Death\’s End was certainly an ambitious conclusion to the story, and managed to continue heightening the stakes (set at \”the conquest of Earth\” from the very beginning) in an engaging way, which made even the occasional peaceful interludes in the story tense with the anticipation of what was about to go wrong next.  The events at the very end of the book felt a little inconsistent with the themes of deterrence and mistrust established by the rest of the story, but on reflection it allows the characters to discard the paranoia that they had been forced to live with for so long, and finish the story in an act of cooperation instead.

The Dark Forest references Asimov\’s Foundation series at one point, and the Asimovian influence on Liu is clear, both in positive and negative aspects – his work grapples with ideas on the scale of human history and beyond, while also contemplating the role of the individual in shaping the course of history, but his characters themselves feel more like archetypes than fully fleshed-out people.  Still, his characterization is an improvement on Asimov\’s, in that he does a somewhat better job of motivating the behaviors that the plot requires of its characters, even if the characters\’ backstories occasionally seem designed to purposefully sculpt the characters towards those behaviors.  (Which is true of many character arcs in plot-driven stories, of course, but the scaffolding isn\’t always so apparent.)  The use of hibernation technology also allows Liu to maintain the same characters over hundreds of years (and more) of plot; Asimov\’s reintroduction of new characters in each \”Seldon Crisis\” is one of the things preventing decent character development in much of the Foundation trilogy.  Liu also makes use of another classic SFnal narrative approach in Death\’s End; he avoids excessive expository dialogue by frequently cutting to excerpts from a later-written history, which also allows him to depict humanity-spanning events succinctly and more or less objectively.

Death\’s End takes the bottom slot on my Hugo ballot.  But that is not meant as a condemnation; rather, it speaks to the strength of the rest of the field, and my opinion that awarding Remembrance of Earth\’s Past a second Hugo would do a disservice to the four other works on the ballot that have not already been so honored.  If The Three-Body Problem had not won a Hugo already, this would have been a far more difficult choice.

Everything I read in 2017, with 2017-published works separated out and bolded if I\’m considering nominating them for Hugos.  (I\’ve also included 2017 works that I read for Hugo consideration in 2018; those are marked with an asterisk.)  See 2016 and 2015 lists.  (And for what it\’s worth, there are plenty of works that I enjoyed quite a bit but am unlikely to nominate; don\’t take the lack of bolding as an indication that I didn\’t like it!)

2017 Novels (at least 40,000 words):

• The Collapsing Empire, John Scalzi
• The Brightest Fell, Seanan McGuire
• Rebel Seoul, Axie Oh
• Stoneskin, K.B. Spangler
• Siege Line, Myke Cole
• Clockwork Boys, T. Kingfisher
• Into the Drowning Deep, Mira Grant
• Jade City, Fonda Lee*
• The Glass Town Game, Catherynne Valente*
• Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty*
• Barbary Station, R.E. Stearns*
• Terminal Alliance, Jim Hines*
• Magic for Nothing, Seanan McGuire
• The \”Wonderful\” Wizard of Futhermucking Oz, Matt Youngmark
• Deadlands: Boneyard, Seanan McGuire
• At the Table of Wolves, Kay Kenyon

2017 Novellas (17,500 to 40,000 words):

• Binti: Home, Nnedi Okorafor
• Idle Ingredients, Matt Wallace
• Buffalo Soldier, Maurice Broaddus
• Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day, Seanan McGuire
• Gluttony Bay, Matt Wallace
• All Systems Red, Martha Wells*
• The Dispatcher, John Scalzi*
• Greedy Pigs, Matt Wallace
• Rolling in the Deep, Mira Grant

2017 Novelettes (7,500 to 17,500 words):

• \”Remote Presence\”, Susan Palwick*
• \”The Worshipful Society of Glovers\”, Mary Robinette Kowal*
• \”The Secret Life of Bots\”, Suzanne Palmer*
• \”Three May Keep A Secret\”, Carlie St. George*

2017 Short Stories (less than 7,500 words):

• \”Origin Story\”, T. Kingfisher
• \”Down and Out in Rl\’yeh\”, Catherynne Valente
• \”The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant\”, Rachael K. Jones*
• \”The Heart\’s Cartography\”, Susan Jane Bigelow*
• \”Utopia, LOL?\”, Jamie Wahls*
• \”Let Pass the Horses Black\”, T. Kingfisher

Non-2017 works read in 2017:

• Brute Force, K.B. Spangler
• Ghost Talkers, Mary Robinette Kowal
• Beast, Brie Spangler
• Heroine Complex, Sarah Kuhn
• Crosstalk, Connie Willis
• \”A Trump Christmas Carol\”, Roz Kaveney, Laurie Penny, John Scalzi, and Jo Walton
• Cobalt City Christmas: Christmas Harder, Eric Scott deBie, Nathan Crowder, Jeremy Zimmerman, Dawn Vogel, Amanda Cherry
• Miniatures: The Very Short Fiction of John Scalzi
• All the InCryptid short stories available on Seanan McGuire\’s website (23 total as of February 2017)
• Infomocracy, Malka Older
• \”Things With Beards\”, Sam J. Miller
• \”Terminal\”, Lavie Tidhar
• \”That Game We Played During The War\”, Carrie Vaughn
• \”The Great Detective\”, Delia Sherman
• The Jewel and her Lapidary, Fran Wilde
• \”Your Orisons May Be Recorded\”, Laurie Penny
• \”A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers\”, Alyssa Wong
• \”The Visitor from Taured\”, Ian R. MacLeod
• The Iron Tactician, Alastair Reynolds
• The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton
• Pride\’s Spell, Matt Wallace
• The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin
• The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin
• \”Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies\”, Brooke Bolander
• Snowflake War Journal, Jeremy Zimmerman
• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers
• A Closed and Common Orbit, Becky Chambers
• \”You Are Not the Hero of This Story\”, Caroline M. Yoachim
• The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu
• Jackalope Wives And Other Stories, T. Kingfisher
• The Orphan\’s Tales: In the Night Garden, Catherynne M. Valente (in progress)
• Death\’s End, Cixin Liu
• All The Birds In The Sky, Charlie Jane Anders
• The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, Kij Johnson
• The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle
• Penric and the Shaman, Lois McMaster Bujold
• \”You\’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay\”, Alyssa Wong
• \”Touring with the Alien\”, Carolyn Ives Gilman
• \”The Art of Space Travel\”, Nina Allan
• TODO: Short stories
• Pay Me, Bug!, C.B. Wright
• \”The First Snow of Winter\”, Caroline M. Yoachim
• Glamour in Glass, Mary Robinette Kowal
• Without a Summer, Mary Robinette Kowal
• Valour and Vanity, Mary Robinette Kowal
• Of Noble Family, Mary Robinette Kowal
• The Rithmatist, Brandon Sanderson
• The Rebirths of Tao, Wesley Chu
• \”Penric\’s Demon\”, Lois McMaster Bujold

\”He steals the thing, Morrolan accuses him of stealing the thing, he gets outraged.\”

\”Oh. Is he a Dragon or a Yendi?\”

\”They aren\’t all that different, Vlad.\”  I started to speak, but Kragar quickly said, \”I should qualify that.  Yendi are like that all the time, but a Dragon on a campaign is capable of subtlety when necessary.\”

Dragon is the eighth Vlad Taltos book, published in 1998.  The bulk of the action takes place early in Vlad\’s career (after Taltos and before Yendi), but the interludes and epilogue take place after Yendi; the events of Dragon were in part precipitated by the conspiracy discovered in Yendi.

About dragons

The dragons of Dragaera mostly live in mountains.  Unlike typical Western-mythology dragons, they neither breathe fire nor fly, but they do have prehensile, psychically-sensitive tentacles around their necks.

About Dragons

So far in the series, I think we\’ve seen more Dragons than any other Dragaeran House except the Jhereg.  Morrolan and Aliera are both Dragons, as well as Cawti\’s former partner, Norathar, who is now the Dragon Heir.  Vlad\’s lieutenant Kragar is a former Dragon, though he doesn\’t like to talk about it much.  Sethra the Younger is also a Dragonlord; while we don\’t know the House of her mentor, Sethra Lavode, her multiple stints as Warlord at least indicate a Dragonish tendency.

Dragons hold both honor and warfare in high esteem, and are eager to use the latter to prove the former.  They take insults seriously and generally respond with bloodshed, though they are not, generally, as quick to anger as Dzur.  Dragonlords seek military power rather than political power; the various intrigues in previous books have shown that most Dragons would much rather be Warlord than Emperor.

As I discussed in the post about Jhereg, perhaps the biggest difference between Dragons and Jhereg is in their opinions on what constitutes proper circumstances and methods for killing people.  Dragons are happy to lead thousands of soldiers to their deaths in battle (or to be one of said thousands of soldiers), but consider an individual assassination to be dishonorable, and killing someone for money to be anathema.  Similarly, dying in battle brings one a unique type of honor in the eyes of one\’s fellow Dragons.

About Dragon

The narrative in Dragon follows three threads.  The beginning of each chapter (and the entirety of chapter 17) relate Vlad\’s experience in the Battle of Baritt\’s Tomb; in the tradition of war tales, he starts that story with \”No shit, there I was…\”  In each chapter except the last, some prompt or another triggers memories of how he ended up in that battle in the first place, and the bulk of each chapter covers those events in order from the beginning.  Three interludes plus an epilogue cover a separate sequence of events that happen much later (after the events of Yendi).  Brust\’s fondness for playing around with narrative structures is clearly evident here.  But to make this synopsis comprehensible, I\’ll start in order from the beginning.

Vlad has apparently been relating his memories to some sort of metal box, and in fact Vlad\’s first-person narrative is directed at said \”odd, shiny contraption with presumed ears at both ends\” as well.  We don\’t get a lot of details about who has paid Vlad to talk to the box, or what the box actually is,((That said, the hints seem to point at Sethra Lavode; I can\’t think of anyone else who has both shown interest in Vlad\’s life and likely has the technology to record his memories.)) but he\’s telling the story three years later.

Morrolan has sent a message asking to hire Vlad (preferred as an alternative to his method of getting Vlad\’s attention in Taltos).  Baritt has died, which Vlad saw coming, having already met his shade on the Paths of the Dead.  Baritt had a large collection of Morganti weapons; Morrolan expects theft and wants Vlad to be able to trace the stolen weapons.  Vlad inspects Baritt\’s estate, but finds himself unable to enter the room full of Morganti weapons; on Kragar\’s suggestion, he brings in Daymar to help tone down their effect.  In the process, Daymar casually mind-probes Vlad (to which Vlad reacts threateningly), and then suggests setting up a psychic trace for anyone entering the room.

The theft happens soon thereafter; a Dragonlord named Fornia has stolen one of the weapons with the apparent intent of provoking war with Morrolan.  Then some of Fornia\’s men try to intimidate Vlad out of the situation, which of course makes him determined to put one over on Fornia however he can; the ensuing fight results in Vlad recuperating at Castle Black.  Rather than staying out of it, Vlad is now determined to see Fornia punished.

