Talyn Review: still more Evil Overlord List violations
#26: No matter how attractive certain members of the rebellion are, there is probably someone just as attractive who is not desperate to kill me. Therefore, I will think twice before ordering a prisoner sent to my bedchamber.
#53. If the beautiful princess that I capture says "I'll never marry you! Never, do you hear me, NEVER!!!", I will say "Oh well" and kill her.
We already had another instance of these being violated earlier, during Skirmig's incoherent exposition of his belief non-system and egotistical creed, but this one preceded it in the story, so it's not like he didn't have fair warning and ample opportunities to protect himself:
I took a deep breath, clenched my fists, and thought about the criminals. I considered their victims, all of whom still lived but would surely die if I did not intervene.
I would not think about Skirmig as a person I had cared about. That I had loved. Any love I could ever have felt for him was over. Dead. I would do what had to be done, what no one else but I could do.
I was Tonk. but even more and deeper than that, I followed Ethebet and served Jostfar. With all my heart and soul and strength and breath, I loved and served. And I would act, for my people and for justice.
I stepped out of the privacy room into the gathering room to discover the room almost empty. All Skirmig's guests were gone. Skirmig though, leaned against a table by the door, an expression of worry on his face.
"One of our guests told me you were sick," he said. "It happens sometimes with those who aren't familiar with Feegash style cooking. it's much richer than traditional Tonk cooking. A day or two of rest and you'll be fine."
"I will, I'm sure," I said, agreeing with him and walking toward him. If I had to deal with only one man at a time, I didn't need the sword. "So where are our guests?"
"I sent them home. They loved your work, and I have no doubt many of them will buy from you. Perhaps even all of them, though little Jervigga mentioned it all seemed rather large and bold to her. I think you'll end up having to do more delicate variations of your patterns for some of the women."
"No doubt," I said. "Some of those women seemed terribly fragile to me." I was within arm's reach of Skirmig. Another step, a single quick move, and I could snap his neck, drag him into the privacy room, lock the door from the inside, and lie to the servants about his whereabouts. That would give me the time I needed to head out and hunt down the other men who had been present, kill them, and round up their wives to take to Law.
He touched me, and in my mind I could see myself making the moves needed to kill him. But my body didn't move. Skirmig stood staring deep into my eyes, worry clear and deeply graven on his face. "You look distraught and weary," he said. He stroked my hair and played with my warrior's braid. "My beloved, you are to be the queen of a vast and glorious kingdom-the kingdom of my heart, and so much more. No queen should ever wear such an unhappy expression on her beautiful face. No queen should ever be as clearly upset as you are." He stroked my face with his fingers, and whispered, "Let me kiss away all your sadness, beautiful Talyn."
He kissed me so gently, so tenderly, so beautifully, and a delicious lethargy seeped into my blood and my bones. It was so sweet. I felt my eyes getting heavy. My body weighed almost more than I had the power to move.
"Poor beautiful Talyn," Skirmig whispered, "this sickness has taken so much out of you. Here. I'll help you to bed, and you can sleep in luxury and silence. And when you wake, you'll feel better, I swear it." He hugged me tight. "Let me take care of you. Let me keep you safe, beloved. I'll take care of you. Always." He scooped me into his arms, and my head fell against his shoulder. And I remembered nothing else.
Skirmig stared into Talyn's darkened room where she lay, a coiled shadow-shape beneath the covers. She slept deeply, and if he had done his work well enough, she would sleep for a handful of days, and wake refreshed and remembering only the version of events that he had planted in her mind.
But he was in trouble. She had been ready to kill him. Right then, right there, with no warning and no second chances; she had turned away from their love and dismissed it entirely because of some ragged view of ethics she carried deep inside her, because of some stupidly heroic need to defend a handful of useless little parasites who had been bred for nothing but
men's entertainment for centuries. Feegash women of the upper classes were chosen because they were weak and servile and stupid and pretty. Feegash men used them up when they were young and then discarded them because they didn't get any better with age.
It wasn't as if they were real women. Like Talyn, for example. Skirmig would have been more understanding, really, if Talyn had been ready to kill him over misuse of a Tonk horse; those at least existed for some purpose other than to spread their legs and scream prettily as the occasion dictated.
The edge of fear dulled, and he started getting angry. Who was she to pass judgment on the likes of him? She was a barbarian, a superstitious heathen, a sword-bearing god-ridden moralist in a world that had at last shouldered past the sheer irrelevance of morality without a second glance. He was a man of civilization, of refined and cultivated tastes, an appreciator of fine art and great literature and great beauty. He knew languages and philosophy; he held a clear view of the world unmuddied by sentiment or superstition; he had risen above shallow emotion and embraced reason. He knew the true value of life, which was nothing at all-life was the thing that preceded death, a mere blip, an error in the universe's silence, a bit of motion between dust and dust. If some deaths came sooner than they would have naturally, what of it? If some lives were stretched longer than they should have been, what of that? In the end, everything was dust anyway, so what did it matter how he amused himself in whatever span of years he could eke out?
He leaned against the goodbye, staring at her.
He should simply get rid of her. Bind her as she slept, bring over the diplomats and mere masters, wake her and have one last glorious go at her, but through the greddscharf with eight bodies and eight sets of eyes and hands instead of just one. Take her all the way from pleasure to pain and from pain back to pleasure and ride her all the way to the delicious sweet finale of death.
And then just walk away, knowing that he'd made a mistake and that there could never be a queen for his particular kingdom.
He could do that.
He should do that, because this last bit of tampering he had done with her was a shoddy bit of work; he was in the position of sweeping dirt under a rug, and watching the pile rise until it all spilled out again. He could not actually remove the memories of what those damned silly twittering whores had said to her without breaking her. All he could do was offer suggestions that nothing those women said had been important or real. Her judgment, though, would eventually shake loose of his control, and she would return to her original conclusions. Only the next time, she would also know that he had manipulated her.
She would be both determined and angry, and she would be harder to stop.
He closed the door of her room and walked away.
He had the obvious solution before him, he recognized it, he understood its value-and he wasn't going to take it.
Why the hell not?
Because he loved her, more fool he.
He wanted to be with her because she was the other half of himself. She was weak where he was strong, strong where he was weak. She had a beauty born of intelligence and will and fierce conviction that would only grow finer and sweeter as she aged. She could come to appreciate the world as it really was over time; he was sure he could help her shake off her superstitions and her primitive moralism and discover the clarity and the freedom that lay beyond.
He loved her, and if that love was an appalling weakness, perhaps it was a weakness he needed to cherish. It could be the colorful little inclusion in the diamond he was becoming; a thing that added a bit of charm and a touch of humanity to a man on his way to perfection.
When she gained control of the Hagedwar, she would begin to see her own existence-her own place in the order of things, both as it was and as it would be with him--more clearly. She would gain a genuine understanding of who he was, of why he could do the things he did and still be worthy of her love. He did not shade the world with the foolishness of "good" or "bad" -- and as she grew, neither would she.
Meanwhile, he would take his little half measures to keep her under control, and he would keep a wary watch on his back, lest she break loose and come after him at some inopportune time.
