[this blog fights fascism] - Talyn, redux, in depth
--Well, there was no end-of-book whammy like say finding out that the so!hott! alien prince who says he loves you more than life itself and considers you a living goddess has actually cursed you to undeath and eventual madness as an immortal warlord - purely out of the highest moral principles, in order to save his people and planet from utter destruction at the claws of other, *evil* undead (and otherwise invincible) warlords and what with feeling that he had an infinitely-stronger duty to *them* than to you what with you being a stranger and to him the alien from the alternate-Earth and anyway he didn't *know* he was going to fall in love with you until after he'd done it and then he couldn't bring himself to tell you and ohshit ohshit we are so screwed...nope, nothing like the reversal of fortune and betrayals and scales-from-the-eyes moments that befall Molly and her sister in the World Gates trilogy, nor yet the ones that happen to Vincalis and friends in the prequel to the Secret Histories where the titular hero/reformer discovers to his horror that all the technology and comforts of their civilization depend on the brutal exploitation and routine murder of huge numbers of unpersons far distant being used as a kind of psychic energy reservoir/generator...and that the leaders he respected and trusted knew about this all along and were cool with it -- I didn't really expect it, by the halfway point, but then I hadn't been at all expecting three of the four major plot switchbacks/betrayals in Dark Gods, either, so I was willing to give Lisle the chance that it would turn out Talyn was meant to be the representatively-arrogant pitiably-dull thud she seemed to this reader to be from page 1 (just like her complacent hero Vincalis at first, or Aeryn Sun) and there'd be a major wakeup call for her and her fellow Spartans Sabacians Tonks in the last hundred pages leading into the next installment.
Alas, not to be - the author of Gods Old and Dark and Vincalis the Agitator and Sympathy for the Devil has apparently been possessed by Jerry Pournelle's psyche*, or possibly even Terry Goodkind's, and completely braineaten, resulting in a book which she thinks is the best book she's ever written but which to me was lacking completely in suspense, ethical complexity, plausible worldbuilding, or the occasional broad humor of culture clashes in her previous books - any/all of which probably explain why it didn't do very well in hardcover, far more than conspiracy on the part of the Big Chain Bookstores to suppress her sales** imo.
To explain why this book is such a Bodysnatched!Pod Person experience it is inevitable that I give a lot of spoilers for the World Gates trilogy, particularly the second book, Wreck of Heaven, where most of the 'reversals of fortune' come, but it can't be helped. In those books, one of the two heroines, a woman with unexplained, personally-costly, apparently-miraculous powers of healing is kidnapped into an alternate dimension and told that she is to be their living goddess, their wonder-working queen because they've searched the worlds and she is the only one who can save them. And at first this seems like a really nice gig - she's ensconced in a gorgeous castle with everything she could ever want, everyone treats her like a sacred entity, the prince who abducted her is handsome and charming and kind and seems to be falling for her, and best of all her healing powers don't result in her taking on the pain of those she heals, something that really screwed her up back home. It's not like she has anyone on our Earth waiting for her, or anything, and although there are more-than-hints that there is a lot being kept from her, and that the dangers in this place are pretty fierce (that's why they had to go world-walking to find a planet-healer, it still seems like a cinderella-story come true.
And then in short order, she finds out that she had a long-lost sister, back home on earth, and that the enemies of her handsome prince are a bunch of interdimensional pirates/psychic vampires/undead sorcerers who go from world to world fucking them up and feeding on the suffering of their life forms until there's nothing left but a cold dead cinder, and that they don't take kindly to living goddesses who cut them off from their drug of power or thwart their ambitions and rivalries to rule amongst themselves (which need said unlimited power) and so they make it their mission to kill such types whenever they appear. She now has a permanent target painted on her, which her handsome prince didn't tell her about, he was just going to Protect Her™ only it turns out he can't.
In fact, he's also turned her into a future undead, because the beautiful gold necklace that is the symbol of her role and power turns out not to be so much a gift as a trap, a recording device that keeps her personality stored in it and uses that information to rebuild her body from surrounding available organic material every time she gets killed - and incidentally turning her completely insane as well as "soulless," like a vampire, whatever that exactly means. So if the chains of Duty to protect the hapless citizens of the planet aren't enough, that's too bad - she can't ever retire from this job.