Morrolan asks Vlad to accompany him on a trip that turns out to be a visit to the Serioli.((The Serioli were also responsible for the creation of Morganti weapons, as an attempt to make war too horrible to contemplate.  As Morrolan points out, it worked – for the Serioli.))  The Serioli greets the five of them – Morrolan, Vlad, Loiosh, Blackwand, and, obliquely, Spellbreaker.  Spellbreaker is someday to become a Great Weapon((“Remover of aspects of deity”, which Morrolan summarizes as “Godslayer”)), but is not yet; first another Great Weapon((“Artifact in sword form that searches for an object of desire when the path is true”, which readers may recognize as having been translated more succinctly as “Pathfinder”…)) must be found.  The two were/are to be created together, but the Serioli can’t clarify the temporal confusion any further.  The Serioli also refers to Vlad as being of \”the Old People\”, or rather, of the \”people from the small invisible lights\”.((The implication seems to be that the Easterners – Vlad\’s race – originally came from a distant star, and are an older race than either the Dragaerans or the Serioli.))  The brief discussion of Great Weapon history/future seems to be all that Morrolan came for, and the three (or five) of them return to Castle Black.

Vlad reports to Captain Cropper’s company within Morrolan’s army, assembling beneath Castle Black.  He has a bit of trouble adjusting to military standards of deference.  He meets his Dragon squadmates – Virt, Napper, Aelburr, and their corporal, Rascha – and begins learning the routines.  Vlad has to get used to drum calls, maneuvers, and the other routines of army life.  He mentions to Virt that he’s not used to being treated civilly by Dragons, having introduced himself as a Jhereg; Virt says “it’s taken some effort” and points out that they’re all going to be relying on each other to not get each other killed.  Vlad’s squadmates’ reasons for volunteering in the army range from personal to professional, but Virt is surprised to learn that Vlad’s reason is a personal grudge against the opposing commander.  Between that and his Jhereg title, they are starting to understand that he’s an unusual soldier.

They move out the next day, and of course it starts raining.  While there are a lot of military practices Vlad never quite takes to, complaining comes naturally.  The weather, the food, the marching, the fact that the Captain gets a horse((Vlad mentions that he hasn’t seen much of horses before; I suppose that’s one part of the taltos legend that doesn’t relate to Vlad.)), the tedium of guard duty, on and on.  Eventually the army reaches a position they intend to hold, and Vlad is asked by Morrolan and Cropper to help delay the attack they expect in the morning.  Vlad sneaks into the enemy camp and steals eleven of their banners.

The enemy attack is indeed delayed, and Vlad starts planning ways to get out of the battle – but he realizes he can’t run while Virt is watching.  He gets wounded in the battle, but earns some respect from his squadmates in the process; not long after he’s stitched up, the army is on the move again.  Eventually they get a moment to breathe and hold services for the soldiers who died in the battle, whose bodies will be sent to Deathsgate Falls.

A few days of marching and waiting later, Vlad discusses the distinction between Dragon and Jhereg notions of killing with Virt.  Vlad thinks Dragon killing is too impersonal, done in bulk.  Virt notes that Jheregs have people killed for business, and that fighting over control of a brothel or over a barony is just a difference of scale.  Vlad eventually understands that a Dragon’s “enjoyment” of war isn’t all that different than Vlad’s enjoyment of seeing the various parts of an assassination plan come together well.

Another imminent battle means another mission, and Vlad takes the rest of his squad with him to torch the enemy’s supply wagons.  In the next morning\’s battle, Vlad\’s squad survives multiple assaults with only a couple minor injuries.  While Vlad felt like he understood the context of the army\’s earlier actions, he has begun to wonder what they\’re doing, and the narrative flashes forward to a conversation he has with Sethra Lavode about it; we see another viewpoint of war and assassination being similar in terms of how attention to detail and keeping things simple helps you succeed.  On the other hand, Vlad notes that running an army and running an Organization are still fairly different.

The final battle approaches, and Morrolan describes Vlad\’s last task: to take the stolen sword from Fornia during the battle.  Dragon honor holds that taking the sword during the battle is appropriate, while thievery is not.  Vlad is confused and annoyed by the seemingly arbitrary difficulties being forced upon him.  During the battle, Vlad\’s military experience grows, as he has to participate in multiple charges, and learns that the time he has spent with his comrades makes it very difficult to abandon them in battle.  Suddenly, Vlad is in bed; it turns out that he took a spell to the back and woke up a couple days later.  The battle is still going on, but Vlad is out of it for the time being.  He never quite recovers the full memory.

Vlad goes for a walk the night before the battle concludes, and wonders whether the only difference between himself and a Dragonlord like Morrolan is the amount of power they are able to wield – and what that meant about the rank-and-file Dragons like his squadmates.  He is unsatisfied with his answers, or Loiosh\’s answer that Dragons are the way they are because they can\’t help it.  He also encounters the Necromancer, in what seems to be a dream state (as Loiosh didn\’t see her at all), and she heals him somewhat.

Late in the battle, Vlad is finally able to leave his unit to seek out Fornia directly.  This is the part of the story that is being told in the first few paragraphs of each chapter, before memory takes him back into the rest of the story.  He approaches Fornia, and Daymar arrives (through or around Fornia\’s teleport block).  Vlad surrenders to avoid being killed, trusting in Dragon honor; meanwhile, Daymar mind-probes Fornia at Vlad\’s request and as a result Vlad understands Fornia\’s plan: to draw Morrolan into single combat in order to draw out the Great Weapon he believes is hiding within the sword he stole.

Morrolan\’s arrival on the scene, while somewhat part of Fornia\’s plan, still throws everything into chaos.  Fornia fails to notice Vlad\’s approach from behind until too late, and Vlad\’s strike (with one of his dead squadmates\’ swords, not at all his usual weapon) takes off both of Fornia\’s hands.  The battle is effectively over at that point, though Vlad does run away from Fornia\’s honor guard – and meets up with Sethra Lavode in the process, who helpfully tells him that he should have run earlier when it would have done any good.  She asks Vlad whether he understands Dragons any better than he did before; he says no, but she disagrees.  After the dead and the living are honored, Vlad returns home.

Tomorrow I\’d go back to making crime; it was so much kinder than war.

The interludes and epilogue are set years later.  Sethra the Younger had recovered the sword after Vlad disarmed Fornia, and wants to exchange it for Kieron\’s Greatsword, held by Aliera.  She asks Vlad to act as go-between for the negotiations, and while he is reluctant at first, Cawti convinces him to do so for Aliera’s sake.  Aliera believes the Great Weapon has been finding its way to her, and to deny it would be to invite further trouble.  She and Sethra meet at Vlad\’s home, where her reaction to Sethra\’s request for the sword of Kieron is \”come take it\”.  Between scenes, Morrolan breaks up the ensuing fight (at Vlad\’s urgent, psychic request), also causing Pathfinder to be released from the sword Sethra bought.  Aliera takes up Pathfinder, leaves Kieron\’s broadsword by Sethra\’s unconscious body, and Vlad finally puts the entire incident behind him after one more session with the weird metal box.

The Dragon Thesis

When discussing Jhereg, I described the Jhereg and Dragon Houses – and their theses – as being opposed over the question of the appropriate methods and motivations for killing others.  Dragon returns to that topic, again by contrast with the Jhereg, but this time we see much more of the Dragon point of view.

For methods, warfare is okay but assassination is not.  Single combat, face to face with both combatants armed and ready, is fine; attacking someone whose guard is down is simply not done.  Even in the middle of battle, there are niceties to be observed; Napper objects to Vlad\’s plan to attack Fornia\’s group from behind without so much as a yell to warn them.

As for motivations, Dragons kill for honor, or to right a wrong; they also kill for simple glory, though at a larger scale than the Dzur do, and the glory they attain is still limited and governed by Dragon notions of the propriety of their killing.  The war is precipitated, more or less deliberately, by both Fornia\’s theft of the proto-Great Weapon, and by his understanding that a public accusation of theft would be an insult that must be answered with warfare.  That said, Morrolan\’s and Sethra\’s ultimate motivations are more far-reaching – the goal they seek to attain with war is, in fact, peace, and most Dragons will claim to have similarly lofty ideals underpinning their martial nature.

The Dragon notion of honor in combat is, to some extent, performative.  Sethra and Morrolan need to defeat Fornia not only to recover the sword he stole, but also to make a very public point to other Dragonlords contemplating opposing them.  At the same time, Dragons restrain their conduct during war – e.g. not abusing prisoners – not only as a point of honor but also because keeping those conventions intact ensures they will benefit from them as well if their situations are ever reversed.  Dragon duels of honor are similarly about demonstrating your virtue not only to your opponent but also to Dragaeran society as a whole.

Antithesis

The antithesis to the Dragon point of view is again the Jhereg approach.  Vlad argues with Morrolan several times over more expedient ways to recover the sword and prevent or end the war; Vlad of course prefers the theft and/or assassination approaches for both speed and efficiency, but Morrolan\’s Dragon honor requires that he instead spend hundreds if not thousands of lives to resolve the issue.  As in Jhereg, Vlad is constrained by Morrolan\’s sense of honor, this time because he is acting as a subordinate in Morrolan\’s army, but he chafes at the restriction constantly.

Jhereg violence is also performative, to some extent.  Assassinations aren\’t done as a warning to the victim – barring revivification, it\’s a little late for such a warning to be useful.  Rather, the Jhereg murders are carried out as a signal to others that the person ordering the killing is not to be trifled with.  The Jhereg also adhere to their own code, which forbids killing a target in their own home, for much the same reason as Dragons – once you break that rule, others may not feel compelled to follow it either, and suddenly you\’re not safe in your own home anymore.

Synthesis

The synthesis between the Jhereg and Dragon viewpoints takes place in several ways.  The methods of the two Houses are combined through Vlad\’s nighttime excursions to sabotage the enemy; Vlad uses the skills he has honed as an assassin, but instead of murdering his enemies, he inconveniences them and buys his own army a few crucial hours.  The story\’s main climax, during which Fornia is defeated and the sword recovered, is accomplished through Vlad\’s misdirection and his backstab of Ori combined with Morrolan\’s martial prowess, capped off with Vlad using a Dragon\’s broadsword in a very un-Dragonlike way.

The motivations behind the killing are also somewhat blended; while the war is prosecuted by Dragons under the constraints of Dragon honor, it is precipitated by a theft from the house of a recently-dead Dragonlord – an act so un-Dragonlike that to accuse a Dragon of it is itself a sufficient pretext for war.  Fornia\’s Jhereglike behavior is itself motivated by a desire for power, but that is a motivation common to both Houses.

A more abstract synthesis of viewpoint is also achieved throughout the story as Vlad comes to better understand how Dragons approach war.  During his conversations with Sethra about the theory of warfare and the management of entire armies, Vlad compares the preparation and planning involved in a war to that required in an assassination, and sees more similarities than differences.  As part of a squad in Morrolan\’s army, Vlad experiences the boots-on-the-ground perspective of battle, and as he holds his own in the line of battle, he comes to be accepted by his Dragon squadmates.  He develops respect for them in turn, and that respect and understanding motivates more Dragonlike behavior from him, to the point that he becomes extremely reluctant to leave them in the middle of battle, despite having originally planned to bug out at the first opportunity.