The whole Skirmig/Talyn pairing is really incoherent. Are we supposed to think that he really loves her, in his twisted Darkside overlord-aspiring way - or that he was just pretending all along to get her magic powers under his control, and is incapable of even a screwed-up actual love? Some things crucial to the plot only make sense if the former, others only if the latter. We are told, explicitly, in fact, that he does love her in his screwed-up way: but it's damned unconvincing, as unconvincing as his rant about secularhumanist superiority and untermenschen and Moral Relativism™, where he might as well just go "Muahahahaha!" and stroke his goatee while holding his Persian cat. People playing real, honest-to-gosh Evil Sorcerers in old Sinbad movies have done a better job of conveying mad, unsuitable, self-destructive passions for fiery refusenik heroines.
If it's only obsessive control-freaky lust, then even the little bit of backing down and giving her space when it comes to conforming to customs and living arrangements and so forth, and doing so knowing that it's a weakness in him that he yields to her, and dangerous to his plan, is completely OOC - particularly when he has the psychic power to put the force-whammy on her. Trophy girlfriends don't get to be autonomous, what they want is irrelevant.
If on the other hand, he's just trying to access the View through her all along, then it makes perfect sense that he'd pretend to back down and give her what she wants, "Yes, dear," so that she won't spook and stop cooperating with him.
But if either of those were so, then why would he give in on the business of the rescued enemy prisoners? Something he wanted nothing to do with, feels no moral or personal responsibility to do, something that he finds politically risky to his reputation (but the more we learn about the situation, the less sense *that* makes, either) but which he went to considerable personal trouble to effect, solely in order to please her, when he could easily have just disappeared them and told her that they died of their injuries and the prison-fever? A rescue which, of course, turns out to be his undoing, like Haggard allowing Amalthea & co into the castle, but with none of Haggard's fatalistic embrace of doom and challenge to them.
21. I will hire a talented fashion designer to create original uniforms for my Legions of Terror, as opposed to some cheap knock-offs that make them look like Nazi stormtroopers, Roman footsoldiers, or savage Mongol hordes. All were eventually defeated and I want my troops to have a more positive mind-set.
29. I will dress in bright and cheery colors, and so throw my enemies into confusion.
And also purely coincidentally, the readers.
Yes, it's a little thing, compared to all the other stuff, but still - I realize that nuance is anathema to the Conservatarian mindset, but do they have to be so utterly unsubtle about wielding stereotypes? So painfully literal-minded? Brownshirts and SS, it's not like this color-combo and invocation is obvious at all, oh no! The logic behind it, internal and not meta? I guess it goes: We're rich and all the world knows it, we're luxurious godless secularhumanist swine, so we're going to dress in the most boring, cheap-ass dyestuffs available as...some kind of obscure ironic statement? Because we'd rather save the money to blow it all on indoor plumbing, HVAC and fluffy towels? On our mistresses' wardrobes, "Hey boys, that's where my money go-o-oes!" Because bright colors aren't macho? Because if we had our trunk-hose and acorn caps in authentic Slashing Eye!Bleed™ then even the thinnest pretense that we're not the Dreaded Swiss Mercenaries freelancing [sorry] moonlighting in fantasy novels would vanish?
But it's all of a piece with telegraphing that Skirmig is the Bad!Guy from the beginning, and confirming it early on, with none of the ambiguity and uncertainty of Lisle's previous novels. If only there were some way to integrate a tiny sound-chip into the spine, so that when ever you hit a page with the Feegash on it, it would play the Imperial March...and equally obvious ripoffs symbolism:
I wandered through long, lovely fields of flowers, the blue skies above me filled with soft white clouds, a stream-heard but not yet seen-burbling nearby. Perhaps behind that little copse of trees.
A herd of wild horses galloped past.
Children shouted and laughed and played nearby, somewhere out of sight.
Ahh. I was back, then. To the place of my dreams and nightmares. The man in the cage was gone, but the woman in white was there. She had not been there at first, but then I'd been looking around. I'd glanced from the hill where she'd stood or sat before, and when I looked back, she was there.
She started walking toward me, something she had never done before. She wore Tonk garb of the old fashion, but all in white. White beads. white embroidery, white paint on her brow, white feathers in her warrior's braid.
She is one of Ethebet's, I thought. Like me. But who are her people? What is her clan? I did not know her tattoos or her paint.
She smiled at me, and I returned the smile; we were, after all, sisters of the sword.
She reached me and without a word dropped her pack also white, at my feet. From it she pulled out a meal blanket and spread it before me, and then she knelt, and out of her pack drew such a feast as I had never seen. Roast birds of all sorts, great slabs of beef and caribou and moose and whale carved and steaming, gravies and sauces, fishes griddle-fried or baked, heaping plates of potatoes like my mother made, a bounty of vegetables from every corner of Hyre. Fruits of all seasons. Desserts both familiar and fanciful. Ales and wines and juices.
The white blanket grew to accommodate the things she pulled out, and I dropped to my haunches and watched her. In all my life I had never seen such a variety of foods in one place.
And when the blanket groaned with good food and good drink, and when I was sure she must certainly stop, she began to pull other things out of her bag. My jewelry. Grand houses on good high ground-horse-houses and spider-houses in taaks across Hyre, and across the seas in Tandinapalis. Herds of horses. Gems and metals. People who bowed to me and served me and brought me all that I commanded. I was...a Beyl? No. More powerful even than that. I stood astride a world, and held the world in my care.
With that much power, I thought, I could do so much good.
When at last she finished, when what seemed to me to be nearly everything in the world lay before me on that white cloth, she pulled one final thing from her bag, and held it in her hand. It was my soldier's flask, marked with the Shielder emblem, filled always with water.
"You stand at the place where your one path becomes two," she told me. "On the one path, you will have all of this." Her free hand made a sweeping gesture that encompassed everything that lay on the white blanket before me. "On the other path, you will have this." And she held up my flask.
I looked at the banquet, at the riches, at my work, at the dreams of Tonks made real-vast spaces and good horses and houses on hills. I started looking closer, at first casually, and then with increasing urgency, and when at last I was sure I had seen everything the woman's banquet offered, I said, "I cannot find water here."
She smiled at me. "No. The water is here." And she held up the flask.
I reached out and touched it--the flask felt cool and slightly damp to my fingertips, and I knew the water in it would be fresh and clear and cold.
I looked at the rich feast, at all the wonderful things to eat and drink. At all the wonderful things to have. I reached out a hand, thinking, If I did not have water. I would still have ale. And wine. And all the fresh fruits in season. I would not want. Except for water itself.
What is water? In a physical sense it is life in its simplest form-without it, we die. But the woman in white did not offer me merely physical water, any more than she offered me houses and horses on a blanket.
So what is water when it is more than water? It is purity. Simplicity. It is truth unvarnished and undecorated. It is a promise. It is quiet, and silence.
And she offered it to me in my Shielders flask.
Honor. Promises made. Promises kept. The truth.
She saw me looking at my flask and then at my jewelry, and the horses, and the wide green hills.