And it gets worse - not only does she find this out by getting killed and coming back from the dead and then learning that it isn't a miracle (and only find this out by looking in the library, because her handsome royal lover sure isn't going to mention it) she (and her long-lost sister back on earth) find out that a) their parents were part of Earth's "Watchers' council" so to speak, and dedicated their lives to trying to protect the prince's planet and people against evil sorcerers, both the undead warlords and ordinary greedy mortal adventurers from still other dimensions, and b) were murdered by their colleagues in a phony accident for not following the rules, which is bad enough, but also that said Watcher colleagues may very well kill them too if they can manage it, in order to maintain operational secrecy/protect the Earth from magical backlash and the undead sorcerers and their minions, all in the name of the Greater Good.
And on top of that, they're not sisters, they're half-sisters, because their parents realized the only way someone could use the Force for good on that other Earth without causing backlash and destruction somewhere else on our Earth, safely, was to be born of two dimensions, theirs and ours, and so their mother with their father's permission entered into a relationship with another man on that alternate world, and had a hybrid daughter, whom - they planned - would be Destined to take on the necklace and power - and doom - of the other world's living goddess-healer in the future.
And this is represented as being something really rather awful and bent for hnau to have engaged in (to use terminology that Lisle most assuredly shares), for all their good intentions, and horrible to have done to Molly all without her possible consent or knowledge, even with the best of intensions of tikkun olam - and healing/saving all the worlds, for that matter. Because that's what they were trying to accomplish, which their Lawful Good colleagues considered far too dangerous and likely to have the exact opposite effect, of destroying the remaining ones. And there are no good, easy answers and only an ambiguously-happy ending, involving the redemption-by-happy-accident-or-miracle - and True Love - of the most powerful of the undead sorcerers, paralleling the story of Dana and Agonostis in Sympathy for the Devil but a lot messier and leaving some broken hearts behind with all the collateral damage to the multiverse and the casualties among the main characters, the Lawful-Ambiguously-Good Guys.
So you'd expect from prior books of hers that meeting these folks - and particularly on top of the revelations-of-betrayal-and-using on a global scale in vincalis/Secret Histories, too - that they're going to turn out to be unknowing pawns of the Dark Side, what with their mandatory child-sacrifice and eugenics programs in service of their Forever War and unquestioning obedience to their society's Laws and all. That's what you'd think, and that probably Talyn like Aeryn Sun is going to have to learn painful truths and walk away from all that:
"I want a beret and boots and a cloak like yours, and sugarstrings
and . . ."
"If you're lucky you won't get what you think you want," I told him. "Except maybe the sugar-strings." Of my parents' fourteen children, eight of us are in the service, six of us drafted into Magics. Which has to have been a source of delight for the Forces, since my father took an early option to participate in the Breeder program. I love my taak, I love my countrymen, I love the Confederacy and all it stands for . . . but I do not want to see Riknir follow in his brothers' and sisters' paths. If he has no talent for magic, and no taste for war, I will be the happiest big sister in Beyltaak.
I rolled out of my narrow bed, keeping my head downyears of sleeping under the eaves had honed in the lot of us a habitual half crouch on waking that returned instantly whenever we came home. I could stand straight in the center of the loft, and did. My parents kept all our beds up there still--even though four of my older siblings have married and we could never manage to all be home at the same time. Those beds stood as a mark of my parents' faith in us, I think--that we would survive service, that we would come home as we could--or perhaps they were a way of warding off disaster, a superstitious talisman. As long as the beds remained in their places so we could have our own when we came home, then we would stay safe.
[p 14] [...]But working three-and-two would keep me in a state of exhaustion during my little free time and keep me from thinking too much.
The commander looked surprised. "If Talyn's information is correct, it seems unlikely to me that we will see another barrage like the last one."
"We may not," the major agreed. "But we could, if the bastards want to draw us off whatever it was they put so much trouble into placing. If we have the people already on the line to get on top of another such attack from the first volley, we should be able to prevent most, if not all, losses."
The commander's lips thinned into a mean little line as he looked past the major to me. But he said, "We're here to protect our people, Major. Go ahead with your plan."
I was tired, but not tired enough to go to my quarters to sleep yet. Under normal circumstances, I would have gone to the Star's Rest for a meal and some entertainment, or perhaps out on the town with a few friends, before I returned to my room in the Shielders' barracks.