Vlad is also reluctant to admit that he\’s learned anything, in a conversation with Aliera right after the battle:

\”…But tell me: Do you understand us a little better now than you did when you signed up?\”

\”No.\”

\”I think you do,\” she said.

I didn\’t answer, and presently she walked away.  At least she didn\’t salute.

Memory and Honor

Memory is also a major theme in Dragon.((As obvious statements go, this one ranks just below \”This book features members of the House of the Dragon\” – Chapter 1 is titled \”Memory Is Like A Watchacallit\”.))  As in Orca, the narration points to a context for Vlad telling the story; in this case, he is relating it to some kind of device meant for preserving his memories by recording his story.((We\’ll get a little more context on this when we discuss Issola next…))  Accordingly, Vlad\’s narration jumps around the sequence of events – each of the first sixteen chapters starts with him describing the climax of the Battle of Baritt\’s Tomb before getting diverted, by some memory or another, back into the sequence of events that lead into the battle.  Vlad remembers some things he had previously forgotten (including a detail about his trip to the Paths of the Dead; which detail, he does not say); he forgets other things, as the chaos of the battle and the wounds he takes leave him with gaps in his memory on multiple occasions.

The theme of memory isn\’t just here to flavor the text and make the narrative structure more interesting.  Memory is tightly tied into the idea of honor that the Dragons hold so dear.  Your personal honor is about how you are known and remembered, both in life and in death.  It is about your peers remembering the honorable things you have done – and about there being no dishonorable acts to remember, either.  Dragaerans, living some two to three millennia, have long memories, and a stain on your honor may take hundreds or even thousands of years to repair.  And certain Dragaerans have even longer memories than that; the undead Sethra Lavode is known to have lived for at least ten thousand years, and likely much longer, and one of her greatest advantages as a military commander is her long memory of battles and wars past.

Vlad\’s actions during the war will be remembered by the Dragons he served with; to them, that defines his honor.  This is even more true for the Dragons that fell in battle, whether their souls survived or not; the memory of their actions is all that is left, and each Dragon strives to ensure that they will be remembered well.

Other interesting notes

• \”Javelin shooters\” – i.e. bows, using fletched \”javelins\” that we would recognize as arrows – seem to be a somewhat esoteric technology on Dragaera.  At least, Vlad doesn\’t recognize them by name, and has to have the concept explained to him.  This is an interesting departure from the usual fantasy milieu, where the bow and arrow is nearly as ubiquitous a weapon as the sword.
• During his recovery from the spell injury, Vlad asks whether there was a little girl on the battlefield.  His squadmates say no, so apparently Vlad was the only person who saw Devera there.
• Baritt\’s death was an assassination, carried out by Laris and ordered by the Sorceress in Green, after he broke with the other conspirators in the conspiracy that Vlad pulled apart in Yendi.
• We now understand better Sethra\’s insistence on Vlad\’s naming the artifact he took from Loraan – it will be a Great Weapon someday.  Ironically, \”Spellbreaker\” won\’t be its eventual name – but it\’s still accurate, for the moment.

Next time

In Issola, we\’ll encounter the second major turning point in Vlad\’s arc, as well as a significant amount of cosmological exposition…

\”Only Dragons kill like that, and Dzur, I suppose.\”

\”You\’re right,\” I said.  \”Dragons and Dzur.  And also Orca, if there\’s a profit in it.\”

Orca is the seventh Vlad Taltos book, published in 1996.  It takes place the year after the events of Athyra; Vlad is still traveling with Savn, with hopes of curing the mental trauma Savn suffered during the previous book.

About Orca

Orca circles, hard and lean.

The House of the Orca is named after the Dragaeran orca, which is (as far as I can tell) the same as the Earthly species.  Orcas are often stereotyped as being all about sailing ships, whether as merchants or as military.  However, this book demonstrates that Orca is also the house of commerce and business((In fact, Vlad never once sets foot on a ship during the events of Orca.)).  Besides shipping concerns, Orcas own banks, real estate holdings, insurers, and various other companies whose focus is on the acquisition and manipulation of wealth, rather than its creation.

As Vlad has noted previously, the hierarchy of the House\’s nobility is connected directly to naval ranks((There isn\’t a direct one-to-one mapping that I know of, but the Orca try to ensure that if one person outranks another in naval rank, the noble hierarchy does not contradict that.)).  This is despite the fact that many of the Orcas managing their landside operations rarely if ever set foot on a ship, and some of the wealthiest Orca seem to take pride in living far inland.

About Orca

Orca is a doubly-nested narrative.  The outer frame is a conversation between Vlad\’s estranged wife, Cawti, and Vlad\’s oldest ally, Kiera the Thief.  This conversation appears as a few interludes between the main chapters, plus a pair of bracketing letters from Kiera to Cawti.  The inner frame, making up the majority of the story, is from Kiera\’s point of view.  Within that frame, Vlad\’s own narration appears a few different times as he describes various events to Kiera((As a result of this nesting, the events of the book aren\’t always told in order; I won\’t necessarily be preserving the narrative order in this synopsis.)).

Vlad has brought Savn to a sorceress near Northport (named Hwdf\’rjaanci, which Vlad immediately gives up on pronouncing; Hwdf\’rjaanci says to call her \”Mother\”).  She was recently informed that the land on which she lives is to be sold, and she agrees to help Savn in exchange for Vlad\’s help in keeping her home.  After working through multiple records of ownership, for both the land itself and for the succession of shell companies that appear to own it, Vlad determines that the ultimate owner of the land is a company named Northport Securities, with an address in the Fyres Building.  He has to work through a couple more shell companies in person (conveniently located in the same building) before discovering that the whole structure was owned by Fyres himself, a recently (and mysteriously) deceased Orca baron.  Fyres\’ holdings are being sold off to cover his debts.  The banks he owned (including the one at which Mother had deposited her savings) have also closed up.

At Vlad\’s request (and in exchange for details about the story), Kiera steals ledgers from Fyres\’ estate; from them, Vlad learns that Fyres\’ entire organization was basically fraudulent.  Kiera talks to a Jhereg contact named Stony, who explains that other than shipbuilding, Fyres\’ main business was these \”paper castles\”.  Fyres\’ fortunes have collapsed twice before, but people kept loaning him money because he was so good at self-promotion and appearing wealthy and successful even when he was deeply in debt((Let\’s just take the comparison to a certain presidential candidate as understood, shall we?)).

Vlad, in disguise, tries to get information from the Imperial investigation into Fyres\’ death and learns that the investigation is itself being falsified; Vlad and Kiera pursue their own investigation from there.  In the meanwhile, Mother works on fixing Savn\’s mind, and he starts to show signs of improvement – most clearly when Vlad is injured, and again when Loiosh is, and Savn responds enough to tend to each of them.

Fyres\’ apparent worth of sixty million Imperials was almost entirely fraudulent.  He had borrowed money to make himself appear wealthy so that he could borrow more money.  His banks were making risky loans because it made their ledgers look good, which ultimately made them look more prosperous and convinced more people to deposit their money there.  As a result, Fyres was in debt to several large banks and some powerful Jhereg, as well as to the treasuries of the Orca, the Dragon, and the Empire itself.  The Empire relied on those banks to enable trade across Dragaera, and the situation gave the Jhereg a lot of Imperial influence as well.  If Fyres were to default on those loans, the banks would go under, the Dragaeran economy would crash, and the Empire\’s Jhereg connections would likely become known as well.

Lord Shortisle, the Imperial Minister of Finance (also an Orca) discovered that Fyres\’ \”paper castles\” were fraudulent.  Shortisle threatens Fyres over it, trying to get his cooperation to undo some of the damage and stabilize the economy; in response Fyres threatens Shortisle with his contacts in the Jhereg.  But Shortisle has Jhereg contacts too – specifically, Stony, who happens to not be holding any of Fyres\’ debt.  Shortly thereafter, Fyres \”accidentally\” dies during a party on his private boat, by slipping and hitting his head on a railing.  His daughter had been convinced to bring a Jhereg assassin on board in exchange for help from Shortisle (and from Vonnith, one of Fyres\’ bankers) in being able to sell off Fyres\’ holdings before the extent of his fraud became known – which is why Mother\’s house was being threatened in the first place.

Shortisle is at least prepared to start handling the fallout immediately – but he loses his job.  Two separate covert groups get involved in the investigation of Fyres\’ death.  The Surveillance group sends Lieutenant Domm, who was assigned to falsify the investigation at Shortisle\’s request.  Domm announces that Fyres\’ death was an accident a week later, which is a suspiciously short time for such an investigation.  So the head of Surveillance leans on Lieutenant Loftis of the Special Tasks Group((The Special Tasks Group is headed by Lord Khaavren, who was also commanding the Phoenix Guard in Teckla.  Between the publications of Teckla and Orca, the first two books of the Khaavren Romances were also published; I will get to those in due course.)) to step in and \”properly\” investigate Fyres\’ death – but still report the same false result in the end.  Vlad\’s and Kiera\’s own investigation gets tangled into that as well, spooking Reega into having Loftis killed, and causing Domm and Vonnith to set up Stony to be killed by Vlad.

When Vlad explains all this to Timmer, who was one of Loftis\’ subordinates in the Special Tasks Group, he asks for the deed to Mother\’s land in exchange.  She agrees, leaves briefly, and then returns to announce to Vlad that \”someone\” (i.e. Domm) will be by to arrest him soon, carefully describing to him when and from where the officer will arrive.  After killing Domm, Vlad returns to the cottage; soon, Timmer arrives as well, having tracked Loiosh back (since she can\’t track Vlad thanks to his Phoenix Stone).  She mostly wanted to satisfy her own curiosity as to whether Vlad was telling the truth about his motives; she also presents the deed to Mother.  Timmer also wraps up the story, telling Vlad and Kiera that Vonnith and Reega will be going free in exchange for their cooperation in cleaning up the mess left by Fyres\’ fraud.

After Timmer leaves, Vlad and Kiera go for a walk and discuss the things that Vlad has realized about Kiera.  She has not been entirely honest with him, after all, but she\’s curious what gave her true identity away, and Vlad tells her.  She describes Kiera as something of a compartmentalized persona, which she uses to keep tabs on the Jhereg – and also to expand her own experiences beyond what was available to her in her usual identity.  Vlad says he intends to take Savn home, and they part ways.  Kiera closes the book with another letter to Cawti acknowledging the things that she and Vlad are hiding from each other (and that Kiera is hiding from her as well) – which includes Cawti and Vlad\’s son, Vlad Norathar.

