Tag Archives: Jonni

Moon on the Hills

Surebleak

In which Korval acquires a new neighbour.

It’s an evocative name, “World’s End”. There’s the obvious sense in which the place is named, referring to a physical boundary, a place where the world comes to an end, but there are other things it could mean, such as a temporal boundary, a time when a world comes to an end. Sometimes a person’s world can come to an end even though the planet continues untouched. Yulie’s world might have ended when he lost the last of his kin. It might have ended today, if Boss Conrad had been someone other than the person he is.

(And isn’t it interesting how, when he’s talking to Yulie, he’s mostly Pat Rin but sometimes he’s Boss Conrad for a moment or two?)

It’s also interesting to speculate how things might have gone differently if Yulie’s brother hadn’t got himself killed before Boss Conrad showed up, and had been the one handling the negotiation for road access.

I Dare – Chapter 30

I Dare – Chapter 26

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Day 345
Standard Year 1392

Jolie’s House of Joy
Surebleak

In which Pat Rin and Natesa pass the eve of an enterprise of surpassing danger.

I am convinced that the ambiguous moment in which Natesa shows up naked in Pat Rin’s bedroom is the primary reason for which the detail of “naked” being Surebleak slang for “unarmed” exists.

Not that it’s without layers of its own; the implications of the analogy say a lot about the conditions of life on Surebleak.

I Dare – Chapter 25

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Day 345
Standard Year 1392

Hamilton Street
Surebleak

In which Boss Conrad goes visiting his peers.

There’s been a bit of a failure of incluing, here: Pat Rin’s been on Surebleak for over a hundred pages at this point, and this is the first mention of him going by the name of Conrad. It becomes apparent on reflection that in the circumstances he would not have been going around introducing himself to people as Pat Rin yos’Phelium, but the first time I read the novel, before I’d taken the time for reflection, the impression I came away with was that he’d for some reason taken the name after Jonni was killed, as part of his plan to sort out the Bosses. (Part of it was that just after people start talking about Boss Conrad, we get the first version of the rumour that he was Jonni’s father, which got me to trying to figure out if it had been mentioned somewhere that Jonni’s full name was Jonni Conrad and I’d just missed it.)

In that respect, reading in chronological order helps, because before we got this far we’d already had “Persistence”, which does remember to mention that Pat Rin had already adopted the name of Conrad for the purposes of setting up his carpet emporium.

Reading in chronological order and including the short stories adds extra layers to a couple other things in this chapter, too.

Penn Kalhoun is mentioned in “Fighting Chance” as one of the people Miri knew when she still lived on Surebleak. That was around thirteen years ago, and he wasn’t a boss yet, then. (He’s been a boss for ten years, we’re told, so he must be doing something right: recall that Boss Moran was considered relatively well-established, and he’d been a boss for less than three years.)

The other thing is the method by which Boss Deacon was dealt with, which sounds to me like a certain incident in “Veil of the Dancer”. Natesa had told Pat Rin the previous evening that she might tell him “one day” how she earned the name of Natesa the Assassin; it seems that day came sooner than she was probably expecting. (Considering the circumstances, I can see where she might have felt a certain kinship of spirit, once she’d got past her initial reaction.)

I Dare – Chapter 23

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Day 310
Standard Year 1392

Blair Road
Surebleak

In which they’re fighting in the street with their children at their feet.

It’s an occupational hazard of people who read adventure stories, daydreaming about being in the story working alongside the heroes, but when I daydream about being in the Liaden Universe I always have to include some element of being swept up involuntarily, because otherwise my plan would be to hide under the nearest rock until it’s all over: the Department of the Interior scares me, and if I’m honest I have to admit that the heroes all know how to look after themselves and I really don’t have any relevant skills and there’s more ways for me to make things worse than to make things better. But there are a couple of places in the series that always tempt me to consider coming out from under the rock, in defense of innocent bystanders who can’t fend for themselves, and Jonni is one of those. (And then I start thinking about my odds of surviving on Surebleak long enough to achieve anything useful, and the rock starts looking good again.)

In the last scene, told from Natesa’s viewpoint, the ring Pat Rin wears is described as Korval’s Ring, which reminds me that on the day he obtained it he told Cheever it was a fake but only showed it to Natesa and allowed her to draw her own conclusions. It appears he has not subsequently found it necessary to correct any false impression she may have gained thereby.

Reading Liad

from Dragon Tide to Dragon Ship, and beyond