"Neither path holds promises beyond what you see. Know that both may hold grief and hardship. And both hold death at the end, as do all paths. We are mortal, after all."
I nodded.
Reached back and touched my warrior braid.
Like all humans, man and woman, I am many things. But I am, at last, Ethebet's creature. More than everything else that defines me, my choice to follow her dictates and precepts defines me. Ethebet's path is the path of service. of hardship, of honor and silence, of promises made and promises kept. Ethebet's path is water to me. It is my life.
I reached out, and from the woman in white I took my flask.
She nodded.
"If you took the flask, I was to give you one other thing." She smiled at me. "By Ethebet's behest, I give you a sword. A good, strong sword that will serve you on the path you take. Wield it wisely and well, knowing that you do so in Ethebet's name, and with her blessing."
And from the white bag, she produced a plain sword in a plain sheath. It bore no ornamentation, nor was it made in the Tonk style. It was flat and dull and lacking in grace, the hilt wire-wrapped, the pommel pyramidal, the crosspieces heavy and serviceable. I pulled it from its sheath, dismayed to find rust on the blade and dried blood in the runnels, and the edges dull and nicked. It had seen service, this blade, and poor care.
Dismayed, I looked at the woman in white.
I saw amusement in her eyes. "It needs a bit of care," she admitted. "But nowhere in all the world is there another blade that will serve you as well."
She swept a hand across the blanket: and the banquet vanished. She rose, and the blanket leapt into her pack, and she slung her pack across her shoulder with the ease of a Conventional on a march.
She offered me her hand, and I took it, and she pulled me to my feet, and then leaned forward and kissed my forehead. "Go with grace, sister," she said. "You are Ethebet's daughter, with whom she is well pleased."
And then she was gone.
I could still hear the children playing. Could still see the horses galloping. The fields were still fragrant, covered with thick grasses and wildflowers.
But the sky grew dark, and the wind turned bitter cold, and suddenly the children's laughter turned to screams that faded into the distance. Fires flickered on the horizons all around me, burning the fields. Burning toward me. Hemming me in. And riders came galloping toward me before the flames, swords raised, screaming for my head.
I woke, clawing at my blanket for the sword Ethebet had given me, and sat up gasping. I had no sword. I had no flask
I did, however, have a desperate need to use the sitter.
I dragged myself. out of the enormous Tonk concubine bed and half crawled to the privacy room attached to my room. And relieved myself, and was sick at the same time. When I was done, I cleaned up the mess, crawled into the shower and turned the water on, and let the warmth and the wetness sluice over me, cleaning me, bringing me back to the real world from the strange. nonsensical place of my nightmares. I had no strength. I could not remember ever having felt so weak or so sick. My head throbbed and my belly felt fair to touch my spine, even as the thought of food made me sicker.
I tilted my face into the water and stuck out my tongue, and lapped a little.
It helped. It was soothing.
After a bit I found my way to my feet, and leaned against the shower wall for a few moments longer. At last I turned off the shower and dried off and wrapped a towel around myself and made my way back to the bed. holding on to the wall to keep myself up.
I realized as I was climbing beneath the covers that Skirmig stood in the doorway watching me.
"At last you're awake," he said, and crossed the room and helped me pull the covers up. "Three days, and I had begun to despair of you waking up again."
I lay with my head on soft pillows, with fine-woven sheets against my naked skin, on a mattress that cradled me beneath blankets that warmed me, trying to get his statement to make sense.
"It can't have been three days," I said. "I remember the banquet, and getting sick at the end of it, and you helping me in here-but that can only have been hours ago."
"Three days," he said. "With the morning of the fourth nearly here. You have not moved, have not made a sound, have not opened your eyes once in all that time, and even my healer, who is a calm and sensible man, was growing frantic."
I frowned. "What...happened to me?"
"You were poisoned," he told me. "One of my colleague's wives, acting in the pay of an Eastil agent, put poison into the dark ale. Three of my colleagues are dead, and you nearly were."
So the messenger dressed all in shining white offers her all the kingdoms of the world on a picnic blanket, which she gives up for the living water for which she pants as the hart, but can't do a darn thing to protect her or even help her protect herself by warning her explicitly of Skirmig's use of the Force-whammy on her, which means we get to have a lot more Talyn-torture and maundering for quite a few more pages (and pages, and pages, which I will spare you because I think reader-torture is wrong) meanwhile we get Gair-torture-by-medicine as he recovers from his stay in prison being beaten and burned and worse to get false confessions because not all Tonk soldiers are honorable after all, following this exchange which brings us into still more Overlord List conflicts:
Gair heard a knock at the door. and heard the healer answer it.
"No, I won't let you in," he said to mutters on the other side. "I don't care who you say sent you. Go away."
He slammed the door.
Someone knocked again. The healer opened it again. "I told you to go away."
And a pause.
"No. lf Talyn wants her clothes, she's going to have to come get them herself. I don't know you, and for all I know, you've thought of a clever way to rob her with my help."
He slammed the door again.
The people on the other side were persistent, but the third time they started pounding and yelling, the healer did not open the door, and after a short while, the strangers went away.
To be replaced, only a moment later, by someone kicking in the door.
No muttering this time--Gair heard the diplomat bastard's voice clear and loud.
"Talyn has agreed to move in with me," the bastard said. "I have come to pick up her clothing, and the Feegash troops are here with me to make sure she gets what she wants."
"She wouldn't just leave," the healer said. "She wouldn't send us notice of this instead of coming herself. "What have you done with her?"
Gair would have given anything to be able to sit up on his own and to see what was going on below. He would have given more for the strength to go down there and fight them, pursue them to bring Talyn safely back to her home. He turned his head and saw Hale looking at him, and saw the fear he felt reflected in Hale's eyes.
The bastard's voice was cool and amused. "I think you must know her very little, witch doctor. When she makes up her mind, Talyn does it quickly, and she doesn't look back. You and your dying charges there would be, for her, looking back on a pathetic scale." The bastard sighed, and Gair could hear men with heavy boots stomping through the house, drawers opening and slamming shut, voices speaking softly. "I need not be either gentle or kind about this, though," the bastard added. "If you're a good, polite little savage, I'll send two of my servants to stay with you and make sure you don't damage or steal anything that belongs to my love. If you're a bad little witch doctor and you'll be bad if you stand in my way, or interfere in my business here--you and the filthy stickmen upstairs can die today."
In the silence that followed, Gair remembered his nightmare--of Talyn hurt, held captive by the bastard, and tortured as he had been tortured when the Tonks held him in their dungeon.
It had been a dream, and he had never in his memory dreamed true dreams before. Except of course he had dreamed each night he was imprisoned that Talyn was with him, and she had been the one who had saved him at last. So that had been a true dream, after a fashion. Perhaps this was a true dream, in the manner of his other dreams about her. Perhaps Talyn was honestly in trouble.
She was a warrior, and like him, she served a code of honor that would have required her to assure the safety of those for whom she had taken responsibility. Idrann was right; she would not have run off one night and not come back--at least to say good-bye and make arrangements with Idrann-unless something was amiss.
So change that "perhaps" to "certainly."