The Orca Thesis

The governing philosophy of the Orcas that Vlad and Kiera encounter in this book is, essentially, \”Profit at any cost\”.  Fyres did not care how many people he lied to and defrauded in order to amass his questionable fortune.  His daughter Reega was willing to assist in the murder of her father in order to preserve as much of his wealth as she could, and Vonnith set Stony and Vlad up to kill each other in order to protect her banking position.  Hwdf\’rjaanci was one of many potential victims of Vonnith and Reega\’s plot to extract what profit they could from the wreckage of Fyres\’ holdings, and she lost her savings in the bank collapse as well.

Even Lord Shortisle\’s actions were primarily driven by profit and wealth.  As the Minister of the Treasury, he was at least acting to preserve the Empire\’s wealth (rather than just his own), but he too was willing to countenance both fraud and murder in the process.

Antithesis

The antithesis to the Orca viewpoint is pretty straightforward: there are things more important than making money.  Kiera and Vlad both embody this principle in character as well as action.  To begin with, Kiera\’s thieving skills could bring her great wealth if she chose to apply them that way, but both in this book and previously we have only seen her use her skills to help others.  In this case, Kiera agrees to help Vlad just in exchange for knowing what\’s going on.

Meanwhile, Vlad has walked away from a fairly lucrative position in the Jhereg organization, and has decided not to do contract killings anymore.  He, too, could still be making money hand over bloody fist if he had not had an attack of conscience, but since he left the Jhereg in Phoenix his motivations have been far less profit-driven.  Vlad\’s investigation in this book is as selfless an act as we\’ve seen from him yet, as his only payment is Mother\’s treatment of Savn\’s mental illness.

These two exchanges, set up at the beginning, are bookended by his exchange with Timmer at the end, where Vlad trades the remaining information he has about the Fyres situation in exchange for the deed to Mother\’s land, setting her free from the threat of eviction.  None of these exchanges involve money, and each of them is beneficial to both sides involved, because both sides are interested in helping others and not just themselves.  This is in stark contrast to the Orca business dealings that we\’re aware of, every one of which involved one of the parties taking advantage of another.

Synthesis

The synthesis of these two viewpoints is pretty straightforward.  As readers, by the end of the story, we expect to see those who have committed evil acts be punished or otherwise atone for their crimes; we hope for the same conclusion in the real world.  We often speak of this process of vengeance or justice as a transaction – \”you\’ll pay for that\”, \”he\’s paid his debt to society\”, \”it\’s time for some payback\”, and so forth.  But though there are those in the story for whom the wages of sin turn out to be a deliberately unrevivifiable death, the architects of the entire plot – Reega and her accomplice Vonnith – walk away free, with no further payment required beyond cooperation in repairing the financial system that they will continue to benefit from.  In fact, every significant character left alive at the end of the book gets paid for their efforts – the antagonists get rewarded in wealth, and the protagonists in less material benefits((Including Hwdf\’rjaanci – though her land and cottage are worth enough money to attract the Orcas\’ avarice, her desire to keep her home has little to do with its value in Imperials; her monetary savings, lost in the bank collapse, are never recovered.)).

Disguise and Misdirection

While the profiteering mindset is at the core of the Orca thesis, I find Orca\’s focus on disguises to be a far more interesting thematic element.

The mechanics of commerce extend beyond the exchange of money for goods and services.  Even an honest businessperson prefers to operate in secrecy whenever possible; information is an asset in almost any line of business, and granting your competitors advance knowledge of your plans is likely to reduce your own profits.  But for the more predatory Orca – the fraudsters, the tax-evaders, the capitalists who build their fortunes on exploitation – secrecy is even more vital.  Fyres\’ hierarchy of nested shell companies served to prevent any but the most dogged investigator from connecting his various holdings together.  Disguising his businesses allowed him to operate more freely while hiding the fraud underlying his fortune.  The investigators themselves are also working covertly on behalf of their respective intelligence agencies.

This is something they have in common with our protagonists.  Both Kiera and Vlad are in disguise when they meet at the beginning of the book, and Vlad goes through multiple other disguises over the course of his investigation; Kiera herself turns out to be a disguise as well.  But none of these disguises holds up.  Kiera and Vlad recognize each other quickly, Vlad learns later that nearly everyone he thought he had fooled with his disguises had in fact seen through them but chose not to tip their hands at the time, and by the end of the book Vlad has realized Kiera\’s true identity.  Similarly, Kiera and Vlad are eventually able to see beyond the disguises of the investigators and of Fyres\’ businesses.  Vlad acknowledges this at the end of the book with as universal a truth as we see anywhere in Orca: \”We all need work on our disguises, don\’t we?\”

The structure of Fyres\’ nested shell companies – one company owned by another, which is in turn owned by another, and so forth – is also reflected in the book\’s narrative itself.  Kiera is talking with Cawti, relating the story of her adventure with Vlad, but that layer of indirection allows Kiera to hide certain things from Cawti: her own identity, details of Vlad\’s behavior, and so on.  Some of Kiera\’s story is heard second-hand (for her, third-hand for Cawti) from Vlad, and in some cases Vlad is reporting things that he heard from others as well, some of which also turn out to be lies.  As readers we feel like we\’re getting the truth as Kiera saw it during her viewpoints, and similarly from Vlad during his, but the fact that Fyres\’ shell companies enabled his fraud leads us by analogy to wonder if Vlad and Kiera are really as reliable narrators as we would normally believe them to be((I, for one, am inclined to believe what I read here; if nothing else, Kiera\’s true identity clearly didn\’t make it into the story Kiera told Cawti, so we must be getting at least a somewhat unexpurgated version of the truth.)).

Other interesting notes

• Devera sighting!  This time it\’s Kiera who sees Devera go by, not Vlad, while she\’s waiting for a reaction to her breaking in to Shortisle\’s office.  The fact that Kiera recognizes Devera (or someone she thinks is Devera; it\’s unclear whether it\’s actually her) is another subtle clue to the attentive reader that Kiera knows things she shouldn\’t.
• Speaking of kids – apparently Vlad left Cawti pregnant!  This was the second of two pretty big reveals at the end of the book, and while the first one was pretty well telegraphed in ways that Vlad and Kiera reviewed, this one comes out of nowhere.  I\’m really looking forward to Vlad getting that particular piece of news…
• I haven\’t talked much yet about Vlad\’s abiding love of food.  He\’s quite the epicurean, and not a bad chef either; though it\’s come up in passing in a few of the other books, it\’s particularly prominent in Orca as Vlad frequently cooks for the cottage, either by himself or alongside Kiera or Mother.  And it leads to one of my favorite asides in the book:
  

  I suggested to Vlad that if the Jhereg really wanted to find him, all they had to do was keep track of the garlic consumption throughout the Empire.  He suggested I not spread the idea around, because he\’d as soon let them find him as quit eating garlic.

• While I winkingly glossed over the apparently similarity between Fyres and Donald Trump in a footnote earlier, I want to revisit that in connection with some other ways that I\’ve noticed ideas in earlier books being applicable to current politics and other events.  Vlad is something of an amateur philosopher, and as he spends a lot of time thinking about (or experiencing) how each of the Houses interact with the world, some of his observations take on a certain timeless quality.  No deep observations about that, just an appreciation of books written twenty to thirty years ago staying fresh and relevant.

Next Time

We\’ll take our first big step into Vlad\’s past since Taltos, and see the story of his brief yet memorable stint in Morrolan\’s army…

Upon Mount Olympolis resides the pantheon of the great cities of fantasy literature.  New Crobuzon sits upon a throne of wings and clockwork, while Lankhmar\’s throne of blackened bones and tarnished coins is no less impressive for its long years of wear.  Ankh-Morpork\’s oaken throne is carved with jocular elephants, who each with a wink of an eye and a curl of a trunk invite you to laugh along with them.

No less exalted on Olympolis is the fey city of Palimpsest.  Her throne is at first one thing, then another, depending on who is looking at it and how the light hits it at the moment – but it is always finely wrought of the richest materials, though often ones no earthly craftsperson would ever use to make a chair.  Her temples and shrines draw penitents who seek to bask in her otherworldly glory and suitors who cannot live without her terrible love, no matter what it might cost them.

Palimpsest is the story of a sexually transmitted city, and of four such pilgrims who each encounter the city and find that they need to return.  The pilgrims are residents of the world as we-the-readers know it, but Palimpsest is built on fairy logic and surrealism.  The author describes the city and its inhabitants with lush language and vivid imagery, anchored by the deep, emotional truths that govern Palimpsest\’s world as surely as the laws of physics govern our own.  If the mark of a great storyteller is the ability to tell you things you know to be untrue and then make your heart believe in them anyway, then Catherynne Valente is a master of the craft.

The city of Palimpsest thrives on human need.  Those who have visited are left with a gut-deep yearning that slowly leaches the color out of the rest of the world.  Palimpsest is a compulsion – the kind of desire that the Buddha warned you about.  Possibly someone who is perfectly satisfied with their life on Earth would not feel such need to return as the four protagonists do, but perfection is boring; the flaws and scars and traumas that the characters carry back and forth between our world and Palimpsest are as compelling as the city itself, and just as richly detailed.  Palimpsest and all its wonders draw the readers into the book and tantalize us with possibilities, but ultimately it\’s the loss and need and loneliness of November, Ludovico, Sei, and Oleg that compel us to stay and see their journey through to the end.  Along the way we get to make sense of Palimpsest itself, as the disparate, absurd details we have learned get slowly and satisfyingly knotted together into a cohesive whole.

I could say so much more about the book, but ultimately my own words will fall short, and if you haven\’t read it you deserve the opportunity to discover all of Palimpsest\’s secrets for yourself.

Maybe [the jhereg] were the only beings in the world who knew what was really going on, and they were secretly laughing at everyone else.

Athyra is the sixth Vlad Taltos book, published in 1993.  It takes place \”some years\” after Vlad\’s departure from the Jhereg at the end of Phoenix.

About athyra

The athyra is a bird of prey with a mild psychic ability it uses to both attract prey and repel predators.

About Athyra

Athyra rules minds\’ interplay…

The House of the Athyra is known for intellectual pursuits, particularly in the area of sorcery.  Vlad describes two types of Athyra:

\”…Some are mystics, who attempt to explore the nature of the world by looking within themselves, and some are explorers, who look upon the world as a problem to be solved, and thus reduce other people to either distractions or pieces of a puzzle, and treat them accordingly.\”

Savn considered this, and said, \”The explorers sound dangerous.\”

\”They are.  Not nearly as dangerous as the mystics, however.\”

\”Why is this?\”

\”Because explorers at least believe that others are real, if unimportant.  To a mystic, that which dwells inside is the only reality.\”

Previously in the series, we have only encountered one significant Athyra character: Loraan, the wizard from whom Vlad stole Spellbreaker and the staff containing Aliera\’s soul during Taltos.

Athyra are far from the only Dragaerans who practice sorcery, but no other Dragaerans push the boundaries of sorcery like the Athyra do, through centuries and even millennia of careful study, observation, and experimentation.((Vlad mentions his Hawk friend Daymar as being similar to an Athyra at one point, but while Daymar has the same eccentric-intellectual personality as the stereotypical Athyra, he is more of a dilettante, and his unique capabilities as a sorcerer seem to owe more to his overwhelming raw power than to dedicated research.))

