Jhereg - Chapter Nine

[kalinara]

So last time, Vlad had to tell his boss about his reluctance to help start a civil war, and his boss promptly tried to kill him. So things are going really well!



So this chapter starts out with Vlad telling us about the "ritual" he goes through after someone tries to assassinate him.

First, I return to my office by the fastest available means. Then I sit at my desk and stare off into space for a little while. After that I get very, very sick. Then I return to my desk and shake for a long time.

Sometime in there, while I’m alone and shaking, Cawti shows up, and she takes me home. If I haven’t eaten, she feeds me. If it is practical, she puts me to bed.

Aw. Apparently this is the fourth time that someone's tried to kill him, and since he has to meet with Aliera, he can't go off to sleep. He teleports himself this time, because he doesn't really feel like trusting someone else with it. Fair enough.

He does have a very sweet sounding goodbye with Cawti before he goes. He's still jumpy enough when he gets to Castle Black for Loiosh to comment on it, and they bicker a little. It seems to help.

There's a funny bit of paranoia when Vlad meets Lady Teldra, as he makes a point of telling us that he trusted Lady Teldra completely...but this could be an imposter. It's interesting to me because Vlad doesn't come across as trusting many people, and Teldra hasn't been nearly the presence that Morrolan, Aliera, or Sethra were in their first appearance. It's not really clear yet why Vlad trusts Teldra in particular so much.

I'm not sure we ever really get an answer to that, but their bond does come up a few times in later books.

So when Vlad goes to see Aliera, we get a clearer idea of their dynamic. It's a lot less tense this time around. Well, in a manner of speaking.

Aliera raised her hand suddenly, and I recognized the gesture as the casting of a spell.

Loiosh hissed with indignation as I hit the floor rolling, and Spellbreaker snapped out.

I didn’t feel any of the tingling that normally accompanies Spellbreaker’s intercepting magic aimed at me, however. I lay there, looking at Aliera, who was watching me carefully.

“What’s gotten into you, anyway?” asked Aliera.

“What was that spell?”

“I wanted to check your genetic background,” she said drily. “I thought I’d look for some latent Teckla genes.”

I cracked up. This just broke me up completely. I sat on the floor, my body shaking with laughter, and felt tears stream down my face. Aliera, I’m sure, was trying to figure out whether to join me, or to cure me.

After a bit more banter, they get down to business. Aliera asks why Vlad had her check Mellar's genes. Vlad explains that he hadn't really been able to learn anything else about the guy's background, and thought maybe this would be helpful.

As it turns out, it was: Mellar has Dragon genes.

Not literal dragon genes, of course. But he has genes from the House of the Dragons. So does Kragar, but this is different. Kragar is a Dragonlord that essentially got booted out and taken in by the Jheregs. Mellar is a "crossbreed". This isn't great, as Vlad tells us. Crossbreeds are pretty rare and generally not accepted by any house but Jhereg. (Though they still have it easier than Easterners, per Vlad, so he's not about to get too teary-eyed.)

Mellar has THREE houses in his makeup: Dragon and Dzur on one side, Jhereg on the other. Vlad is a little surprised that Jhereg genes are identifiable, as the House is known for being a mish-mash of the other Houses, but apparently a mish-mash that's put together for enough generations ends up being identifiable as something in and of itself.

And then the world building gets very interesting. They chat about genes, which Vlad understands the concept of, but doesn't really understand the depth of what Aliera can do. Aliera tells him though that telling a House isn't hard though, because each animal is different.

Essentially, the Dragaeran Houses get their names because of the animal, because the animal genes have been infused into their ancestors.

In Aliera's words:

And you’re proud of this? I thought, but didn’t say. I must have looked as shocked as I felt, though, because she said, “I’d thought you realized this.”

“It’s the first I’ve heard of it, I assure you. Do you mean, for example, that Chreothas are descended from actual chreothas?”

She looked puzzled. “Not ‘descended’ exactly. It’s a bit more complicated than that. All Dragaerans are initially of the same stock. But things changed when—How shall I put this? All right: Certain, uh, beings once ruled on Dragaera. They were a race called Jenoine. They used the Dragaeran race (and, I might add, the Easterners) as stock to practice genetic experimentation. When they left, the Dragaerans divided into tribes based on natural kinship, and the Houses were formed from this after the formation of the Empire by Kieron the Conqueror.”

Kieron, by the way, is Aliera's own ancestor. Vlad wonders what the Jenoine might have done to the Easterners...apparently no one is sure, but one theory is that they bred in psionic ability. Vlad has another thought:

“Hmmm. Fascinating. Aliera, has it ever occurred to you that Dragaerans and Easterners could be of the same stock originally?”

“Don’t be absurd,” she said sharply. “Dragaerans and Easterners can’t interbreed. In fact, there are some theories which claim that Easterners aren’t native to Dragaera at all, but were brought in by the Jenoine from somewhere else to use as controls for their tests.”

“ ‘Controls?’ ”

“Yes. They gave the Easterners psionic abilities equal to, or almost equal to, that of Dragaerans. Then they started messing around with Dragaerans, and sat back to see what the two races would do to each other.”

This is a minor spoiler for later events in the series, but we're going to revisit the question of the relationship of Easterners and Dragaerans multiple times over the course of the series. And while Aliera is brilliant and powerful, she may be blinded by her own biases...