Talyn was in trouble, and she had only a graying healer, a Hva Hwa hunter, and two starved, near-death warriors to rescue her.
Gair realized that he couldn't satisfy himself by seeing the sun, then dying. He had to live. Talyn. the woman who had given him and Hale their lives back, needed him.
You could ask why Skirmig, the supposéd-diplomat, is so anxious to antagonize the Healer who is Talyn's old friend and the detainees she has adopted, so needful of putting on an alpha-dominance display for them, when it would be quite literally no work at all to convince them that he was a wonderful human being and the soul of altruism by just smiling apologetically and saying almost nothing, given that he used his own carriage and forged the documents to smuggle them out of prison and helped arrange their medical care. When that would be the more rational thing to do, ensuring their loyalty which might, you know, come in handy if they get caught anyway, because then they might be more likely to not reveal his involvement. And particularly more rational in terms of stealth and avoiding nosy neighbors, than showing up at dinnertime with a squad of bootnecks and getting into a shouting match with somebody inside and then kicking down Talyn's front door. Ask away -- but you won't get an answer in the book, except for Skirmig being Eeeevil.
I refer you to Evil Overlord List numbers 3. My noble half-brother whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon and 84. I will not have captives of one sex guarded by members of the opposite sex.
Okay, so Gair the Eastil commando isn't innately Skirmig's rival, but the opposition of Skirmig and his desires for Talyn and Hyre is set up from the first, and not just in the heavy-handed editorial foreshadowing and supernatural dream-hints liberally sprinkled along. Even before we are told that Skirmig is the Big Bad, he objects that risking his political career to help some dying Eastil prisoners of dubious status is nothing he wants to get into, and he only does it because Talyn insists and he wants to make her happy. (Why it would be so politically dangerous for him to remove some between-the-cracks internees publically - heck, he could hold them up as examples of how badly the Tonks ran things and why they needed the guiding hand of Civilization to straighten them out, no matter how disingenuous such a propaganda coup would be - is never really made clear or plausible.)
The saving of Gair from Abu Ghraib the newly-privatized foreigner-owned Beyltaak prison and its sadistic guards is something which only makes sense if poor old Skirmig really is besotted in love, - but if he's a totally-sadistic monster of an Evil Overlord on his way up, who's killed and worse to who knows how many people (more on that later) and thinks nothing of torturing women to death in the course of a sexual relationship as is the way of his people, then why should he care what Talyn thinks of him, let alone be willing to risk his Sekrit Plan of conquest over it? Granted, there's no reason yet to think that Talyn will ever get the hots for enemy agent Gair, filthy, half-starved, sick, and crippled from torture - but even if he doesn't expect her to elope with him, or vice versa, still he considers the continued presence of the paperworkless Gair under his protection to be a political danger. Even if Talyn is Special!Sue, it doesn't mesh. Not when he can put the force-whammy on her and make her forget everything that just happened...
--Except when you consider that it's an Apocalyptic Fic, in which you can have the Guilty digging pits that they then fall into without any Plausibility required, because Divine Intervention and Providence can be involved to move far more than just small things, or for one big Wonder at a high price--
22. No matter how tempted I am with the prospect of unlimited power, I will not consume any energy field bigger than my head.
We don't actually see this happen, but we can safely infer that it must have, in order to have given Skirmig the powers which we find out he has possessed all along, to mind-control all the people around him. Again, we hit major Implausibles very quickly, and a scenario which could have (in the hands of, say, Tom Holt, let alone Terry Pratchett) been played for a lot of laughs even in a serious story: A zombie-recruiting pyramid scheme may seem like a good idea, but trust me, you don't want to get stuck with an ever-expanding number of mindless minions requiring your direct and constant oversight to stop them eating each other's brains might be an Overlord List entry.
We hear in a bit in another vision from St. Ethebet that Talyn & Gair are the world's One And Only Chance of stopping Skirmig from destroying the whole world, that he has to be stopped NOW, before all humanity falls to his darkness, and yet - we also find out that he's stretched himself insanely thin, that he can't fully control his armies of minions any longer, that he can barely control them at all, because by turning all his compatriots and occupied citizens into an Army Of Hungry Zombies™ with a Pyramid Recruitment Scheme he's now required to share out his strength among all of them, to dominate them directly, and every new zombie recruit becomes yet another drain on his power - and he isn't an immortal demigod, nor an undead immortal warlord, and yet he's trying for a level of psychic/magical control that not even Vlad Dracul nor yet Sauron managed. Frankly, the very idea that he could do this in the first place, without being directly powered himself by some vast immortal power, Demon or Dark God or bodiless Alien Being Of Pure Mind, is Improbable - and another indication that this is an Apocalyptic Novel and Skirmig supposed to be The Antichrist.
Yes, a stunningly-incompetent Antichrist; a comic-opera, pantomime-villain Antichrist, bumbling around goofing up his own plans through a combination of sexual obsession and overweening self-confidence, but The Antichrist nonetheless. This is the only reason, in fact, that makes sense of St. Ethebet and her picnic-providing angelic messenger-girl being so het up about him, ZOMG!TEOTWAWKI!!!1!, instead of taking the not-entirely-unreasonable view that for all his awfulness, Skirmig is a mortal wizard who's about to imitate Aesop's famous bullfrog and do an overfilled-balloon imitation, and it shouldn't be too hard to make him pop sooner, but in any case he can hardly avoid it for very much longer, and then their major challenge and where their major efforts should be focused would be on getting ready to pick up the pieces, since as we find out his enchantments don't survive his death (naturally enough, being all fueled out of his own willpower.)
57. Before employing any captured artifacts or machinery, I will carefully read the owner's manual.
This one applies to both Skirmig using the View and Talyn using the Hagedwar, although to be fair, both of them are sneaking around trying to get more power behind each other's back, even when they're [both] pretending to be honest and open and truly, madly, deeply in love with each other. So they can't exactly consult with other living experts and make sure that they're not doing anything potentially-terminally dumb, out of sheer ignorance of possible problems.
27. I will never build only one of anything important. All important systems will have redundant control panels and power supplies. For the same reason I will always carry at least two fully loaded weapons at all times.
Granted, when you're tricking an outside expert into making your Doomsday Device for you, this may not be in your control, but it doesn't seem to even occur to Skirmig that this is a point of vulnerability to him, to have all his stolen View power channeling through one small piece of ordinary (ie regular melting-point) silver! (At least it wasn't a lead figurine...)
17. When I employ people as advisors, I will occasionally listen to their advice.
In this case, we have to kind of extrapolate again, because Skirmig doesn't have any advisors, counselors, or, for that matter, even any loyal henchmen - all he has are minions whom he's not just lured to his service, but who to varying (and increasing) degrees he simply manipulates like puppets, via his magic. So we have to add a corollary - I will employ people as advisors, to catch my obvious errors before I commit to them. --Errors like setting up zombie pyramid schemes, frex; or leaving your mortal enemies alive after revealing your hatred of them, because you think they're insignificant threats, for another. This whole "fleshmage" thing - the name used for the zombie-magic thing, the highly-inaccurate and misleading name, I should add, given that the people who are involuntarily enthralled by it (tho' while still living, unlike the Cauldron-born) don't actually gain the ability to work any magic after they've been made into the legendary, scare-children-with-stories-of fleshmages; they just become magically-linked slaves to the real mage who controls their flesh. I guess just "slaves" or "slaves of the wizard" wasn't cool 'n' scary-sounding enough.