About Athyra

After a prologue featuring four unnamed people eating an unidentified bird around a campfire, the story starts with a brand new viewpoint character, Savn.  He\’s a young Teckla apprenticed to Master Wag, the physicker for the village of Smallcliff.  On his way home from Wag\’s, he encounters Vlad and points him towards Tem\’s house, the village inn.  At home that night, he has a mystic vision of Vlad opening and closing the paths of his future life, which shows him that, contrary to his assumption that he would eventually become Smallcliff\’s physicker, he has choices that he can make in his life.  (At this point and a few others, we get viewpoints from Rocza, helping fill in some of the story details that Savn isn\’t yet aware of.  As Loiosh\’s mate, Rocza has a psionic connection with him but not with \”the Provider\” (Vlad); she frequently does not understand the things that Loiosh asks her to do on Vlad\’s behalf, but helps him anyway out of some combination of love and hope of reward.)

The next morning, a cart driver called \”Reins\” is found dead outside Tem\’s.  Savn assists Wag with the autopsy.  Speculation at Tem\’s points at Vlad (being an Easterner who has only just arrived in town); Vlad claims otherwise and offers to help find the killer.  He discovers that the local lord, Baron Smallcliff, is the Athyra sorcerer Loraan, from whom Vlad stole Spellbreaker.  This fact surprises Vlad because he thought Loraan was dead, and he tells Savn that the Baron is probably undead.

Vlad also offers to teach Savn witchcraft, and starts with a meditation technique and psionic communication.  He does this in a cave that he wants to explore for other reasons; he explains that \”Dark Water\” (water that runs underground and has never seen the light of day) can be used to aid necromancy and also, when contained, to repel the undead.  Vlad also begins filling Savn in on some background: Loraan wants to kill him, and probably killed Reins to draw Vlad in, as Reins had been the driver who delivered the hidden Vlad to Loraan\’s keep previously.  Vlad intends to avenge him.

Savn isn\’t sure what to think, but the amount of time he\’s been spending with Vlad is starting to draw attention – first nasty looks from others in the town, and then a beating from his former friends, which Rocza breaks up.  Savn is aware that his life is changing but he no longer knows what lies ahead of him.  The rest of the harvest passes in a blur.

Later, Savn spots some of Loraan\’s men-at-arms heading to Tem\’s, and runs ahead to warn Vlad; in the ensuing fight, Vlad is wounded and escapes via teleport.  Savn gathers some supplies (including Vlad\’s pack from his room at Tem\’s) and goes to the spot where he first met Vlad; from there the jhereg lead him to Vlad who has a broken rib, a collapsed lung, and a wound to his leg.  Savn recalls a similar case from his training with Wag, and improvises an underwater-seal suction system to reinflate Vlad\’s lung.  Confident after the successful procedure and waiting for Vlad to wake, Savn practices the witchcraft trance and wanders in his own dreams; a voice((I speculate that this is Verra, who I think is still keeping an eye on Vlad, but I have no certain facts on this at the moment.)) tells him that he still matters and Vlad will need him again.

Savn goes for more supplies, avoiding a mob searching for Vlad, and brings Wag back to Vlad; Savn\’s sister Polyi eventually shows up as well.  They move Vlad to the caves both for access to water and to avoid discovery.  Vlad has a fever from an infection in his leg wound, which Wag begins to treat while reciting the proper handling of the \”Fever Imps\” which constitute Wag\’s basic grasp of germ theory.  Savn and Polyi stay with Vlad overnight, and argue about Loraan\’s undeath and Vlad\’s intention to kill him.  The next morning, their parents don\’t seem upset about their absence, and Savn suspects Vlad has bespelled them; nobody else Savn talks to believes Vlad capable of it.

When the two jhereg show up at Savn\’s house again, he goes with them despite being angry at Vlad, but he brings a kitchen knife in case he decides to kill Vlad.  Polyi accompanies him, and they treat Vlad\’s fever again.  Savn accuses Vlad of magically manipulating his parents\’ minds, and Vlad admits to it.  Savn reminds Vlad of what he\’d said about Athyra explorers treating people like objects and Athyra mystics acting like they don\’t exist; Vlad realizes he\’s been doing both.  He finally fills Savn in on the details of the situation: Loraan is working with a Jhereg assassin, who wants to kill Vlad Morganti-style because of his departure from the Jhereg.  Savn doesn\’t know whether to believe Vlad, and engages him in something of an epistemological debate; Vlad\’s position comes down to \”don\’t assume, find out\”.  Vlad tells Savn about his plan to enter Loraan\’s manor via the cave system, and believes himself somewhat safe under the assumption that Loraan can\’t possibly maintain a teleport block over all the caves.

Savn decides to apply Vlad\’s argument to the question of Loraan\’s undeath and goes to the manor to request an audience, claiming he has information about the Easterner.  He observes that his Baron is unusually pale, and that he is in fact accompanied by a Jhereg assassin, but Loraan quickly grows impatient with him.  Savn is thrown into the same cell as Master Wag, who has been tortured into giving up Vlad\’s location.  Savn sets Wag\’s broken limbs and remembers he still has the kitchen knife; he uses it to stab a guard in the back with surgical precision, and goes in search of the cave-connected room that Vlad had hoped to enter.  He finds the room, hears tapping on one of the gates, and opens it to admit Vlad, Polyi, and the two jhereg.  Then Loraan and the Jhereg assassin, Ishtvan, teleport into the room.

The ensuing fight happens mostly in the darkness, with Vlad trying to get his enemies to distrust each other.  He is still wounded, though, and he tries to get Savn and Polyi to run as Ishtvan closes in on him.  Instead, Savn fills his lantern with Dark Water and uses it to weaken Loraan.  Loraan calls for Ishtvan to kill Savn, which gives Vlad the distraction he needs to kill Ishtvan; Loraan knocks the lantern from Savn\’s hand and then knocks Savn unconscious.  Savn drops directly into the witchcraft trance, and watches himself catch the Morganti dagger passed to him by Rocza and kill Loraan with it.

The epilogue continues the scene from the prologue; we learn that the four people are Vlad, Savn, Polyi, and a minstrel named Sara; they are eating an athyra.  Savn does not seem to be aware of much; the use of the Morganti dagger severely damaged his mind.  Vlad asks Sara to take Polyi back to town but keeps Savn with him, as the townsfolk are unlikely to treat him well anyway, and he intends to find a way to heal Savn\’s mind.

The Athyra Thesis

The Athyra thesis can be summed up as \”Knowledge is power\”.  There is more to it, of course – not least the unspoken corollary that both power and knowledge are desirable things, and the more the better.  Another corollary that Athyra tend to believe is the idea that knowledge (and the power that comes from it) ought to be held close, guarded carefully, and not shared if one can possibly help it – the fewer people that know a thing, the greater its power.

In the first five Vlad books, Vlad typically takes the side of the antithesis for most of the plot.  Throughout Athyra, however, Vlad displays the qualities of the namesake House, both positively and negatively.  His discoveries and knowledge drive the plot as he figures out that Loraan is undead (and that he killed Reins) and develops a plan to kill him.  He teaches Savn how to enter a trance state for witchcraft, and how to communicate psionically, but he keeps a lot of secrets about what else he knows and what he plans to do.

After Vlad describes the two types of Athyra, Savn asks him whether he\’s an explorer or a mystic (implicitly asserting Vlad\’s Athyra similarity); Vlad says that he hasn\’t found the answer to that question, \”but I know that other people are real, and that is something.\”  That something doesn\’t keep him from using those other people for his own purposes, though.  He manipulates Savn and his family in multiple ways, including outright mental magic cast on Savn\’s parents, and he puts Savn and Polyi in lethal danger.  (Nor are Savn and his family the only people Vlad uses; Reins is dead because of Vlad\’s choice to use him to get into Loraan\’s keep during Taltos.)

The Athyra Antithesis

Savn, being the viewpoint character for this book, takes on the antithesis role that Vlad has taken on in prior books.  Until he meets Vlad, Savn has led a mostly unexamined life – helping his parents farm and studying under the village physicker, whom he will inevitably succeed at some point.  While somewhat well-educated by Smallcliff Teckla standards, given Master Wag\’s rigorous education in how to think critically about the cases he handles, Savn is both younger and more ignorant than any other Dragaeran character we\’ve spent any significant time with.  He continually seeks guidance from those around him, thinking about the things he\’s experienced according to their standards instead of relying on his own knowledge.

Even in the areas of Savn\’s training, medical care (and to a lesser extent, storytelling), Savn applies his expertise for the benefit of those around him.  As the village physicker, he expects the end result of his apprenticeship to be a life serving others with very little improvement to his own station in life; Master Wag is respected by the villagers, of course, but at the end of the day he\’s still a Teckla living and working in a small village.  Such a life is opposed to everything the Athyra consider important, both in one\’s general ignorance of the wider world and in its use of what knowledge one does hold to help others but rarely oneself.

Synthesis

The synthesis between the Athyra thesis and its antithesis builds from the first chapter.  A few hours after Vlad and Savn meet for the first time, Savn has a vision of the world opening up for him, and realizes that he has choices in his life.  He doesn\’t necessarily have to stay in Smallcliff his whole life, and he doesn\’t even necessarily have to be a physicker.

Following that, Savn begins to learn how to think, and realizes in the process that he can\’t depend on other people for his answers.  Even Master Wag\’s suggestion to simply observe and think doesn\’t satisfy him any more than would Bless\’s appeal to divinity or Speaker\’s appeal to authority.  Eventually he takes the question to Vlad himself, in the process of trying to decide whether he believes what Vlad has been saying about Loraan.

\”Vlad, how do you know what the truth is?\”

… \”Let\’s start with this,\” [Vlad] said.  \”Suppose everyone you know says there\’s no cave here.  Is that the truth?\”

\”No.\”

\”Good.  Not everyone would agree with you, but I do.\”

\”I don\’t understand.\”

\”It doesn\’t matter.\”  Vlad thought for a moment longer, then suddenly shook his head.  \”There\’s no easy answer.  You learn things bit by bit, and you check everything by trying it out, and then sometimes you get a big piece of it all at once, and then you check that out.\”

Vlad goes on to challenge the things that \”everyone knows\” or that have been passed down to Savn by tradition – that the Baron is a good person, or that Vlad\’s fever was due to the Fever Imps that Master Wag taught Savn about.

\”Well, I assume, since it\’s been done that way for years-\”

\”Don\’t assume, find out.\”

\”You mean, I can\’t know anything until I\’ve proven it for myself?\”

\”Hmmm.  No, not really.  If someone learns something, and passes it on, you don\’t have to go through everything he learned again. … But you don\’t have to accept it on faith, either.\”

\”Then what do you do?\”

\”You make certain you understand it; you understand it all the way to the bottom.  And you test it.  When you both understand why it is the way it is, and you\’ve tried it out, then you can say you know it.\”

At the climax of the book, Savn is unable to perceive most of the fight between Vlad, the Jhereg assassin Ishtvan, and Loraan; he is both literally and figuratively in the dark.  But he\’s still able to test the knowledge he\’s acquired, realizing that first-hand observation has validated Vlad\’s assertions about Loraan.  With that understanding he is able to turn the fight around by using Dark Water to weaken Loraan, and the defeat of both antagonists follows from there.