But these were nothing like normal circumstances. My father was away and out of touch with my mother, my mother's best friend had just died, and though we in Magics may not be permitted to make family our first priority, we may make it our second. I took leave of Major Damis and notified the duty sergeant of my intended whereabouts.
It was no happy thing walking through the streets of Beyltaak The task had suffered from the Eastils' barrage. The Zatavars' bakery on Fishbinder Street was burning; people fought the flames but it looked to me to be damage to property only. I saw both Mother and Father Zatavar manning buckets in the fire line, and no one weeping as they would over a lost child. Two blocks away, though, crossing Wide Lane, rescuers pulled bodies out of Lorlina's brothel; like others passing by, I quickly checked the faces of those lying beneath the sheds on the walkway to make sure that one of my own people was not numbered among the dead. Lorlina had welcomed her last customer, I discovered, though I did not know any of the rest; her place had served mostly the better-off sailors from the docks and travelers passing through. The brothel was undamaged, though, and no doubt Lorlina had left it to some family member or one of her girls.
This is the way of attacks through the View. Conventionals send missiles that can be seen by the eyes, heard by the ears, felt by the flesh; their surprise is only in the instant before their impact. They never leave horrors unannounced for the unsuspecting after they have done their work; they have no way of threading a needle and leaving a building standing but everyone inside it dead, undiscovered until someone back home misses family member and starts a search.
Many of us hate Magics for that; compared to the fighting done by the Conventionals, our work is dirty and ugly and it wears on the soul.
Walking through the street in the aftermath of the attack, I could not find my pride in my uniform or my service. Though I knew how many attacks my comrades and I had turned away, I could see with my eyes and feel with my heart those that I had failed to protect. The dead speak louder than the living in the ears of the guilty, and I heard them clearly, whispering to me as I made my way home.
I thought of my father, away in lnjtaak, and I wondered if perhaps the time had come to settle for peace instead of victory. If perhaps, after three hundred years, no victory was possible. When the innocent dead speak, it's hard to hold on to our certainties, and I am not so strong that I have never had doubts. I had them then, and for just an instant hoped that we might have peace even if it was the weak peace of diplomats and not the strong peace of soldiers.
When I got home, I could tell that my news would come as no surprise to my mother. Ma sat on one of the benches at the long table in our strangely silent house, with her head buried in her arms. She made no noise, and for a moment a new horror overcame me-that if I touched her she would not move, and that I had come home to find one last place filled with the victims of the Eastils, and my own world destroyed.
But at the sound of my step on the floor she raised her head and looked at me with eyes red from much crying, but now dry. "I'll fix you something to eat," she said by way of greeting, "and we'll talk." [pp 38-39]
Changing the subject is as close to an apology as Pada will go. l didn't pursue her slur--I just said, "They've come up with something subtle. I suspect if we cannot backtrail their Senders
and have our Senders destroy them, they're going to be trouble."
"Not for me." Pada looked smug.
"Oh? You learn some new magic I need to know about?" I kept my voice even. It has been a rough day for everyone, I reminded myself. Don't shove her in the bay. Don't shove her in the bay.
We came even with that alley l'd been watching-and out of the shadows stepped two men, both big, both armed with long knives, both staring at the two of us unblinking. They reeked of cheap wine and salban smoke, and they wove from side to side as they stood.
I braced myself and ran personal defense and attack spells through my head and tried to remember who had last been court-martialed for use of magic against civilians, and how that had gone.
The bigger of the two--Mountain Left, I thought--said, "You're . . . shuh . . , shuh . . . Shielders, aren't you?"
"We are," I said, praying under my breath that those two would suddenly get scared and run away. If I remembered correctly: that last court-martial had ended in a permanent placement in eternally frozen Gavas Base.
"We juh . . . juh . . . jusht wanted to thank you. Good work."
They raised their daggers to their foreheads and bowed, and I could envision sliced foreheads or one of them losing his balance and sprawling forward and running me through by accident. But they survived the salute and so did we. They faded into the shadows, we hurried on our way, and my heart moved out of the back of my mouth and down into my chest where it belonged.
I am daily grateful for the Shielders uniform, and for the men and women who have fought so long and hard to make it a symbol of good.
