Jhereg - Chapter Twelve

[kalinara]

So last time, we ended with a bit of a cliffhanger. House Jhereg has made a move, and Morrolan, host of Castle Black, might be dead. For good. That probably means bad news for the folks trying to avoid a civil war.



So, we resume pretty much exactly where we left off, with a bit of a clarification. Morrolan is unrevivable RIGHT NOW, because there's a spell preventing it. Not because he's suffered any of the ways that would permanently prevent revivification (brain damage/beheading/et cetera.)

This means that IF they can find the sorcerer that cast the spell, then they can get said sorcerer to remove it.

SorcerESS, actually. This is the work of the Left Hand of the Jhereg, and they're mostly female. Unfortunately, there isn't enough information for Aliera to use Pathfinder to find her. But there's another option: Fentor, Morrolan's bodyguard, has also been murdered. His throat was slit. And no one bothered to put a spell on him. Aliera is able to bring him back. It's actually pretty cool:

She nodded, once, then laid her left hand on his throat. She held it there for a moment and removed it. The wound was closed, and from where I stood I could only barely make out a faint scar.

She continued checking over his body and turned it over to make sure that there was nothing on his back. She turned it over again and laid both of her hands on his chest. She closed her eyes, and I could see the lines of tension on her face.

Fentor started breathing.

I like when the underlings don't die meaningless deaths. Vlad finds himself wondering what his own face had looked like in the past-mentioned incident where Aliera had brought HIM back.

Vlad contacts Kragar and asks him to bring a Morganti blade. Then he questions Fentor. There isn't really much to go on: he was slugged, woke up blindfolded, then someone teleported in, and cut his throat. Vlad is pessimistic, but Aliera asks if he heard voices. Particularly a woman's voice.

He did.

Aliera uses a mind-probe on him. There's an interesting moment where Fentor balks and looks at Vlad, he only cooperates when Vlad gives the okay. (Vlad is in charge of Morrolan's security after all, which is separate from his role as low level Jhereg boss. And, I think implicitly, is a far more socially important role. It makes it interesting then that Vlad doesn't just quit the Jhereg stuff for this.)

So the mental image is enough for Pathfinder, while Kragar uses that moment to teleport the Morganti blade to Vlad. Then they're off hunting.

Teleportation, as we've seen, makes Vlad sick. Fortunately that's not as much of an obstacle when you're traveling with a very powerful angry sorceress with a Great Weapon. Unfortunately, they've teleported in the middle of a Left Hand enclave. There are a lot of sorceresses here. Even when Vlad has a nifty chain that disrupts spellcasting.

It's all very exciting. Aliera points out the target, Vlad hits her with some shuriken and then she teleports away. Aliera, on Vlad's psychic shout, goes after the sorceress, leaving Vlad surrounded by a lot of angry sorceresses. And well, an anti-magic chain is nice, but not terribly useful against a lot of them. Especially, once Vlad ends up hit with a paralysis spell.

I would have screamed if I could have. It wasn’t so much that they were going to kill me; but, lying there, utterly helpless, while Loiosh was going to be burned to a crisp, I almost exploded with frustration. My mind hammered at the invisible bonds that held me, as I recklessly drew on my link to the Orb for power, but there was not a chance that I could break the bindings. I just wasn’t a sorcerer of the same class as they were. If only Aliera were here.

He thinks about how Aliera would basically just dissolve all the women in chaos.

Which gets Vlad's mind racing. Because Aliera's ability to use chaos is genetic, based on being a descendant of Kieron. And, he remembers asking Aliera how genetic heritage interacts with reincarnation of the soul. Her answer had been "Oddly".

And...in a manner of speaking, Vlad is Aliera's brother.

More specifically, both Vlad and Aliera are reincarnations of the SIBLINGS of Kieron, but whose to say what generation the ability actually started?

The thoughts took no time whatsoever. I knew what I had to do then, although I had no idea how to do it. But at that point I didn’t care. Let the whole world blow up. Let the entire planet be dissolved in chaos. The sorceress, who was still within my range of vision, became my whole world for a moment.

I envisioned her dissolving, dissipating, vanishing. All of the sorcerous energy I had summoned and been unable to use, I threw, then, and my rage and frustration guided it.

I have heard, since, that those who were looking on saw a stream of something like formless, colorless fire shoot from me toward the tall sorceress with the finger pointing off into the air, who never saw it coming.

As for me, I suddenly felt myself drained of energy, of hate, of everything. I saw her fall in upon herself and dissolve into a swirling mass of all the colors I could conceive of, and several that I couldn’t.

Apparently, it started one generation up.

That said, this is not great. Vlad has no knowledge of how to control what he's just summoned, and is a little too out of it to manage to get away. But fortunately, he does have a sister, of sorts, who is an expert, who teleports in to save the day.