In the end, Savn embodies the synthesis by turning his knowledge into power as the Athyra do, but sacrificing his mind in the process – the one price, above all else, that no Athyra would ever choose to pay.

Other interesting notes

• The name \”Savn\” seems to be derived from the word \”savant\”, which typically means a person with broad or deep knowledge; etymologically, as a noun it simply means \”one who knows\”.  (The French word savant translates to the present participle \”knowing\”.)  The word is best known by many as part of the phrase \”idiot savant\”, which may well describe Savn at the end of the book (though it is unclear how much of his medical knowledge Savn retains at this point).
• The chapters are each preceded by a verse from the Dragaeran folk song \”Dung-Foot Peasant\”.  Each verse describes a category of person the singer will not marry for some given reason (except for the last verse, in which the singer says they\’ll marry a bandit.  Each category also describes someone in the chapter – Savn and his family are the peasants of the first verse (and the title), Tem is the serving-man of the second, the third refers to the town Speaker, and so on.  The \”bandit\” of the seventeenth verse is Vlad himself; he had previously stolen from Loraan, has been making a living by occasionally stealing from other bandits, and is in fact the person Savn leaves town with.

\”But it all happened so fast.\”

\”That is how these things work, Vladimir.  You see all your peasants smile and look sleepy and they say, \’Oh, this is our lot in life,\’ and then something happens and they all say, \’We will die to keep them from doing this to our children.\’  All in a night it can happen, Vladimir.\”

\”I guess so.  But I\’m frightened, Noish-pa…\”

Phoenix is the fifth Vlad Taltos book, published in 1990.  It is essentially a direct sequel to Teckla, not only following directly afterwards in the chronology but also continuing to address some of the plot points and themes that were raised but not resolved in that book.

(I have written the vast majority of this post while caring for my newborn son (who arrived on May 28th); I apologize in advance for both the delay in posting this and any lack of coherency in the argument.  Also, please forgive the extremely long synopsis, as I did not have the time or brain to write a shorter one.  In any case, hopefully it won\’t take quite as long to write the next one…)

About phoenixes

Phoenixes in Dragaera are similar to those from classical mythology – rare birds that die in fire and are reborn from their own ashes.

About Phoenixes

Phoenix sinks into decay…

Phoenix rise from ashes gray.

The core attributes of the House of the Phoenix has far less to do with the individual members than it does with the House\’s place in the Dragaeran Cycle.  As the phoenix represents death and rebirth, the Phoenix period in the Cycle is supposed to be one of decadence (in the sense of a declining civilization) and renewal.  The House of the Phoenix is accordingly understood to be situated at both the beginning and the end of the sequence of Houses, tying that sequence together into a repeating cycle.  Furthermore, the Phoenixes have a particular place in Dragaeran history, as the Interregnum that ended a couple hundred years was bracketed by a decadent Phoenix emperor and a reborn Phoenix empress.  The emperor, Tortaalik, was decadent to the point of causing the collapse of the Empire; the current Phoenix empress, Zerika, is considered a \”reborn\” Phoenix after having retrieved the Orb of Judgment((The Orb of Judgment is the primary symbol of office of the Empress, as well as the source of power for Dragaeran sorcery.  Every citizen of the Empire (including non-Dragaerans who belong to a House, like Vlad and his father) has a link to the Orb that can be used to perform sorcery if one has the skill, and to tell time as well.  The Empress herself (around whose head the Orb tends to orbit) can also use the Orb to insure the truth of testimony given in Imperial court, and unless she specifically causes it not to, it records her thoughts and actions for posterity (as well as giving her access to the same from her predecessors).  Additionally, the Orb\’s color tends to reflect the Empress\’ mood, and can apparently act directly to protect the Empress from harm.)) from the Paths of the Dead and returned living to the mortal world.

Zerika is Empress not only by virtue of having retrieved the Orb, but also simply as a result of being the only Phoenix currently alive.  It is unclear how the House will continue – a dicey proposition in any case, as one can only be confirmed as a member of the House if a phoenix passed overhead at the time of one\’s birth – but there is speculation that divine intervention will be involved.  In any case, since the end of the Interregnum (about 240 years before the events of Phoenix), Zerika has held the Orb and by most accounts has ruled wisely and well in accordance with her \”reborn\” nature.

About Phoenix

The plot starts with Vlad cornered by unknown assailants; he prays to his goddess Verra for aid, and to his surprise she answers by bodily transporting him to her throne room in the Paths of the Dead (which was the point of Verra arranging the attack).  She hires him to murder the King of Greenaere, an island nation off the coast of Dragaera where, for some reason, Dragaeran sorcery and psionics do not work.  He demands ten thousand gold imperials for the job, which she agrees to.

The book\’s headings are titled as lessons about being an assassin, a conceit which Vlad introduces in a brief prologue and occasionally returns to in the narration.  Notably, he points out as he tries to plan the murder that he prefers to have much more information about and control over the job he\’s doing, and his concern is justified – while he successfully carries out the assassination, he does not get away cleanly, and he has to begin running.  After meeting a Greenaeran drummer (who helps him tend the wounds he suffered while escaping from the guards), both he and the drummer, Aibynn, are arrested for the king\’s murder.

Greenaere\’s notion of interrogation is civilized, and Vlad is not tortured((Much to his relief, as he is aware that he did not hold up well under torture during the events of Teckla.)); he refuses to either admit to the assassination or reveal why he did it.  He does get some time in prison for self-reflection, though, continuing to challenge his current choice of work in light of Noish-pa\’s explicit statement of disapproval on the topic during Teckla.  He is eventually rescued by Aliera, Cawti, and Morrolan, and both he and Aibynn are brought back to Adrilankha.

From here, the consequences of the assassination unfold, and becomes entangled with Kelly\’s revolutionary group; Cawti\’s involvement in that group is still a sore point between her and Vlad.  Greenaere and its ally Elde Island declare war on Dragaera, and Morrolan, Aliera, and Sethra prepare; they\’re aware (or at least highly suspicious) that Vlad had something to do with the outbreak of hostilities.  The Empire\’s preparations include forced conscription in South Adrilankha, which further angers the revolutionaries; the leaders (including Cawti) are soon thereafter arrested for the destruction of a watchtower.  Cawti is offered conditional release when Norathar, the Dragon heir and her former partner, attempts to intercede, but she refuses to leave without her compatriots.

Vlad, on hearing this at Castle Black, makes use of the Tower of Windows to reenter the Halls of Judgment and demand answers from Verra.  She explains that the intent of the assassination of the King of Greenaere was in fact to start a war and cause conscription in South Adrilankha, which she had hoped would derail Kelly\’s nascent revolution.  Verra explains that Kelly has discovered a long-hidden truth about how society works, but that that truth cannot flourish in the Empire as it is, and his attempt to force it to do so will only lead to the massacre of his organization((Verra describes these ideas as predating even the Jenoine and preserved in Lyorn vaults, which were unearthed during the Interregnum and eventually found their way into Kelly\’s hands.  Putting this together with what we know of Kelly\’s philosophy from Teckla (and what we know of Brust\’s own politics), it sounds like Kelly basically discovered this world\’s equivalent of Trotskyist theory.  (Or perhaps it was Trotskyism, and the civilization that came before the Jenoine is actually our own.  I don\’t remember whether Dragaera is explicitly supposed to be the future of our own world or not.)  In any case, as I mentioned briefly in discussing Teckla, Trotskyism postulates certain preconditions for the permanent revolution that is its ideal state, including the existence of a proletariat gathered into large groups (e.g. in factories containing thousands of workers).  Trotsky believed that the peasantry (i.e. the rural poor, largely consisting of farmers) were incapable of organizing as needed for a successful socialist revolution, in part due to being spread across the land; the peasantry as described in general Communist theory is nearly identical to the role played by the Teckla in Dragaeran society.  Verra understands that Dragaera has not yet reached the point where socialism can successfully take hold – but underestimates Kelly\’s belief that the time for the revolution is now.)).  She had not been expecting them to fight conscription; her surprise and dismay at how things went is terrifying to Vlad, who is not used to the idea of gods making mistakes.

Vlad returns to his usual pattern of acting stubbornly and rashly in defense of his wife and starts confronting and threatening high-ranked Jhereg, earning himself multiple assassination attempts in the process.  A Jhereg council member named Boralinoi tells Vlad that he framed Kelly\’s group (and Cawti in particular) for the watchtower\’s destruction, because the group was cutting into Jhereg profits as well as causing problems with the Empire.  Vlad responds by declaring his intention to kill Boralinoi, but isn\’t able to do so immediately and has to fight his way out of the council member\’s office.

Soon thereafter, Vlad is summoned to speak with the Empress, who claims she simply wanted to know him better after he was brought to her attention both by threatening the Jhereg\’s representative in the Palace and by his marriage to the former partner of the Dragon Heir.  They walk around the palace while they talk, apparently a usual habit for the Empress.  Vlad asks about his wife\’s release, and Zerika tells him that she refused the conditions of her release, which included a promise not to act against the interests of the Empire (a different explanation than was given Norathar, though Vlad does not comment on it).

Zerika also describes what she sees as the role of the Empress – not to rule Dragaera absolutely but to make sure the lifeblood of the Empire (food and goods, mainly) flows uninterrupted, and to use the Orb to safeguard the Empire from disaster.  She explains her desire to keep the Jhereg happy by revealing that the Jhereg play a role in the proper functioning of the Empire (rather than simply profiting by providing access to things the Empire has deemed illegal): the Jhereg provide the urban Teckla with distractions from their menial existence and prevent Teckla unhappiness (which would ultimately disrupt the efficiency of the city and the \”delicate balance\” of Dragaeran society)((This subtly ties back into Kelly\’s (and Brust\’s) politics as well; the Empire is using the Jhereg to keep the working class suppressed and either unwilling or unable to threaten the stratified class structure that is Dragaeran society.)).  But she is sympathetic to Vlad\’s plea that he needs Cawti freed more than the Jhereg need her imprisoned, and she orders her unconditional release.  Cawti is, of course, as committed as ever to Kelly\’s cause and declares her intention to work for their release as well, and her relationship with Vlad is no less fractured than it was before she was imprisoned.