As uniforms go. it's rather ordinary. Emerald swordsman's shirt, front-lacing vest and pants, both in black hamlet cloth, low-heeled soft leather boots. and the beret. The Shielder beret is black, too, and the pin on the front is the sword and star. Unit insignia, ribbons. and ranks go on the vest and the shirt's dropped shoulders, just above the sleeve gathers. But all Shielders wear the same beret, and that beret is, many times, more magic than we would dare cast. It can be a symbol of fear--for each wearer is a warrior and a master of magic, and if pressed we can link into the web of active Shielders to channel the power with which we can defend ourselves or protect others but it is also a symbol of respect and devotion and love. We hold the line for everything we love--and everything our fellow citizens in the Confederacy and its many taaks love. Only Senders, who wear a variant of the same uniform, differing in nothing but the color of shirts and berets--garnet and two crossed lightning bolts as their beret pin, receive the same respect as Shielders. The Conventionals--cavalry, foot, artillery, engineers, and miners--see us as doing the least work and getting the most glory. But they cannot do what we do. They volunteer--joining at nineteen or twenty, and serving a six-year enlistment, after which they can choose to stay or choose to return to civilian life.
We in Magics--Senders, Shielders, and even Intelligence--wake up one morning. shortly after reaching adolescence, to find our mothers crying over our beds up in the eaves and men in uniform down in the kitchen waiting to tell us that we have magical talent that has manifested and that we will be going with them. Intelligence knows before we know. And their people get to us the instant they discover us. I was thirteen when they came for me. Pada was twelve. Some of my comrades have started as young as ten.
The first thing they tell us is that we will be in the service of the Confederacy until we break or die. Not an easy thing to find out as a child. They train us, they hurt us, they take everything we have and everything we love away from us . . . and then, gradually, they give us power, and skill, and privilege. We pay for it with our lives and futures, but we are in turn well paid. With respect. With love. With some freedoms beyond those enjoyed by other citizens.
And yet, l cared little for magic and would have given away even Ethebet's Law for a chance to pursue my own loves and dreams. [pp 6-7]
We also would, based on earlier books, anticipate finding a similar sort of progress on the part of the hero Gair, from the invading Eastils, who has been raised and trained all his life to believe that his country has been trying singlemindedly and to the exclusion of all else to conquer their neighbors for the past 300+ years! solely out of the goodness and generosity of their hearts to spread their Civilization, system of just laws, and economic prosperity to the barbarous Tonks - and not because they have wide fertile farmlands and forests full of timber, and mountains overflowing with iron ore, oh no, not at all! You'd expect a parallel set of revelations and resisted Disillusionment, leading to both main charas going out and rebelling together against their own corrupt and blind-stupid leadership to put an end to this Forever War, at long last.
But no, apparently the Eastils have sincerely been slaughtering their neighbors via magical air raids as well as swords and arrows, pouring their resources into this campaign both fiscal and human for all these generations, and incurring at last the odium of the rest of the community of nations and economic penalty of embargoes, out of sheer benevolence. (And not even, a la the real forever war between France & England and all its proxy iterations, to keep the peons distracted from their own failures of leadership, and away from the throats of their plutocracy.)
Nothing about the geopolitics or socio-economics of the world of Korre or the (bad-punning?) continent of Hyre, however, makes any sense at all. The simpler the sword-and-sorcery setting - frex, the Lankhmar books, or Dunsany's short stories, or CL Moore's Jirel ones - the less solid the foundation has to be, the more of a glittering stage set, spray paint and shadows on canvas flats, against which the important-in-this-subgenre actions of "the dance" take place. And this is a sliding scale thing, and no set rules for when the framework fails to be sufficient to suspend disbelief. (But under any fantastic fictional set-piece as IRL, the hidden planking must be solid, or else catastrophe...) When you set out to write a para-realistic political fantasy, and not something which exists just for the sake of the chase and sex scenes and the explosions, you have to have it a) be internally consistent, b) match up to the patterns of human behavior in the real world, if just analogously.
Likewise, unless you're setting out to write characters who are supposed to be very badly damaged, fragmented, and Unreliable more than all charas are necessarily Unreliable, being finite and limited in knowledge as well as having their own vanities and purposes and rivalires - or just really, really dumb - you need to have some internal consistency in the way you represent their mental states, desires, and beliefs.
