Dutiful Passage
Approaching Jump
In which the Master Trader and his apprentice return to work.
According to my notes, this is the first substantial mention of Gordy — not counting a couple of times when people have mentioned him while running through the members of Clan Korval — since I Dare. I hadn’t realised it was that long.
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Tarona Rusk
Langlast Departure
In which Tarona Rusk takes stock of herself.
I think that when Tarona Rusk assumes that Shan intentionally set her up as a weapon against the Department, she’s making the usual mistake of the Department-trained of projecting their own methods and motives onto Korval. As accounted in Alliance of Equals, the two motivations for his actions that she dismisses out of hand are the two that were most on his mind at the time, and far from expecting her to take on the Department he expected her to want help staying away from them.
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Dutiful Passage
Langlast Departure
In which Shan and Padi get some rest.
Now we have some familiar faces, and a sense of where this story fits in the series. It’s only a day or two since the end of Alliance of Equals, so this is taking place around the same time as Neogenesis. (At least to start with.)
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Admiral Bunter
In which Padi accepts her nature.
And so Aunt Anthora’s gift does come back into relevance – and now, considering also how interested she was to learn Padi had opened it, and what the occasion of that was, I’m wondering if Anthora somehow intended it to assist in Padi’s transition.
Admiral Bunter
In which things are concealed.
Padi has finally had an opportunity to do the thing she was too-ready to do at the beginning of the novel, and found that she doesn’t like it.
As I follow Tolly’s reasoning, the problem is that there’s no certainty about what Admiral Bunter will do once the core mandate is removed. The Admiral says, now, that he trusts Tolly, and he might even mean it, now – but once Tolly has restored his freedom, he’ll be faced with the immediate situation of another person in a position to do him over the way Inki did, or worse, which is a definite problem. And, as Tolly says, the Admiral’s toolset for dealing with definite problems has historically tended toward immediate lethality as the best and only solution.
I’m a bit bemused that Tarona Rusk fell for Shan’s false compliance so easily. Partly, I suppose, it’s that she sees what she wants and expects to see; and also that what she sees of Shan is only what he wants her to see. I get the feeling that, for all she mocked him for being only a Healer, it’s his Healer training that’s giving him the advantage here.
Day 54
Standard Year 1393
Solcintra
Liad
In which Anthora is boxed in.
Well, that’s one way to prevent Nova sorting things out by going in front of the Council and accusing the Department: send someone in front of the Council to accuse Korval of everything the Department has done.
Interesting that it’s Aragon who’s been maneuvred into making the accusation. Aragon has been mentioned several times as an old and respected High House, so an accusation from Aragon will be taken seriously; it’s a significant step up from the last time we saw somebody make an accusation in Council at the Department’s instigation, when it was an ambitious clan hovering around the border between the high and mid levels. Also interesting because the most recent of the Agents of Change that have been named to us, earlier in this book, was a chel’Mara, and chel’Mara looks to Aragon — so it might even be her specifically that Aragon is about to ask about when he’s interrupted.
Because of course there’s an interruption: having Korval called before the Council to answer an accusation might be an effective way to force Anthora out of Jelaza Kazone, but letting things run on long enough for her to actually answer would be risky. I presume the interruption was part of the plan, for that reason and because it provided the excuse to hustle Anthora into the room where the trap lay ready, but I wonder how the Department managed it. Did they know their targets so well as to be able to predict that attacking dea’Gauss at a particular time would result in a Master Accountant interrupting the Council hearing? Worrying thought, that.
Having done this re-read, paying more attention to names than I usually do, I recognize everyone in the list of Korval’s allies and friends. Justus is the clan of Ken Rik, Guayar is the clan of Clonak, Ixin is the clan of Jethri and of Aelliana’s prize student Rema, Reptor is the clan of Aelliana’s space pirates, and Mizel is the clan that produced Aelliana herself. (The fact that it’s counted now among Korval’s friends is a pretty clear sign that Aelliana’s mother is no longer delm.)
The date issue is compounding itself: if the chapter heading was wrong about it being Day 53 when Anthora was told to present herself to the Council the next day, this chapter must also be wrong about it being Day 54 when she presents herself to the Council. But I still think that’s more straightforward than the alternative.
Things That Go Bump in the Night
In which several people pass a restless night.