She began gesturing with her left hand, then, and the green mass began to shimmer, and slowly it turned blue. I thought it was very pretty. I looked closely. Was it my imagination, or did the blue mass seem a bit smaller than it had been? I looked around the edges of where it had been and confirmed it. There was nothing there, now. The wooden floor of the restaurant was gone, and it pulled back to reveal the edge of what appeared to be a pit. I looked up, and discovered that part of the ceiling was missing as well.

...oops. Anyway, Aliera basically shrinks it all into a small crystal, which she gives to Vlad, telling him to give it to his wife. No one will believe him if he explained where it came from anyway.

I don't know, I think Cawti might. But Aliera, gently for her, let's him know how stupid he was to try that without any of her knowledge or experience.

That, of course, is when the Imperial Guards show up. Fortunately, Aliera is able to scare them away. She's also got the sorceress. Or more specifically, she's got the sorceress's body up in Castle Black, while she's got the woman's soul trapped in her weapon. Vlad's bothered by this, but needs must.

-

They get back to Castle Black, specifically to Morrolan's Tower. The Necromancer, who was mentioned before, has been recruited to help. And she and Aliera wake the sorceress up. Then it's up to Vlad.

“Perhaps,” I went on to her, “it is a flaw in my character, but I truly enjoy using Morganti weapons on you bitches.”

Still nothing.

“That’s why we brought you back, you know.” As I said it, I drew the dagger Kragar had supplied me with and held it before her eyes. They widened with recognition. She shook her head in denial.

I’d never had to do anything like this before, and I wasn’t liking it now. It wasn’t as if she’d done something wrong—she’d just accepted a standard contract, much as I would have done. Unfortunately, she’d gotten involved with the wrong people. And, unfortunately, we needed her cooperation because she’d done a good job. I couldn’t stop myself from identifying closely with her.

I touched her throat with the back of the blade, above the edge. I felt it fighting me—trying to turn around, to get at the skin, to cut, to drink.

She felt it too.

It's interesting to me, reading this book alongside the Golden Queen. Because for all that Wolverton occasionally talks about Gallen's career as a bounty hunter, he generally comes across as a far more traditional hero type than Vlad is. Vlad's a thug with connections, whose entire quest this book is to assassinate some dude. If anything, he skirts the line of being a villain protagonist. He's trying to avoid a war, and to keep his friends from being caught in his own issues, but he's not (at this point in time anyway - this does change over time) a particularly altruistic or heroic person.

I bring this up, because a few chapters ago, we saw Gallen pretty casually attempt to torture a man for information, only to be stalled by the fact that it's almost impossible TOO torture someone already dead. But there was still no introspection or regret.

Whereas here, amoral anti-heroic Vlad actually does have qualms and misgivings about what he's doing. He identifies with this woman. He doesn't think she's done anything particularly wrong, by his own standards.

That said, this is getting dark. He tells her that he won't be able to use the Morganti blade on her if she cooperates. And for a Jhereg, breaking a contract is a huge deal. He escalates:

“Well, what is it?” I asked, harshly. I saw her face torn with indecision. Sometimes I truly loathe the things I do. Maybe I should have been a thief after all.

I grabbed hold of her dress and raised it up, exposing her legs. I pulled at one knee. Loiosh hissed, right on cue, and I said, aloud, “No! Not until I’m done with her!”

I licked the forefinger of my left hand and wetted down a spot on the inside of her thigh. She was close to tears, now, which meant she was also close to breaking. Well, now or never.

“Too late,” I said with relish, and lowered the Morganti blade, slowly and deliberately, toward her thigh. The point touched.

“No! My god, stop! I’ll do it!”

Vlad feels sick, but the sorceress lifts the spell.

I think Brust does a good job here of skirting a line. It's really the kind of line that Vlad's danced along for most of the book. The threat he makes is brutal, and the sexualized element is definitely not an accident. I think it helps that there is no indication that Vlad would have actually carried out the threat. (It wouldn't have brought Morrolan back to destroy the woman's soul. And we've seen that Vlad is not casually cruel.)

And of course, Vlad's own self-disgust helps. This is why I brought up Gallen. I'm not trying to criticize Wolverton specifically. It's more that, in science fiction and fantasy, torture and brutality aren't uncommon, even among heroes. And a lot of times, I don't think we, as readers, think about that.

For me, as a long time reader of the genre, it's not notable that Vlad takes part in a torture/interrogation in this book. It IS notable that this character, who is an amoral thug at heart, actually feels disgust and horror about it. That's the part I'm not used to seeing.

It makes me think a bit.

Anyway, Morrolan wakes up. He's angry, but then mostly just confused and curious. He asks about the now-sobbing sorceress and gets the run-down. Vlad gives his Morganti dagger to Morrolan. Morrolan collects them, and Vlad thinks that he doesn't ever want to see it again. He also sees the look of disgust on Aliera's face when she catches his eye.

The chapter ends with Vlad and the others leaving the sorceress with Morrolan. They tell him they promised her her soul for helping, but nothing else, and it's at least heavily implied that he's going to kill her the old fashioned way. No one seems to feel very good about the whole thing though.