Because we find out in the end that plenty of the Feegash mercs weren't happy or voluntary participants in the conquest and enslavement of Hyre, either, and they too were freed and horrified by what had been done to them, after Skirmig gets his reward. Not only that, some of the Tonks found that being tools used to torture each other really rocked for them, and thus deserved to be hunted down and killed in post-war purges, we learn at the end of the book. (Which is plausible, but hardly used as an occasion for the sort of self-examination of conscience and loss of hubris which leads to what Lisle/Talyn would dismiss as weakness and "moral relativism," -- you know, the old fandom chestnut that goes right along with the power/responsibility equation, "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.")
But! we've earlier learned that the Hagedwar magic system is something which is common to the Feegash, at least the male Feegash, at least their aristocracy - and yet none of them seem to be aware that one of their number is using it against them, to sieze vast amounts of power over them from in their midst, as a stepping stone to World Domination™. Which is really, really Improbable, for more reasons than I could possibly catalogue, except to say that 1) a bunch of power-hungry greedy brutal warlords 2) are probably going to be suspicious of each other, based on Primary World historical experience, and 3) if they all know about and use this same 4) detectable type of magic which they 5) guard jealously from outsiders, including their own womenfolk, then 6) it seems fairly likely that they'd be aware of one of their own using it to Level Up, or at least 7) the possibility of this, and be on guard for it. It shouldn't be a walk in the park, whereby he becomes The Necromancer unopposed save by Talyn, Gair, and St. Ethebet and her goopy angel.
--Except if Skirmig is the Antichrist. Because being the Antichrist means you automatically get +10 Charisma, and the ability to Charm anyone into not suspecting you or erase memories without hardly lifting a finger, whether they're fellow Evil, hapless Neutral, or even more hapless Good - unless they're Sworn Paladins of Yawheh. That's just the way the Rules work, in Apocalyptiverse Roleplaying Games.
Next: Volunteer Armies are for pussies! Let's bring back the cat' while we're at it!
#53. If the beautiful princess that I capture says "I'll never marry you! Never, do you hear me, NEVER!!!", I will say "Oh well" and kill her.
We already had another instance of these being violated earlier, during Skirmig's incoherent exposition of his belief non-system and egotistical creed, but this one preceded it in the story, so it's not like he didn't have fair warning and ample opportunities to protect himself:
I took a deep breath, clenched my fists, and thought about the criminals. I considered their victims, all of whom still lived but would surely die if I did not intervene.
I would not think about Skirmig as a person I had cared about. That I had loved. Any love I could ever have felt for him was over. Dead. I would do what had to be done, what no one else but I could do.
I was Tonk. but even more and deeper than that, I followed Ethebet and served Jostfar. With all my heart and soul and strength and breath, I loved and served. And I would act, for my people and for justice.
I stepped out of the privacy room into the gathering room to discover the room almost empty. All Skirmig's guests were gone. Skirmig though, leaned against a table by the door, an expression of worry on his face.
"One of our guests told me you were sick," he said. "It happens sometimes with those who aren't familiar with Feegash style cooking. it's much richer than traditional Tonk cooking. A day or two of rest and you'll be fine."
"I will, I'm sure," I said, agreeing with him and walking toward him. If I had to deal with only one man at a time, I didn't need the sword. "So where are our guests?"
"I sent them home. They loved your work, and I have no doubt many of them will buy from you. Perhaps even all of them, though little Jervigga mentioned it all seemed rather large and bold to her. I think you'll end up having to do more delicate variations of your patterns for some of the women."
"No doubt," I said. "Some of those women seemed terribly fragile to me." I was within arm's reach of Skirmig. Another step, a single quick move, and I could snap his neck, drag him into the privacy room, lock the door from the inside, and lie to the servants about his whereabouts. That would give me the time I needed to head out and hunt down the other men who had been present, kill them, and round up their wives to take to Law.
He touched me, and in my mind I could see myself making the moves needed to kill him. But my body didn't move. Skirmig stood staring deep into my eyes, worry clear and deeply graven on his face. "You look distraught and weary," he said. He stroked my hair and played with my warrior's braid. "My beloved, you are to be the queen of a vast and glorious kingdom-the kingdom of my heart, and so much more. No queen should ever wear such an unhappy expression on her beautiful face. No queen should ever be as clearly upset as you are." He stroked my face with his fingers, and whispered, "Let me kiss away all your sadness, beautiful Talyn."
He kissed me so gently, so tenderly, so beautifully, and a delicious lethargy seeped into my blood and my bones. It was so sweet. I felt my eyes getting heavy. My body weighed almost more than I had the power to move.
"Poor beautiful Talyn," Skirmig whispered, "this sickness has taken so much out of you. Here. I'll help you to bed, and you can sleep in luxury and silence. And when you wake, you'll feel better, I swear it." He hugged me tight. "Let me take care of you. Let me keep you safe, beloved. I'll take care of you. Always." He scooped me into his arms, and my head fell against his shoulder. And I remembered nothing else.
Skirmig stared into Talyn's darkened room where she lay, a coiled shadow-shape beneath the covers. She slept deeply, and if he had done his work well enough, she would sleep for a handful of days, and wake refreshed and remembering only the version of events that he had planted in her mind.
But he was in trouble. She had been ready to kill him. Right then, right there, with no warning and no second chances; she had turned away from their love and dismissed it entirely because of some ragged view of ethics she carried deep inside her, because of some stupidly heroic need to defend a handful of useless little parasites who had been bred for nothing but
men's entertainment for centuries. Feegash women of the upper classes were chosen because they were weak and servile and stupid and pretty. Feegash men used them up when they were young and then discarded them because they didn't get any better with age.
It wasn't as if they were real women. Like Talyn, for example. Skirmig would have been more understanding, really, if Talyn had been ready to kill him over misuse of a Tonk horse; those at least existed for some purpose other than to spread their legs and scream prettily as the occasion dictated.
The edge of fear dulled, and he started getting angry. Who was she to pass judgment on the likes of him? She was a barbarian, a superstitious heathen, a sword-bearing god-ridden moralist in a world that had at last shouldered past the sheer irrelevance of morality without a second glance. He was a man of civilization, of refined and cultivated tastes, an appreciator of fine art and great literature and great beauty. He knew languages and philosophy; he held a clear view of the world unmuddied by sentiment or superstition; he had risen above shallow emotion and embraced reason. He knew the true value of life, which was nothing at all-life was the thing that preceded death, a mere blip, an error in the universe's silence, a bit of motion between dust and dust. If some deaths came sooner than they would have naturally, what of it? If some lives were stretched longer than they should have been, what of that? In the end, everything was dust anyway, so what did it matter how he amused himself in whatever span of years he could eke out?
He leaned against the goodbye, staring at her.