Next: No, not Romania, the Antichrist is Swiss!
(* And I gotta say, I didn't know that Pournelle was a votary of Russell Kirk before now, but assuming that's true it really does explain a whole lot.)
(** Lisle apparently believes this is the case, which is funny since not only did I pick up Talyn precisely because it was face-out in the front of SF at B&N in the New Titles section, but every Lisle book that I've ever read I've found at B&N or Borders over the years. --Well, insofar as someone who really ought to know better falling victim to bizarre paranoia is funny, which is not very. )
(*** Also the hardcover part likely didn't help, since I know I am not very unique among fandom in having to 'wait for the paperback' - not just a chronically-poor issue, but also due to the fact that fen tend to buy books often, frequently - altho' I have been known to buy a book more than once, first in paperback and then track down a used hardcover & am probably not alone in that either.)
Alas, not to be - the author of Gods Old and Dark and Vincalis the Agitator and Sympathy for the Devil has apparently been possessed by Jerry Pournelle's psyche*, or possibly even Terry Goodkind's, and completely braineaten, resulting in a book which she thinks is the best book she's ever written but which to me was lacking completely in suspense, ethical complexity, plausible worldbuilding, or the occasional broad humor of culture clashes in her previous books - any/all of which probably explain why it didn't do very well in hardcover, far more than conspiracy on the part of the Big Chain Bookstores to suppress her sales** imo.
To explain why this book is such a Bodysnatched!Pod Person experience it is inevitable that I give a lot of spoilers for the World Gates trilogy, particularly the second book, Wreck of Heaven, where most of the 'reversals of fortune' come, but it can't be helped. In those books, one of the two heroines, a woman with unexplained, personally-costly, apparently-miraculous powers of healing is kidnapped into an alternate dimension and told that she is to be their living goddess, their wonder-working queen because they've searched the worlds and she is the only one who can save them. And at first this seems like a really nice gig - she's ensconced in a gorgeous castle with everything she could ever want, everyone treats her like a sacred entity, the prince who abducted her is handsome and charming and kind and seems to be falling for her, and best of all her healing powers don't result in her taking on the pain of those she heals, something that really screwed her up back home. It's not like she has anyone on our Earth waiting for her, or anything, and although there are more-than-hints that there is a lot being kept from her, and that the dangers in this place are pretty fierce (that's why they had to go world-walking to find a planet-healer, it still seems like a cinderella-story come true.
And then in short order, she finds out that she had a long-lost sister, back home on earth, and that the enemies of her handsome prince are a bunch of interdimensional pirates/psychic vampires/undead sorcerers who go from world to world fucking them up and feeding on the suffering of their life forms until there's nothing left but a cold dead cinder, and that they don't take kindly to living goddesses who cut them off from their drug of power or thwart their ambitions and rivalries to rule amongst themselves (which need said unlimited power) and so they make it their mission to kill such types whenever they appear. She now has a permanent target painted on her, which her handsome prince didn't tell her about, he was just going to Protect Her™ only it turns out he can't.
In fact, he's also turned her into a future undead, because the beautiful gold necklace that is the symbol of her role and power turns out not to be so much a gift as a trap, a recording device that keeps her personality stored in it and uses that information to rebuild her body from surrounding available organic material every time she gets killed - and incidentally turning her completely insane as well as "soulless," like a vampire, whatever that exactly means. So if the chains of Duty to protect the hapless citizens of the planet aren't enough, that's too bad - she can't ever retire from this job.
And it gets worse - not only does she find this out by getting killed and coming back from the dead and then learning that it isn't a miracle (and only find this out by looking in the library, because her handsome royal lover sure isn't going to mention it) she (and her long-lost sister back on earth) find out that a) their parents were part of Earth's "Watchers' council" so to speak, and dedicated their lives to trying to protect the prince's planet and people against evil sorcerers, both the undead warlords and ordinary greedy mortal adventurers from still other dimensions, and b) were murdered by their colleagues in a phony accident for not following the rules, which is bad enough, but also that said Watcher colleagues may very well kill them too if they can manage it, in order to maintain operational secrecy/protect the Earth from magical backlash and the undead sorcerers and their minions, all in the name of the Greater Good.
