Surebleak

In which we are reunited with various people already resident on Surebleak.

As the first chapter of the latest book of a series, this is mainly concerned with reminding the reader (or introducing them if they’re entering the series here) who everyone is and what they’ve been up to. It’s quite a long chapter, which might simply be that it’s a long series and there are a lot of characters to catch up on — but then, we don’t catch up on everybody, which suggests that these might be just the characters we need to know about to follow what’s going to happen in this novel. Which suggests there’s going to be a lot happening.

(Just how long a chapter the first chapter is depends whether the first part of the novel set on Surebleak, divided into three sections headed I, II & III, is one chapter or three. I wrote the paragraph above thinking of the whole thing as one chapter, but on reflection, I think I’m going to blog it as three chapters, if only so that the blog entries are a reasonable length.)

In the first section, we are reintroduced to Miri and Val Con and Lizzie, the storefront qe’andra project, the “contracts were made to be broken” problem, Hazenthull and Tolly’s situation, Ren Zel’s struggle, Kamele, and the ongoing absence of Theo.

The storefront qe’andra project came out of a conversation in Dragon in Exile. This is the first mention of its progress, and of Ms kaz’Ineo and her apprentice, in a canonical text, but they will be familiar to some readers: they featured in the non-canonical short story “Street Cred”, which was built out of outtakes from this novel.

I can see why Val Con wanted an assurance that Haz had thought out the reasons for going after Tolly instead of Tocohl. Apart from the thing he mentions, that as an agent of the Clan she might be expected to prioritise a daughter of the Clan over a contractor, there’s the possibility that she might have been running on emotion instead of reason. As Miri reminds us, the big cloud over Haz’s life is that she took a big gamble to save the life of her mentor and friend, and it didn’t come off; now she has a new mentor and friend in danger, and a chance to get it right this time.

The game of rijel has not been mentioned before. Of Kamele’s playing partners, I recognise Scout vey’Loffit as one of her colleagues mentioned in Dragon in Exile, but Tassi appears to be a new character.

The vision of Bechimo that the Tree shares with Val Con is presumably connected in some fashion with Theo’s encounter with the Tree’s seedling. Assuming that the vision is from the seedling’s perspective, the “swinging view” and the Tree’s enthusiasm suggests to me that the occasion is the seedling being moved from Dancer onto Bechimo, near the beginning of The Gathering Edge.