He should simply get rid of her. Bind her as she slept, bring over the diplomats and mere masters, wake her and have one last glorious go at her, but through the greddscharf with eight bodies and eight sets of eyes and hands instead of just one. Take her all the way from pleasure to pain and from pain back to pleasure and ride her all the way to the delicious sweet finale of death.
And then just walk away, knowing that he'd made a mistake and that there could never be a queen for his particular kingdom.
He could do that.
He should do that, because this last bit of tampering he had done with her was a shoddy bit of work; he was in the position of sweeping dirt under a rug, and watching the pile rise until it all spilled out again. He could not actually remove the memories of what those damned silly twittering whores had said to her without breaking her. All he could do was offer suggestions that nothing those women said had been important or real. Her judgment, though, would eventually shake loose of his control, and she would return to her original conclusions. Only the next time, she would also know that he had manipulated her.
She would be both determined and angry, and she would be harder to stop.
He closed the door of her room and walked away.
He had the obvious solution before him, he recognized it, he understood its value-and he wasn't going to take it.
Why the hell not?
Because he loved her, more fool he.
He wanted to be with her because she was the other half of himself. She was weak where he was strong, strong where he was weak. She had a beauty born of intelligence and will and fierce conviction that would only grow finer and sweeter as she aged. She could come to appreciate the world as it really was over time; he was sure he could help her shake off her superstitions and her primitive moralism and discover the clarity and the freedom that lay beyond.
He loved her, and if that love was an appalling weakness, perhaps it was a weakness he needed to cherish. It could be the colorful little inclusion in the diamond he was becoming; a thing that added a bit of charm and a touch of humanity to a man on his way to perfection.
When she gained control of the Hagedwar, she would begin to see her own existence-her own place in the order of things, both as it was and as it would be with him--more clearly. She would gain a genuine understanding of who he was, of why he could do the things he did and still be worthy of her love. He did not shade the world with the foolishness of "good" or "bad" -- and as she grew, neither would she.
Meanwhile, he would take his little half measures to keep her under control, and he would keep a wary watch on his back, lest she break loose and come after him at some inopportune time.
The whole Skirmig/Talyn pairing is really incoherent. Are we supposed to think that he really loves her, in his twisted Darkside overlord-aspiring way - or that he was just pretending all along to get her magic powers under his control, and is incapable of even a screwed-up actual love? Some things crucial to the plot only make sense if the former, others only if the latter. We are told, explicitly, in fact, that he does love her in his screwed-up way: but it's damned unconvincing, as unconvincing as his rant about secularhumanist superiority and untermenschen and Moral Relativism™, where he might as well just go "Muahahahaha!" and stroke his goatee while holding his Persian cat. People playing real, honest-to-gosh Evil Sorcerers in old Sinbad movies have done a better job of conveying mad, unsuitable, self-destructive passions for fiery refusenik heroines.
If it's only obsessive control-freaky lust, then even the little bit of backing down and giving her space when it comes to conforming to customs and living arrangements and so forth, and doing so knowing that it's a weakness in him that he yields to her, and dangerous to his plan, is completely OOC - particularly when he has the psychic power to put the force-whammy on her. Trophy girlfriends don't get to be autonomous, what they want is irrelevant.
If on the other hand, he's just trying to access the View through her all along, then it makes perfect sense that he'd pretend to back down and give her what she wants, "Yes, dear," so that she won't spook and stop cooperating with him.
But if either of those were so, then why would he give in on the business of the rescued enemy prisoners? Something he wanted nothing to do with, feels no moral or personal responsibility to do, something that he finds politically risky to his reputation (but the more we learn about the situation, the less sense *that* makes, either) but which he went to considerable personal trouble to effect, solely in order to please her, when he could easily have just disappeared them and told her that they died of their injuries and the prison-fever? A rescue which, of course, turns out to be his undoing, like Haggard allowing Amalthea & co into the castle, but with none of Haggard's fatalistic embrace of doom and challenge to them.
21. I will hire a talented fashion designer to create original uniforms for my Legions of Terror, as opposed to some cheap knock-offs that make them look like Nazi stormtroopers, Roman footsoldiers, or savage Mongol hordes. All were eventually defeated and I want my troops to have a more positive mind-set.
29. I will dress in bright and cheery colors, and so throw my enemies into confusion.
And also purely coincidentally, the readers.
Yes, it's a little thing, compared to all the other stuff, but still - I realize that nuance is anathema to the Conservatarian mindset, but do they have to be so utterly unsubtle about wielding stereotypes? So painfully literal-minded? Brownshirts and SS, it's not like this color-combo and invocation is obvious at all, oh no! The logic behind it, internal and not meta? I guess it goes: We're rich and all the world knows it, we're luxurious godless secularhumanist swine, so we're going to dress in the most boring, cheap-ass dyestuffs available as...some kind of obscure ironic statement? Because we'd rather save the money to blow it all on indoor plumbing, HVAC and fluffy towels? On our mistresses' wardrobes, "Hey boys, that's where my money go-o-oes!" Because bright colors aren't macho? Because if we had our trunk-hose and acorn caps in authentic Slashing Eye!Bleed™ then even the thinnest pretense that we're not the Dreaded Swiss Mercenaries freelancing [sorry] moonlighting in fantasy novels would vanish?
But it's all of a piece with telegraphing that Skirmig is the Bad!Guy from the beginning, and confirming it early on, with none of the ambiguity and uncertainty of Lisle's previous novels. If only there were some way to integrate a tiny sound-chip into the spine, so that when ever you hit a page with the Feegash on it, it would play the Imperial March...and equally obvious ripoffs symbolism:
I wandered through long, lovely fields of flowers, the blue skies above me filled with soft white clouds, a stream-heard but not yet seen-burbling nearby. Perhaps behind that little copse of trees.
A herd of wild horses galloped past.
Children shouted and laughed and played nearby, somewhere out of sight.
Ahh. I was back, then. To the place of my dreams and nightmares. The man in the cage was gone, but the woman in white was there. She had not been there at first, but then I'd been looking around. I'd glanced from the hill where she'd stood or sat before, and when I looked back, she was there.
She started walking toward me, something she had never done before. She wore Tonk garb of the old fashion, but all in white. White beads. white embroidery, white paint on her brow, white feathers in her warrior's braid.
She is one of Ethebet's, I thought. Like me. But who are her people? What is her clan? I did not know her tattoos or her paint.
She smiled at me, and I returned the smile; we were, after all, sisters of the sword.
She reached me and without a word dropped her pack also white, at my feet. From it she pulled out a meal blanket and spread it before me, and then she knelt, and out of her pack drew such a feast as I had never seen. Roast birds of all sorts, great slabs of beef and caribou and moose and whale carved and steaming, gravies and sauces, fishes griddle-fried or baked, heaping plates of potatoes like my mother made, a bounty of vegetables from every corner of Hyre. Fruits of all seasons. Desserts both familiar and fanciful. Ales and wines and juices.
The white blanket grew to accommodate the things she pulled out, and I dropped to my haunches and watched her. In all my life I had never seen such a variety of foods in one place.