Fortunately, the Jenoine have been driven off. Some are destroyed, and there's a noodle incident about Sethra having destroyed one fairly recently. Vlad remembers how, in his first meeting with Sethra, she had been uncharacteristically nervous and later, equally as uncharacteristically exhausted. He thinks that this clears up one mystery. (This event will be revisited in a later book. :-D You get used to that.)

Apparently, the Jenoine may have been the architect of the own defeat though, as per Aliera, they were interested in the study of "Chaos". Something happened and KABOOM, there's a "Great Sea of Chaos", a few new gods, and no more Jenoine.

Vlad connects this with a far more recent event. One of the events that led into the Interregnum that we hear so much about was a failed experiment by a man named Adron, which led to the creation of another, smaller Sea of Chaos up north.

He realizes then that THIS is what folks mean when they talk about "pre-Empire sorcery". Before the creation of the Orb, people directly manipulated raw chaos. Vlad finds the idea pretty horrifying, but Aliera has someone different ideas about it. Especially since the aforementioned Adron was her father.

Vlad hopes that Morrolan's interest in the practice won't lead to another event, but Aliera reassures him. Pre-Empire sorcery is actually an in between step, not great, but what Adron was doing was a more direct manipulation, which only a few people can do. Specifically members of the e'Kieron House of the Dragon.

Aliera and her father are members of that line, so they can. Kieron himself apparently never used it. And Vlad wonders then how genetic heritage interacts with reincarnation of the soul. (Remember, one of the reasons Morganti blades are so horrifying is that they DESTROY the soul. A soul can be reincarnated eventually.)

Vlad wonders about the Jhereg. He's surprised that the Jenoine bred an animal like the Jhereg into the Dragaerans. (It also raises an interesting question about the Teckla, because if there's one creature less impressive than Jhereg, it's the tiny rodents. It makes one wonder if maybe the Teckla are peasants because they're the control group...)

Anyway, Aliera notes that the Jhereg are the exception. They don't have the same origin as the other tribes. There's also a throwaway line about the Jenoine experimenting with putting human intelligence into a brain the size of a walnut, which explains the Jhereg themselves. But there are no jhereg genes in the Dragaerans.

This is very much a history chapter, which is quite fun, but hard to recap.

The gist of it is that there were a shit ton of tribes before the founding of the Empire. Eventually, they got narrowed down to 16. But there were outcasts from each tribe as well, and while Kieron was uniting the Empire, an ex-Dragon named Dolivar started uniting the outcasts (being a Dragon...well, ex-Dragon, he did it by killing the leaders that didn't agree). They ended up sarcastically calling themselves the House of the Jhereg, and Kieron decided he needed spies and scouts for the wars against the Easterners, and he recruited them. Apparently, this ended up leading to Kieron's assassination (not by Jheregs, but by folks who decided he was responsible for what they did.)

Vlad thinks it's interesting that he's never heard of a Jhereg chieftain named Dolivar. The Jhereg don't bother with heroes though. He's mentioned in Lyorn records. Aliera learned more from Sethra, who was there (and that's a shock to Vlad. He'd known Sethra was ancient, but not two hundred thousand years ancient), and some of which she herself remembered.

Aliera is NOT ancient, by the way. She was born not too long before the interregnum. But she's undergone past life regression. She'd been there, and more. Kieron and Dolivar had been her brothers. She'd seen it play out.

Aliera had been a Shaman. Kieron had been a warrior. And he's still hanging around the Paths of the Dead, by the way. Aliera-present day had even spoken to him. He'd known her.

And then she has a pretty dramatic revelation of her own:

“Three of us. The Shaman, the warrior—and the traitor. By the time Dolivar betrayed us, we no longer considered him a brother. He was a Jhereg, down to his soul.

“His soul . . . ” she repeated, trailing off.

“Yes,” she continued, “ ‘Odd’ is the right way to describe the way heredity of the body interacts with reincarnation of the soul. Kieron was never reincarnated. I have been born into a body descended from the brother of my soul. And you—” she gave me a look that I couldn’t interpret, but I suddenly knew what was coming. I wanted to scream at her not to say it, but, throughout the millennia, Aliera has always been just a little faster than me. “—You became an Easterner, brother.”

It's interesting how this reveal seems very abrupt, but at the same time, we know exactly what this means to Vlad.

And in a weird way, it does fit. Vlad hates Dragaerans more than anything. But his closest friends and associates, except for his wife, are Dragaerans. He uses Eastern witchcraft, but his familiar isn't a cat, like his grandfather. It's a jhereg. A Dragaeran creature.

Vlad is an Easterner who understands very deeply how Dragaerans think, and somehow manages to be both a lowly crimeboss while being a genuinely close friend to some of the most powerful people in society. And as much as Vlad is constantly aware of his comparative lack of power, his friends don't really seem to be.

And it's interesting how it reflects in each of his friendships. I don't think Kragar or Morrolan have any idea, but the former is an ex-Dragon outcast turned Jhereg. While the latter is a Dragaeran steeped in Eastern culture, who maintains his ties to both worlds.

And then there's Aliera, who has a surprisingly sibling-like vibe with Vlad, which says something for a woman so status conscious that she levitates to mask her lack of height and duels anyone who comments.

So on some level, Vlad may well be what he hates the most. We'll have to see next chapter how he reacts to that.