Anthora and Ren Zel together always fill me with fond amusement, or amused fondness, which I think I might now be sufficiently old enough to carry off successfully, though it’s been there even since the first time I read I Dare, when I was about the same age as Anthora. I think there’s something about the way Anthora presents herself that encourages one to think of her as a precocious youngster whatever her actual age. Sober Ren Zel, on the other hand, sometimes seems older than his years, but I’ve always had a few years on him because he’s actually younger than Anthora.
The interesting thing about Anthora’s encounter with Ren Zel is that it’s not just a case of her bumping into him when she goes to follow up her vision of the Passage under attack: her nightmare of battle is almost certainly an echo of his nightmare memory. (When Anthora talks in her sleep, what she says is Ren Zel’s dialogue from a particularly harrowing moment in the battle.) Which suggests that there was already some kind of connection between them, a suggestion reinforced by the fact that Ren Zel finds her presence somehow familiar.
Day 50
Standard Year 1393
Lytaxin
Erob’s Medical Centre
Catastrophe Unit
In which healing goes forth.
Erob’s medical technicians think a lot of themselves, don’t they? To be fair, I suppose they have a right to, most of the time; it’s just that this situation is unlike anything they’ve been trained for.
A couple of unexplained visions occur. Shan gets a vision of Moonhawk to match his vision of Lute last week (I really hope those get elaborated on some day), and Miri gets a vision of Val Con in Jelaza Kazone’s garden. Val Con’s easy enough to explain, given the lifemate link, but it seems unlikely, even given the givens, that he and she have literally travelled all the way back to Liad; perhaps it’s Val Con’s metaphor for some safe space within himself that he retreated to for protection from the damage that was unwittingly being done him. It might not be an inappropriate metaphor, at that; the way the Tree meddles with its mobile branches, it might be personally responsible for Val Con’s survival even if it’s not directly present.
I like the moment where Shan thinks of the room he’s in as the “room of catastrophes”, leaving it open whether it’s a room in which catastrophes are dealt with, per the official designation, or a room in which catastrophes are created.
War Zone
In which there is a battle for Lytaxin.
Of course the Tree is at the centre of the protected area. But I don’t think that means that Erob is not important to Korval, or that its inclusion in the protection is only incidental, only that the Tree is the most valuable of all the valuable things Korval sought to protect. Considered rightly, I think, it says how much honor Korval did Erob by giving them a Tree; it shows that a Tree is no mere ornament, but a thing which Korval is obliged to protect for as long as it stands, and there are many clans that Korval would not choose to allow to benefit from such protection, even incidentally.
This chapter sees the flowering of seeds planted near the beginning of this novel, or even earlier. The development of the Val Con and Miri’s lifemate bond is one of the more obvious. Another is Pod 77’s attack on the Yxtrang battleship, which uses a chain of events Nelirikk tried to point out, and was ignored, back when he was still Nelirikk No-Troop.
Erob’s Boundary
War Zone
In which Val Con has a plan which is too audacious to fail.
Over the course of this book, I’ve been having trouble figuring out what it means for a Liaden to be one of “the line direct”. Earlier, Nova said that Miri’s heirloom showed her grandmother was one of the line direct and that would make her easier to identify, and I thought maybe that meant the line direct was whichever family line a clan’s delm was chosen from: Line Tiazan in Miri’s case, or Line yos’Phelium in Korval. But here is Shan counting himself and Priscilla as members of the line direct, so at least in Korval’s case it’s not just yos’Phelium.
But now that I’m thinking about it, I recall a scene back in Scout’s Progress where the term is used to distinguish between someone who might wear Korval’s crest because they’re actually a member of the clan and someone who might wear Korval’s crest because they’re an employee in one of Korval’s businesses. So, I guess that’s what it means, and that does fit the bit with Miri’s heirloom: knowing that her ancestor was an actual member of Clan Erob and not just someone who happened to work for them at some point would make it easier to narrow down who she is. (I’m not sure I see the usefulness of the concept in general: wouldn’t every person be in the line direct of their own clan? But then again, Liadens don’t really do “in general”; there’s always a context. Whenever a Liaden says “the line direct”, the meaning would always be outlined by who’s speaking, who they’re speaking to, and what hats they’re wearing.)