And when the blanket groaned with good food and good drink, and when I was sure she must certainly stop, she began to pull other things out of her bag. My jewelry. Grand houses on good high ground-horse-houses and spider-houses in taaks across Hyre, and across the seas in Tandinapalis. Herds of horses. Gems and metals. People who bowed to me and served me and brought me all that I commanded. I was...a Beyl? No. More powerful even than that. I stood astride a world, and held the world in my care.
With that much power, I thought, I could do so much good.
When at last she finished, when what seemed to me to be nearly everything in the world lay before me on that white cloth, she pulled one final thing from her bag, and held it in her hand. It was my soldier's flask, marked with the Shielder emblem, filled always with water.
"You stand at the place where your one path becomes two," she told me. "On the one path, you will have all of this." Her free hand made a sweeping gesture that encompassed everything that lay on the white blanket before me. "On the other path, you will have this." And she held up my flask.
I looked at the banquet, at the riches, at my work, at the dreams of Tonks made real-vast spaces and good horses and houses on hills. I started looking closer, at first casually, and then with increasing urgency, and when at last I was sure I had seen everything the woman's banquet offered, I said, "I cannot find water here."
She smiled at me. "No. The water is here." And she held up the flask.
I reached out and touched it--the flask felt cool and slightly damp to my fingertips, and I knew the water in it would be fresh and clear and cold.
I looked at the rich feast, at all the wonderful things to eat and drink. At all the wonderful things to have. I reached out a hand, thinking, If I did not have water. I would still have ale. And wine. And all the fresh fruits in season. I would not want. Except for water itself.
What is water? In a physical sense it is life in its simplest form-without it, we die. But the woman in white did not offer me merely physical water, any more than she offered me houses and horses on a blanket.
So what is water when it is more than water? It is purity. Simplicity. It is truth unvarnished and undecorated. It is a promise. It is quiet, and silence.
And she offered it to me in my Shielders flask.
Honor. Promises made. Promises kept. The truth.
She saw me looking at my flask and then at my jewelry, and the horses, and the wide green hills.
"Neither path holds promises beyond what you see. Know that both may hold grief and hardship. And both hold death at the end, as do all paths. We are mortal, after all."
I nodded.
Reached back and touched my warrior braid.
Like all humans, man and woman, I am many things. But I am, at last, Ethebet's creature. More than everything else that defines me, my choice to follow her dictates and precepts defines me. Ethebet's path is the path of service. of hardship, of honor and silence, of promises made and promises kept. Ethebet's path is water to me. It is my life.
I reached out, and from the woman in white I took my flask.
She nodded.
"If you took the flask, I was to give you one other thing." She smiled at me. "By Ethebet's behest, I give you a sword. A good, strong sword that will serve you on the path you take. Wield it wisely and well, knowing that you do so in Ethebet's name, and with her blessing."
And from the white bag, she produced a plain sword in a plain sheath. It bore no ornamentation, nor was it made in the Tonk style. It was flat and dull and lacking in grace, the hilt wire-wrapped, the pommel pyramidal, the crosspieces heavy and serviceable. I pulled it from its sheath, dismayed to find rust on the blade and dried blood in the runnels, and the edges dull and nicked. It had seen service, this blade, and poor care.
Dismayed, I looked at the woman in white.
I saw amusement in her eyes. "It needs a bit of care," she admitted. "But nowhere in all the world is there another blade that will serve you as well."
She swept a hand across the blanket: and the banquet vanished. She rose, and the blanket leapt into her pack, and she slung her pack across her shoulder with the ease of a Conventional on a march.
She offered me her hand, and I took it, and she pulled me to my feet, and then leaned forward and kissed my forehead. "Go with grace, sister," she said. "You are Ethebet's daughter, with whom she is well pleased."
And then she was gone.
I could still hear the children playing. Could still see the horses galloping. The fields were still fragrant, covered with thick grasses and wildflowers.
But the sky grew dark, and the wind turned bitter cold, and suddenly the children's laughter turned to screams that faded into the distance. Fires flickered on the horizons all around me, burning the fields. Burning toward me. Hemming me in. And riders came galloping toward me before the flames, swords raised, screaming for my head.
I woke, clawing at my blanket for the sword Ethebet had given me, and sat up gasping. I had no sword. I had no flask
I did, however, have a desperate need to use the sitter.
I dragged myself. out of the enormous Tonk concubine bed and half crawled to the privacy room attached to my room. And relieved myself, and was sick at the same time. When I was done, I cleaned up the mess, crawled into the shower and turned the water on, and let the warmth and the wetness sluice over me, cleaning me, bringing me back to the real world from the strange. nonsensical place of my nightmares. I had no strength. I could not remember ever having felt so weak or so sick. My head throbbed and my belly felt fair to touch my spine, even as the thought of food made me sicker.
I tilted my face into the water and stuck out my tongue, and lapped a little.
It helped. It was soothing.
After a bit I found my way to my feet, and leaned against the shower wall for a few moments longer. At last I turned off the shower and dried off and wrapped a towel around myself and made my way back to the bed. holding on to the wall to keep myself up.
I realized as I was climbing beneath the covers that Skirmig stood in the doorway watching me.
"At last you're awake," he said, and crossed the room and helped me pull the covers up. "Three days, and I had begun to despair of you waking up again."
I lay with my head on soft pillows, with fine-woven sheets against my naked skin, on a mattress that cradled me beneath blankets that warmed me, trying to get his statement to make sense.
"It can't have been three days," I said. "I remember the banquet, and getting sick at the end of it, and you helping me in here-but that can only have been hours ago."
"Three days," he said. "With the morning of the fourth nearly here. You have not moved, have not made a sound, have not opened your eyes once in all that time, and even my healer, who is a calm and sensible man, was growing frantic."
I frowned. "What...happened to me?"
"You were poisoned," he told me. "One of my colleague's wives, acting in the pay of an Eastil agent, put poison into the dark ale. Three of my colleagues are dead, and you nearly were."
So the messenger dressed all in shining white offers her all the kingdoms of the world on a picnic blanket, which she gives up for the living water for which she pants as the hart, but can't do a darn thing to protect her or even help her protect herself by warning her explicitly of Skirmig's use of the Force-whammy on her, which means we get to have a lot more Talyn-torture and maundering for quite a few more pages (and pages, and pages, which I will spare you because I think reader-torture is wrong) meanwhile we get Gair-torture-by-medicine as he recovers from his stay in prison being beaten and burned and worse to get false confessions because not all Tonk soldiers are honorable after all, following this exchange which brings us into still more Overlord List conflicts:
Gair heard a knock at the door. and heard the healer answer it.
"No, I won't let you in," he said to mutters on the other side. "I don't care who you say sent you. Go away."
He slammed the door.
Someone knocked again. The healer opened it again. "I told you to go away."
And a pause.
"No. lf Talyn wants her clothes, she's going to have to come get them herself. I don't know you, and for all I know, you've thought of a clever way to rob her with my help."
He slammed the door again.
The people on the other side were persistent, but the third time they started pounding and yelling, the healer did not open the door, and after a short while, the strangers went away.
To be replaced, only a moment later, by someone kicking in the door.
