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I Dare – Chapter 29

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Day 349
Standard Year 1392

Hamilton Street
Surebleak

In which Pat Rin has not attempted to be sensible recently.

It’s pretty apparent that Cheever and Pat Rin are friends now, however sudden and uncomfortable the beginning of their association may have been. Which, as Cheever points out, is liable to cause a problem if Pat Rin can’t get past thinking “That’s my friend in danger” when it would be more helpful to take a step back and look at the longer view. (Or, in Natesa’s case, “That’s my beloved in danger” — which is an admission I think Pat Rin’s making explicit for the first time.)

The “doctor, so-called” is another nice addition to the series’ collection of memorable one-off characters.

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.)