With both career and marriage in jeopardy, Vlad retreats to the last and first constant of his life – his grandfather.  In Noish-pa\’s usual fashion, he provides wisdom and context with a minimum of judgment, as Vlad tries to make sense of the impending revolt and the turmoil of his life.  Noish-pa uses witchcraft to reveal that another assassin waits for Vlad outside the shop; Vlad leaves, draws him away from the shop, and kills him first.  He is wandering South Adrilankha when the revolution starts in earnest, though he doesn\’t remember much in detail (and his narration skips ahead accordingly).  Vlad returns to his grandfather\’s shop to find three dead Phoenix Guards and Noish-pa cleaning his rapier; he convinces him to accept sanctuary at Castle Black, which Morrolan is happy to grant((Vlad and his grandfather are greeted at Castle Black by Lady Teldra, Morrolan\’s Issola majordomo (or official hostess or something; the full scope of her duties has not yet been made clear).  I have not yet mentioned Teldra and her perfect, welcoming manners, despite her brief appearances in every book so far; I will certainly be discussing her in more detail when I get to Issola.  For the moment, I just wanted to appreciate how even the distrustful-of-elfs elder Taltos cannot help but like her after she greets him with broad yet understated praise.)).

At Castle Black, Vlad learns that Cawti has been rearrested – this time for treason against the Empire, for which the penalty is execution.  He figures out a plan and secures promises of assistance from his usual allies despite not letting them all in on it.  He gets Morrolan to arrange an immediate audience with the Empress, to whom he proposes both to testify that Boralinoi and the Jhereg Organization were the actual destroyers of the watchtower, and to secure a peace treaty with Greenaere, in exchange for the release of Cawti and her compatriots.  She accepts the deal and he testifies immediately, once and for all ending his career in the Jhereg Organization, and returns to Castle Black.

Sethra Lavode, Daymar, and Aibynn work together to punch a teleport through Greenaere\’s sorcery blocks, and Vlad\’s party (himself, Loiosh and Rocza, Morrolan, and Aliera) reach the castle, storming past guards who challenge them but are unable to actually stop them.  The new King (the son of Vlad\’s victim) demands the assassin as part of the treaty deal; Vlad quietly makes an arrangement with him, outside of his allies\’ hearing.  Morrolan and Aliera teleport back home, but Vlad steps out of the area of effect and surrenders himself.

Vlad recommends they kill him quickly, but the King has questions, saying Vlad was someone\’s tool and he\’d rather have the wielder.  Vlad refuses to reveal or kill his employer (not that he was likely to accomplish the latter anyway), and then they run out of time.  Aliera returns by teleport, along with Aibynn and Boralinoi, and a letter from the Empress claiming he was Vlad\’s employer (which Vlad isn\’t about to gainsay).  The King allows Vlad to act as Boralinoi\’s executioner, but then refuses to let him leave again, and he and Aliera fight their way out of the palace.  Aibynn proposes drumming again, and manages to drum the three of them back into Verra\’s halls.  Vlad is angry with Verra to the point of declaring his intent to never have anything to do with her again, but Verra points out he\’s starting a different life and she won\’t hold him to that yet.  She declares that Vlad has an appointment with Empress and sends them back to the palace((On their arrival, Aliera casually addresses Verra as \”Mother\”; after Aliera leaves but before Vlad does, Devera greets Vlad (having had to stay hidden from Aliera because she hasn\’t yet been born), and tells him that Verra meant well.  Since Vlad\’s soul is brother to Aliera\’s, does that make Verra Vlad\’s mother as well?  It\’s unclear at the moment, but in any case, Verra\’s family dynamics remain strange.)).

Zerika grants Vlad the Imperial title((Imperial titles appear to be a separate matter from House titles; for one thing, they sound like they\’re much harder to revoke or alter at the whim of one\’s House, e.g. as Orca does with its titles to ensure they correspond to naval ranks.)) of Count Szurke, which comes with some land near the Eastern border.  Vlad passes off his organization to Kragar, except for his South Adrilankha interests, which he gives to Cawti as they say goodbye for the foreseeable future.  He also says goodbye to the rest of his allies, and then to his grandfather, who he asks to manage his new lands and manor.  On the run now, Vlad teleports back to the place where he originally received Loiosh\’s egg, and sets off to the west.

The Phoenix Thesis

The standard Phoenix attributes of decay and rebirth apply to the House\’s place in the cycle, but those are two facets of what I think is the deeper meaning of the House.  Phoenix is a liminal House, a symbol of transition between one state of being and another.  The Cycle may be cyclical, but the iterations are not identical, and the House of the Phoenix stands astride the threshold of history, acting as psychopomp for the death of the ages past and the midwife for the birth of the ages yet to come.  Tortaalik in his decadence guided the pre-Interregnum Empire to its death.  Then, Zerika reversed the psychopomp role to bring the Empire itself, embodied in the Orb, back from the dead; the new Empire is not precisely the same as the old one, much as the phoenix arising from its own ashes need not be identical to its former self.

Additionally, the House of the Phoenix is generally considered to be the most noble of the Dragaeran Houses, by some combination of their rarity and their particular position in the Cycle; this is of course more true during the Phoenixes\’ turn holding the Orb, and even more so during the reign of a reborn Phoenix.  Phoenixes are, more often than any other Dragaerans, born to rule in one way or another.

To be Phoenix, then, is to be a leader that both catalyzes and responds to change – when a Phoenix moves through the world, the world changes in their wake.  Zerika exemplifies this not only in her position as Empress but in the way she acts in the process of making decisions – she thinks best on her feet, and she and Vlad are walking during both of their significant conversations.  (The decadent Phoenixes are likely not in motion nearly as much, but in those cases their very inaction catalyzes transition as well – whether the destruction of the Empire or simply the changing of the Cycle.)  Further, in one of those conversations we get more of a view into the mechanisms of Imperial leadership than we\’ve ever had before, as Zerika explains the tradeoffs she makes and the way even the Jhereg are useful to the Empire.

The Phoenix Antithesis

The antithesis of the Phoenix attributes of change is stasis and stagnation.  The anti-Phoenix seeks to avoid change – to keep doing the same things in the same way, forever.  Maybe it\’s due to fear of what could be lost, or simply comfort in the way things are, which are two sides of the same coin.  But when things inevitably do change, the anti-Phoenix turns to regression – trying to turn back the clock and return to the \”good old days\”, whatever that means.   It is of course impossible to do – things said cannot be unsaid, things done are remembered even if undone, and time can no more flow backwards than can the Cycle that governs Dragaeran history.

Vlad spends the majority of the book playing the anti-Phoenix, of course.  He doesn\’t want his life to change, and he\’s terrified by the changes that are already happening.  He not only refuses to accept the changes that have already happened, but he also ignores other changes as they happen, as he clings tightly to the illusion that his former life still exists((His cowardice in facing his changing life is a continuation of his stereotypical-Teckla role from the previous book; Teckla and Phoenix are really two halves of the same story.)).

He accepts Verra\’s assassination contract as if it were any other, even though it isn\’t; he asks her, a goddess, the most powerful being he\’s ever known, for a simple monetary payment because the prospect of her offering something else scares him.  (\”I\’ve heard too many stories about people getting what they wish for.\”)   The unusual employer isn\’t the only thing that makes this contract different, either; he acknowledges once he\’s on Greenaere that he\’s usually a lot better informed about his jobs, and he pays dearly for the lack of preparation.

Following his return from Greenaere, Vlad\’s actions for nearly the entire remainder of Phoenix is motivated by his desire to save Cawti and his relationship with her, the changes in which he refuses to accept until near the end of the book.

Synthesis

The fact that resisting change is futile means that most of Phoenix is spent in synthesis.  Despite his desire to handle this contract like any other, not only is the assassination of the King of Greenaere different in its own right, but it also catalyzes the major changes that occur over the rest of the book.  His unwillingness to accept the changes that are happening cause and accelerate other changes in his life; trying to save Cawti causes him to destroy his career in the Jhereg.

In terms of the action of the book, the climax occurs as Vlad and Aliera escape Greenaere after delivering (and executing) Boralinoi.  However, the climax in Vlad\’s development during the book is even more important; this is a book about how people change, after all.  At the beginning of chapter 15, Vlad faces the realization that he has, in fact changed:

When had I suddenly become enamored of doing the right thing, rather than the practical thing?  Was it on the streets of South Adrilankha?  Was it in my grandfather\’s shop, when he said, so simply and quietly, that what I did was wrong?  Was it when I finally realized, once and for all, that the woman I\’d married was gone forever, and that, whoever she had become, she had no use for me as I was?  Or was it that I was finally faced with a problem that couldn\’t be solved by killing the right person; could only be solved, in fact, by performing a service to the Empire that I hated?

He realizes that Cawti had gone from hating Dragaerans (as he thought he did despite all of his friends being Dragaeran) to hating the Empire, just as he has been doing, and concludes:

By surrendering to \”right\” as opposed to \”practical\”, I had changed irrevocably.  But once you allow yourself to recognize necessity, you find two things: One, you find your options so restricted that the only course of action is obvious, and, two, that a great sense of freedom comes with the decision.((This statement resonates strongly with me in the current political environment, and cuts to the core of several discussions I\’ve had about the 2016 presidential election.  Supporting Clinton in order to defeat Trump is the practical choice, but is it the right one?  I suspect I know what the author\’s answer to that question would be…))

By this time tomorrow, Vlad Taltos, Jhereg and assassin, would be dead, one way or the other.

Knowing as he does that his career as a member of the Jhereg Organization and his life in Adrilankha are both going to end no matter what, Vlad at least has the freedom to act without clinging to the parts of his life that are already doomed.  He had in fact already made that choice when he testified, under the Orb, against the Jhereg – but this moment is when he fully realizes what his decisions have meant.

Change will, ultimately, always win out over stasis.  The synthesis of the Phoenix thesis and its antithesis is essentially a victory for the Phoenix point of view: while you cannot prevent change, you can decide how to handle the transitions in your life, and even use the inevitable changes to their greatest effect in improving the lives of yourself and others.

Going places

In addition to the general thesis/themes of transition and change, Phoenix has a particular interest in how people get from one place to another.  Means of transportation Vlad uses include:

• Divine teleportation via prayer
• Sea travel by ship
• Being carried in a crate
• Escaping through a hole melted in a jail wall
• Teleportation via Dragaeran sorcery
• Climbing through a window that has been ritually linked to the Halls of Judgement
• Walking in circles through the Imperial Palace
• Teleportation across planes (again, to the Halls of Judgment) via drumming

Other interesting notes

• Fittingly for this liminal House, the events of Phoenix take place around the Dragaeran New Year; the revolt starts on the second day of the year.
• We discover more details, and raise more questions, about the Interregnum (itself a 497-year liminal state) and how it changed the Empire upon its restoration.  The advancement in Dragaeran sorcery resulting from the pre-Empire sorcery practiced during the Interregnum seems to have changed Imperial society in much the same way as the Industrial Revolution changed Western civilization.  The biggest question that occurs to me about the Interregnum and its end is this: would a non-Phoenix have been able to recover the Orb from the Paths of the Dead?  Or would the need for the cycle to resume at the reign of the Phoenix mean that any such attempt would be doomed to fail?  (This is probably a question best tabled until we get to the Khaavren Romances, though…)
• The cyclical nature of the Phoenix is also evident in Vlad\’s choice of destination upon teleporting away from Adrilankha.  He returns to the place where he originally performed the ritual linking him with Loiosh; he speculates that this may be the place where his life as an assassin could be considered to have started, and decides that it is an appropriate place for that life to end as well.  As the reign of the Phoenix marks both the beginning and end of a Cycle (and as the end of a cycle is the beginning of the next), that place in the wilderness marked the beginning of Vlad\’s Jhereg career and its end, and the beginning of whatever came next.

