Spiral Dance
Gimlins Approach
In which Jela receives assistance from several unexpected directions.
Or else: In which events take a dramatic turn and shoot off into left field. If I didn’t already know what was coming next, I think I would be having real trouble not going straight on to the next chapter.
(Incidentally, explicit confirmation that Jela’s whip thing is a shib. Now I can consider that question settled, and stop second-guessing myself.)
Jela’s contact meeting wasn’t likely to go well, as Cantra clearly thought. How right she was.
I wonder how Jela knows that the grey-robed lady and her companion are sheriekas.
I don’t recall that we ever do get a detailed answer to that. Presumably his studies in the place where the instructors had no names included a course in recognising sheriekas agents along with everything else.
But how do you get to see a dramliz pair if they don’t want to be seen? They are powerful. How did the military learn about them in the first place?
The question of how did the military learn about them in the first place was already open, since there were rumours of human-looking sheriekas agents back when Jela was still with his old ship. (Though perhaps there would have been such rumours in any case; it’s a pretty obvious shape for paranoia to take.)
On reflection, I’m wondering if perhaps it wasn’t so much anything about their persons as about the lady displaying capabilities in the alleyway that were only possible through sheriekas tech.
His whip thing is a shib? Is it made of wire, as in Plan B? Or ceramic, as in Crystal Dragon?
I wondered how Jela knew they were Shereikas too. Figured it must be based on their actions in the alley, but who knows.
Interesting that the tile speaks to Jela, but not to Cantra…at least, I’m not convinced she was merely distracted and not noticing its message. We found out in her interactions with the sheriekas “toys” she picked up for Uncle, that she has some kind of mental defenses seemingly built-in.
Whew! And what a way to decimate a population! Honestly, when I first read this, I took it as just some kind of weird cult, but now I see that the sheriekas simply use every means available to them to sow death to humans.
And…just to mention it…it’s in this chapter that we find out, sort of, what happened to Garen.
Actually, there’s more specifics about Garen’s death given in <Crystal Dragon.
It was this “tile” I meant a couple chapters back, when I referred to a “pamphlet.”