And on top of that, they're not sisters, they're half-sisters, because their parents realized the only way someone could use the Force for good on that other Earth without causing backlash and destruction somewhere else on our Earth, safely, was to be born of two dimensions, theirs and ours, and so their mother with their father's permission entered into a relationship with another man on that alternate world, and had a hybrid daughter, whom - they planned - would be Destined to take on the necklace and power - and doom - of the other world's living goddess-healer in the future.
And this is represented as being something really rather awful and bent for hnau to have engaged in (to use terminology that Lisle most assuredly shares), for all their good intentions, and horrible to have done to Molly all without her possible consent or knowledge, even with the best of intensions of tikkun olam - and healing/saving all the worlds, for that matter. Because that's what they were trying to accomplish, which their Lawful Good colleagues considered far too dangerous and likely to have the exact opposite effect, of destroying the remaining ones. And there are no good, easy answers and only an ambiguously-happy ending, involving the redemption-by-happy-accident-or-miracle - and True Love - of the most powerful of the undead sorcerers, paralleling the story of Dana and Agonostis in Sympathy for the Devil but a lot messier and leaving some broken hearts behind with all the collateral damage to the multiverse and the casualties among the main characters, the Lawful-Ambiguously-Good Guys.
So you'd expect from prior books of hers that meeting these folks - and particularly on top of the revelations-of-betrayal-and-using on a global scale in vincalis/Secret Histories, too - that they're going to turn out to be unknowing pawns of the Dark Side, what with their mandatory child-sacrifice and eugenics programs in service of their Forever War and unquestioning obedience to their society's Laws and all. That's what you'd think, and that probably Talyn like Aeryn Sun is going to have to learn painful truths and walk away from all that:
"I want a beret and boots and a cloak like yours, and sugarstrings
and . . ."
"If you're lucky you won't get what you think you want," I told him. "Except maybe the sugar-strings." Of my parents' fourteen children, eight of us are in the service, six of us drafted into Magics. Which has to have been a source of delight for the Forces, since my father took an early option to participate in the Breeder program. I love my taak, I love my countrymen, I love the Confederacy and all it stands for . . . but I do not want to see Riknir follow in his brothers' and sisters' paths. If he has no talent for magic, and no taste for war, I will be the happiest big sister in Beyltaak.
I rolled out of my narrow bed, keeping my head downyears of sleeping under the eaves had honed in the lot of us a habitual half crouch on waking that returned instantly whenever we came home. I could stand straight in the center of the loft, and did. My parents kept all our beds up there still--even though four of my older siblings have married and we could never manage to all be home at the same time. Those beds stood as a mark of my parents' faith in us, I think--that we would survive service, that we would come home as we could--or perhaps they were a way of warding off disaster, a superstitious talisman. As long as the beds remained in their places so we could have our own when we came home, then we would stay safe.
[p 14] [...]But working three-and-two would keep me in a state of exhaustion during my little free time and keep me from thinking too much.
The commander looked surprised. "If Talyn's information is correct, it seems unlikely to me that we will see another barrage like the last one."
"We may not," the major agreed. "But we could, if the bastards want to draw us off whatever it was they put so much trouble into placing. If we have the people already on the line to get on top of another such attack from the first volley, we should be able to prevent most, if not all, losses."
The commander's lips thinned into a mean little line as he looked past the major to me. But he said, "We're here to protect our people, Major. Go ahead with your plan."
I was tired, but not tired enough to go to my quarters to sleep yet. Under normal circumstances, I would have gone to the Star's Rest for a meal and some entertainment, or perhaps out on the town with a few friends, before I returned to my room in the Shielders' barracks.
But these were nothing like normal circumstances. My father was away and out of touch with my mother, my mother's best friend had just died, and though we in Magics may not be permitted to make family our first priority, we may make it our second. I took leave of Major Damis and notified the duty sergeant of my intended whereabouts.
It was no happy thing walking through the streets of Beyltaak The task had suffered from the Eastils' barrage. The Zatavars' bakery on Fishbinder Street was burning; people fought the flames but it looked to me to be damage to property only. I saw both Mother and Father Zatavar manning buckets in the fire line, and no one weeping as they would over a lost child. Two blocks away, though, crossing Wide Lane, rescuers pulled bodies out of Lorlina's brothel; like others passing by, I quickly checked the faces of those lying beneath the sheds on the walkway to make sure that one of my own people was not numbered among the dead. Lorlina had welcomed her last customer, I discovered, though I did not know any of the rest; her place had served mostly the better-off sailors from the docks and travelers passing through. The brothel was undamaged, though, and no doubt Lorlina had left it to some family member or one of her girls.