It would be easy to give in to self-pity, but I would only have been lying to myself.  It was a time of change, a time of growth…

But there was still somewhere the sense of triumph for having done something no witch had ever done before, and a certain serene pleasure in having succeeded.  I decided I\’d feel pretty good if it didn\’t kill me.

Dying, I\’ve found, always puts a crimp in my enjoyment of an event.

Taltos was the fourth Vlad Taltos book published, in 1988.  It is the earliest book in Vlad\’s chronology (with the brief exception of the prologue to Jhereg, which takes place after Taltos\’ flashback scenes but before the main plot).

Taltos is one of the only two books in the Vlad series not named after a Dragaeran House.  (The other, The Final Contract, is planned to be the last book in the series.)  So this post might be a little different from the preceding ones – but we\’ll see if I can stick to the format.  Let\’s give it a try!

(Also, a brief programming note: my wife is pregnant and due in a week.  Posts may continue to be intermittent for a while.)

About táltos

In the mythology of Hungary (the country of Brust\’s descent), a táltos is someone given supernatural powers at birth.  How exactly this happens isn\’t clear; some sources say that it is due to prenatal contact with God, but others connect the táltos with pagan religion (which raises the question of which god is involved).  The powers of a táltos generally include the power to cure as well as a meditative trance ability that somewhat resembles Vlad\’s witchcraft meditation.  A táltos usually has extra bones (e.g. extra fingers) – this may or may not be connected to the extra joints Vlad notices in the goddess Verra\’s fingers, as worship of Verra seems to be at least loosely connected with Eastern witchcraft.  There are other aspects of the táltos, many of which vary by who\’s telling the legends((Most of those additional aspects have not yet, as far as I know, made a significant appearance in the Vlad\’s story.  On the other hand, the táltos is almost always connected to a magical horse, one of which appears in Brokedown Palace (which takes place in Vlad\’s ancestral homeland of Fenario).  Additionally, St. Stephen of Hungary was, in some legends, believed to be a táltos; I don\’t know whether our author was specifically named after the saint, but the connection is interesting nevertheless.)).

About Taltos

The only members of the Taltos family about whom I have any details are Vlad, his father, and his grandfather.  Neither Vlad\’s father nor his grandfather have been given a first name so far in the books (though Vlad calls his grandfather \”Noish-pa\”).  Vlad\’s father and grandfather moved to Adrilankha before Vlad was born.  (Vlad\’s mother died when Vlad was young; that\’s about all we know of her at the moment.)

His father worked for decades as a restaurateur; Easterners apparently brought the concept of restaurants (as separate from an inn that provides food along with the lodgings) to Dragaera, and they still run most of the best restaurants in Adrilankha.  He then spent his life\’s savings to buy a baronetcy in the House of the Jhereg and unsuccessfully attempted to assimilate into Dragaeran culture before dying shortly thereafter.  Even years later, Vlad sees this as a vast waste of money, despite how lucrative his own career in the Jhereg has become, and he holds a lot of resentment for his father\’s desire to become Dragaeran.

Vlad\’s grandfather taught Vlad fencing and Eastern witchcraft (despite his father\’s protestations that Vlad should instead learn Dragaeran sorcery).  He was also involved somehow in the Easterner revolt sometime around when Vlad was born, which is an occasional topic of discussion in Teckla.  Noish-pa often acts as Vlad\’s moral compass; Vlad goes to him whenever he\’s having trouble figuring out how to move forward with the bigger questions of life, and Noish-pa gently but reliably points Vlad in the right direction.

Summarizing Vlad Taltos himself is difficult, for reasons I\’ll discuss in more detail shortly…

About Taltos

Taltos tells a couple of stories, interspersed.  The main plot starts with Vlad as a new Jhereg boss, low on the totem pole but controlling his own area, learning that one of his \”button-men\” (basically, \”henchman\”) stole the money that he was supposed to be collecting for Vlad and ran away with it.  The flashback plot is Vlad\’s youth and initial entry into the Jhereg Organization as an enforcer, giving more detail on the background story we already knew((Specifically, Vlad being bullied by Dragaerans, learning fencing from his grandfather, starting fights with young Orcas, and learning to hate the people among whom he and his family were living.  There\’s nothing significantly new here, but a lot of additional information that fleshes out the bits and pieces we had before.  Also, meeting his first boss Nielar and first partner Kragar, as well as Kiera…)).  There is also a third narrative, split among the seventeen chapter headings, of Vlad casting some kind of extremely difficult witchcraft; we find out what exactly it is towards the end of the story.

In the main plot, Vlad soon learns his button-man, Quion, has fled to Dzur Mountain, home of the extremely powerful (and also undead) sorceress, Sethra Lavode.  (The name is of course familiar to us readers, but this is the first time Vlad has had anything to do with her.)  Quion apparently had also met Morrolan (another name more familiar to the reader than to Vlad at this point) before the theft, so Vlad goes to ask Morrolan about it, and Morrolan teleports himself and Vlad straight to Dzur Mountain – where they find Sethra Lavode and Quion\’s corpse.  It turns out that the whole thing was a set up to get Vlad to visit Dzur Mountain in order for Sethra and Morrolan to make Vlad a lucrative and dangerous proposition: breaking into an Athyra wizard\’s keep to recover a staff containing the soul of Aliera e\’Kieron.  (In case it wasn\’t obvious by now, Taltos is the book in which Vlad meets nearly all of his powerful allies.)

The supposition is that the Athrya wizard, Loraan, had set up his keep\’s defenses to alert him to the presence of any unexpected Dragaeran visitors, but had not accounted for the presence of Easterners, hence Sethra and Morrolan hiring Vlad for the job.  Vlad\’s objections to the job are beaten down by Sethra\’s offer of seven thousand Imperials, and he takes the case.  He breaks into Loraan\’s keep by hiding in a wine barrel, but runs into Loraan in his lab; Morrolan comes to the rescue.  They escape with not only the staff but also the golden chain that Vlad found, which the reader already knows to be Spellbreaker; Morrolan appears to have killed Loraan in the process, though their hasty teleport back to Dzur Mountain makes that difficult to confirm.

At this point, we spend a bit more time than usual in flashbacks, as Vlad describes how he first met Kiera the Thief, the only one of his usual allies that he\’d met before he started working for the Organization.  She helps him out in a couple different ways, and asks her to hold on to a vial she claims contains the blood of a goddess.  For only twenty or thirty years, \”not long,\” she says, forgetting (or pretending to forget, more likely) how much of an Easterner lifespan that is.

Back in the main action, Vlad is summoned back to Dzur Mountain, where Sethra and Morrolan ask him to enter the Paths of the Dead – essentially, an exclusive section of the Dragaeran afterlife – to reunite Aliera\’s soul with her body and bring her back to the world of the living.  They are asking him because they believe that, as an Easterner, Vlad should be able to leave the Paths when a Dragaeran is not able to.  Vlad agrees on the condition that Morrolan accompany him, and Morrolan agrees in turn despite having no reason to believe he\’ll be able to leave.  They travel to Deathgate Falls, the entry point to the Paths of the Dead, and follow Sethra\’s instructions to reach the Lords of Judgement (which is to say, the gods, as Easterners see them).  Verra, Vlad\’s occasional matron goddess, is among them, and is surprised to hear that Vlad and Morrolan are there to retrieve Aliera.  She somehow summons and revives Aliera, who in typical Dragon fashion refuses to leave Morrolan behind.

Verra explains that it is the blood that determines the fate of someone in the Paths of the Dead – hence Vlad and his Easterner blood can leave (once), but Morrolan and his Dragaeran blood must stay, and Aliera is only granted an exemption as the heir to the Imperial throne.  (Verra\’s own blood is clearly different, as she is a goddess.)  After visiting the Cycle – apparently a physical phenomenon within the Paths of the Dead, in addition to a somewhat metaphorical construct by which the succession of the Imperial throne is guided – Vlad figures out a way out.  He uses an immense and improvised witchcraft ritual – the one that he has been casting across the chapter beginnings for the entire book – as witchcraft works within the Paths while sorcery does not.  The ritual summons the vial of goddess\’ blood to himself from his home; he then injects the blood into Morrolan, overcoming the blood-borne restrictions on leaving the Paths, and enables the entire party to successfully leave.

The Taltos Synthesis

Vlad is a character of contradictions, and in many cases it\’s hard to say that one side of the contradiction is Vlad\’s \”thesis\” while another is his \”antithesis\”.  But in some cases, there are specific parts that he consciously identifies with.  Vlad sees himself as an Easterner – but, as we learned in Jhereg, he has the soul of a Dragaeran, and Teckla demonstrated that he doesn\’t identify strongly with the other Easterners in Adrilankha.  His hatred of Dragaerans as a general class is one of his major motivations – but he has surrounded himself with Dragaeran allies from a very young age, and frequently risks his life for them.  Vlad is already the synthesis of the various opposing ideas that he embodies.

The climax of the story is Vlad\’s successful use of witchcraft, an art strongly tied to his Easterner identity, while stuck in the Dragaeran afterlife, in order to save the life of a Dragaeran whom he had originally hated when they met.  It\’s a microcosm of the contradictions that make up Vlad\’s character; while the climax doesn\’t exactly resolve any of Vlad\’s internal tensions, it demonstrates that in the end his notions of self-identity are less important to him than doing his best to help and protect the people he feels responsible for((In the vocabulary of \”love languages\”, Vlad\’s most reliable way of telling you he cares about you has always been his willingness to put himself at great and often inadvisable risk for you.)).  So be it; he contains multitudes.

Other interesting notes

• Even before Vlad had met any of his powerful allies, he knew Kiera the Thief, having originally met her when he was eleven.  The things we learn about her later (and that we\’ve already learned about Vlad) suggest that she had a good idea of what lay ahead of him already, but the foresight she shows in this particular case is impressive.
• Sethra suggests in her knowing way that Vlad name the golden chain, but provides no further reasons; she is obviously already aware of the item\’s potential (which it doesn\’t show fully for at least a few more books, if I recall correctly).
• Between this book and Phoenix, we get the distinct impression that the gods in general, and Verra in particular, are far more fallible than most people consider gods to be.  This is not reassuring.
• Vlad meets multiple interesting characters in the Halls of Judgement, including Baritt (whose death was a minor plot point in Yendi), Kieron (founder of the Dragaeran Empire and his past-life brother), and Devera (Aliera\’s as-yet-unborn daughter, who also briefly appeared in Yendi when Vlad spent a few minutes dead).

Next time

When Verra closes a door, she opens a window, which happens to be a portal into another dimension, or something.  Phoenix has Vlad standing upon the threshold of his life…