This is the way of attacks through the View. Conventionals send missiles that can be seen by the eyes, heard by the ears, felt by the flesh; their surprise is only in the instant before their impact. They never leave horrors unannounced for the unsuspecting after they have done their work; they have no way of threading a needle and leaving a building standing but everyone inside it dead, undiscovered until someone back home misses family member and starts a search.
Many of us hate Magics for that; compared to the fighting done by the Conventionals, our work is dirty and ugly and it wears on the soul.
Walking through the street in the aftermath of the attack, I could not find my pride in my uniform or my service. Though I knew how many attacks my comrades and I had turned away, I could see with my eyes and feel with my heart those that I had failed to protect. The dead speak louder than the living in the ears of the guilty, and I heard them clearly, whispering to me as I made my way home.
I thought of my father, away in lnjtaak, and I wondered if perhaps the time had come to settle for peace instead of victory. If perhaps, after three hundred years, no victory was possible. When the innocent dead speak, it's hard to hold on to our certainties, and I am not so strong that I have never had doubts. I had them then, and for just an instant hoped that we might have peace even if it was the weak peace of diplomats and not the strong peace of soldiers.
When I got home, I could tell that my news would come as no surprise to my mother. Ma sat on one of the benches at the long table in our strangely silent house, with her head buried in her arms. She made no noise, and for a moment a new horror overcame me-that if I touched her she would not move, and that I had come home to find one last place filled with the victims of the Eastils, and my own world destroyed.
But at the sound of my step on the floor she raised her head and looked at me with eyes red from much crying, but now dry. "I'll fix you something to eat," she said by way of greeting, "and we'll talk." [pp 38-39]
Changing the subject is as close to an apology as Pada will go. l didn't pursue her slur--I just said, "They've come up with something subtle. I suspect if we cannot backtrail their Senders
and have our Senders destroy them, they're going to be trouble."
"Not for me." Pada looked smug.
"Oh? You learn some new magic I need to know about?" I kept my voice even. It has been a rough day for everyone, I reminded myself. Don't shove her in the bay. Don't shove her in the bay.
We came even with that alley l'd been watching-and out of the shadows stepped two men, both big, both armed with long knives, both staring at the two of us unblinking. They reeked of cheap wine and salban smoke, and they wove from side to side as they stood.
I braced myself and ran personal defense and attack spells through my head and tried to remember who had last been court-martialed for use of magic against civilians, and how that had gone.
The bigger of the two--Mountain Left, I thought--said, "You're . . . shuh . . , shuh . . . Shielders, aren't you?"
"We are," I said, praying under my breath that those two would suddenly get scared and run away. If I remembered correctly: that last court-martial had ended in a permanent placement in eternally frozen Gavas Base.
"We juh . . . juh . . . jusht wanted to thank you. Good work."
They raised their daggers to their foreheads and bowed, and I could envision sliced foreheads or one of them losing his balance and sprawling forward and running me through by accident. But they survived the salute and so did we. They faded into the shadows, we hurried on our way, and my heart moved out of the back of my mouth and down into my chest where it belonged.
I am daily grateful for the Shielders uniform, and for the men and women who have fought so long and hard to make it a symbol of good.
As uniforms go. it's rather ordinary. Emerald swordsman's shirt, front-lacing vest and pants, both in black hamlet cloth, low-heeled soft leather boots. and the beret. The Shielder beret is black, too, and the pin on the front is the sword and star. Unit insignia, ribbons. and ranks go on the vest and the shirt's dropped shoulders, just above the sleeve gathers. But all Shielders wear the same beret, and that beret is, many times, more magic than we would dare cast. It can be a symbol of fear--for each wearer is a warrior and a master of magic, and if pressed we can link into the web of active Shielders to channel the power with which we can defend ourselves or protect others but it is also a symbol of respect and devotion and love. We hold the line for everything we love--and everything our fellow citizens in the Confederacy and its many taaks love. Only Senders, who wear a variant of the same uniform, differing in nothing but the color of shirts and berets--garnet and two crossed lightning bolts as their beret pin, receive the same respect as Shielders. The Conventionals--cavalry, foot, artillery, engineers, and miners--see us as doing the least work and getting the most glory. But they cannot do what we do. They volunteer--joining at nineteen or twenty, and serving a six-year enlistment, after which they can choose to stay or choose to return to civilian life.
We in Magics--Senders, Shielders, and even Intelligence--wake up one morning. shortly after reaching adolescence, to find our mothers crying over our beds up in the eaves and men in uniform down in the kitchen waiting to tell us that we have magical talent that has manifested and that we will be going with them. Intelligence knows before we know. And their people get to us the instant they discover us. I was thirteen when they came for me. Pada was twelve. Some of my comrades have started as young as ten.
The first thing they tell us is that we will be in the service of the Confederacy until we break or die. Not an easy thing to find out as a child. They train us, they hurt us, they take everything we have and everything we love away from us . . . and then, gradually, they give us power, and skill, and privilege. We pay for it with our lives and futures, but we are in turn well paid. With respect. With love. With some freedoms beyond those enjoyed by other citizens.
And yet, l cared little for magic and would have given away even Ethebet's Law for a chance to pursue my own loves and dreams. [pp 6-7]
We also would, based on earlier books, anticipate finding a similar sort of progress on the part of the hero Gair, from the invading Eastils, who has been raised and trained all his life to believe that his country has been trying singlemindedly and to the exclusion of all else to conquer their neighbors for the past 300+ years! solely out of the goodness and generosity of their hearts to spread their Civilization, system of just laws, and economic prosperity to the barbarous Tonks - and not because they have wide fertile farmlands and forests full of timber, and mountains overflowing with iron ore, oh no, not at all! You'd expect a parallel set of revelations and resisted Disillusionment, leading to both main charas going out and rebelling together against their own corrupt and blind-stupid leadership to put an end to this Forever War, at long last.
But no, apparently the Eastils have sincerely been slaughtering their neighbors via magical air raids as well as swords and arrows, pouring their resources into this campaign both fiscal and human for all these generations, and incurring at last the odium of the rest of the community of nations and economic penalty of embargoes, out of sheer benevolence. (And not even, a la the real forever war between France & England and all its proxy iterations, to keep the peons distracted from their own failures of leadership, and away from the throats of their plutocracy.)
Nothing about the geopolitics or socio-economics of the world of Korre or the (bad-punning?) continent of Hyre, however, makes any sense at all. The simpler the sword-and-sorcery setting - frex, the Lankhmar books, or Dunsany's short stories, or CL Moore's Jirel ones - the less solid the foundation has to be, the more of a glittering stage set, spray paint and shadows on canvas flats, against which the important-in-this-subgenre actions of "the dance" take place. And this is a sliding scale thing, and no set rules for when the framework fails to be sufficient to suspend disbelief. (But under any fantastic fictional set-piece as IRL, the hidden planking must be solid, or else catastrophe...) When you set out to write a para-realistic political fantasy, and not something which exists just for the sake of the chase and sex scenes and the explosions, you have to have it a) be internally consistent, b) match up to the patterns of human behavior in the real world, if just analogously.
Likewise, unless you're setting out to write characters who are supposed to be very badly damaged, fragmented, and Unreliable more than all charas are necessarily Unreliable, being finite and limited in knowledge as well as having their own vanities and purposes and rivalires - or just really, really dumb - you need to have some internal consistency in the way you represent their mental states, desires, and beliefs.
Next: No, not Romania, the Antichrist is Swiss!
(* And I gotta say, I didn't know that Pournelle was a votary of Russell Kirk before now, but assuming that's true it really does explain a whole lot.)
(** Lisle apparently believes this is the case, which is funny since not only did I pick up Talyn precisely because it was face-out in the front of SF at B&N in the New Titles section, but every Lisle book that I've ever read I've found at B&N or Borders over the years. --Well, insofar as someone who really ought to know better falling victim to bizarre paranoia is funny, which is not very. )
(*** Also the hardcover part likely didn't help, since I know I am not very unique among fandom in having to 'wait for the paperback' - not just a chronically-poor issue, but also due to the fact that fen tend to buy books often, frequently - altho' I have been known to buy a book more than once, first in paperback and then track down a used hardcover & am probably not alone in that either.)