No muttering this time--Gair heard the diplomat bastard's voice clear and loud.
"Talyn has agreed to move in with me," the bastard said. "I have come to pick up her clothing, and the Feegash troops are here with me to make sure she gets what she wants."
"She wouldn't just leave," the healer said. "She wouldn't send us notice of this instead of coming herself. "What have you done with her?"
Gair would have given anything to be able to sit up on his own and to see what was going on below. He would have given more for the strength to go down there and fight them, pursue them to bring Talyn safely back to her home. He turned his head and saw Hale looking at him, and saw the fear he felt reflected in Hale's eyes.
The bastard's voice was cool and amused. "I think you must know her very little, witch doctor. When she makes up her mind, Talyn does it quickly, and she doesn't look back. You and your dying charges there would be, for her, looking back on a pathetic scale." The bastard sighed, and Gair could hear men with heavy boots stomping through the house, drawers opening and slamming shut, voices speaking softly. "I need not be either gentle or kind about this, though," the bastard added. "If you're a good, polite little savage, I'll send two of my servants to stay with you and make sure you don't damage or steal anything that belongs to my love. If you're a bad little witch doctor and you'll be bad if you stand in my way, or interfere in my business here--you and the filthy stickmen upstairs can die today."
In the silence that followed, Gair remembered his nightmare--of Talyn hurt, held captive by the bastard, and tortured as he had been tortured when the Tonks held him in their dungeon.
It had been a dream, and he had never in his memory dreamed true dreams before. Except of course he had dreamed each night he was imprisoned that Talyn was with him, and she had been the one who had saved him at last. So that had been a true dream, after a fashion. Perhaps this was a true dream, in the manner of his other dreams about her. Perhaps Talyn was honestly in trouble.
She was a warrior, and like him, she served a code of honor that would have required her to assure the safety of those for whom she had taken responsibility. Idrann was right; she would not have run off one night and not come back--at least to say good-bye and make arrangements with Idrann-unless something was amiss.
So change that "perhaps" to "certainly."
Talyn was in trouble, and she had only a graying healer, a Hva Hwa hunter, and two starved, near-death warriors to rescue her.
Gair realized that he couldn't satisfy himself by seeing the sun, then dying. He had to live. Talyn. the woman who had given him and Hale their lives back, needed him.
You could ask why Skirmig, the supposéd-diplomat, is so anxious to antagonize the Healer who is Talyn's old friend and the detainees she has adopted, so needful of putting on an alpha-dominance display for them, when it would be quite literally no work at all to convince them that he was a wonderful human being and the soul of altruism by just smiling apologetically and saying almost nothing, given that he used his own carriage and forged the documents to smuggle them out of prison and helped arrange their medical care. When that would be the more rational thing to do, ensuring their loyalty which might, you know, come in handy if they get caught anyway, because then they might be more likely to not reveal his involvement. And particularly more rational in terms of stealth and avoiding nosy neighbors, than showing up at dinnertime with a squad of bootnecks and getting into a shouting match with somebody inside and then kicking down Talyn's front door. Ask away -- but you won't get an answer in the book, except for Skirmig being Eeeevil.
I refer you to Evil Overlord List numbers 3. My noble half-brother whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon and 84. I will not have captives of one sex guarded by members of the opposite sex.
Okay, so Gair the Eastil commando isn't innately Skirmig's rival, but the opposition of Skirmig and his desires for Talyn and Hyre is set up from the first, and not just in the heavy-handed editorial foreshadowing and supernatural dream-hints liberally sprinkled along. Even before we are told that Skirmig is the Big Bad, he objects that risking his political career to help some dying Eastil prisoners of dubious status is nothing he wants to get into, and he only does it because Talyn insists and he wants to make her happy. (Why it would be so politically dangerous for him to remove some between-the-cracks internees publically - heck, he could hold them up as examples of how badly the Tonks ran things and why they needed the guiding hand of Civilization to straighten them out, no matter how disingenuous such a propaganda coup would be - is never really made clear or plausible.)
The saving of Gair from Abu Ghraib the newly-privatized foreigner-owned Beyltaak prison and its sadistic guards is something which only makes sense if poor old Skirmig really is besotted in love, - but if he's a totally-sadistic monster of an Evil Overlord on his way up, who's killed and worse to who knows how many people (more on that later) and thinks nothing of torturing women to death in the course of a sexual relationship as is the way of his people, then why should he care what Talyn thinks of him, let alone be willing to risk his Sekrit Plan of conquest over it? Granted, there's no reason yet to think that Talyn will ever get the hots for enemy agent Gair, filthy, half-starved, sick, and crippled from torture - but even if he doesn't expect her to elope with him, or vice versa, still he considers the continued presence of the paperworkless Gair under his protection to be a political danger. Even if Talyn is Special!Sue, it doesn't mesh. Not when he can put the force-whammy on her and make her forget everything that just happened...
--Except when you consider that it's an Apocalyptic Fic, in which you can have the Guilty digging pits that they then fall into without any Plausibility required, because Divine Intervention and Providence can be involved to move far more than just small things, or for one big Wonder at a high price--
22. No matter how tempted I am with the prospect of unlimited power, I will not consume any energy field bigger than my head.
We don't actually see this happen, but we can safely infer that it must have, in order to have given Skirmig the powers which we find out he has possessed all along, to mind-control all the people around him. Again, we hit major Implausibles very quickly, and a scenario which could have (in the hands of, say, Tom Holt, let alone Terry Pratchett) been played for a lot of laughs even in a serious story: A zombie-recruiting pyramid scheme may seem like a good idea, but trust me, you don't want to get stuck with an ever-expanding number of mindless minions requiring your direct and constant oversight to stop them eating each other's brains might be an Overlord List entry.
We hear in a bit in another vision from St. Ethebet that Talyn & Gair are the world's One And Only Chance of stopping Skirmig from destroying the whole world, that he has to be stopped NOW, before all humanity falls to his darkness, and yet - we also find out that he's stretched himself insanely thin, that he can't fully control his armies of minions any longer, that he can barely control them at all, because by turning all his compatriots and occupied citizens into an Army Of Hungry Zombies™ with a Pyramid Recruitment Scheme he's now required to share out his strength among all of them, to dominate them directly, and every new zombie recruit becomes yet another drain on his power - and he isn't an immortal demigod, nor an undead immortal warlord, and yet he's trying for a level of psychic/magical control that not even Vlad Dracul nor yet Sauron managed. Frankly, the very idea that he could do this in the first place, without being directly powered himself by some vast immortal power, Demon or Dark God or bodiless Alien Being Of Pure Mind, is Improbable - and another indication that this is an Apocalyptic Novel and Skirmig supposed to be The Antichrist.
Yes, a stunningly-incompetent Antichrist; a comic-opera, pantomime-villain Antichrist, bumbling around goofing up his own plans through a combination of sexual obsession and overweening self-confidence, but The Antichrist nonetheless. This is the only reason, in fact, that makes sense of St. Ethebet and her picnic-providing angelic messenger-girl being so het up about him, ZOMG!TEOTWAWKI!!!1!, instead of taking the not-entirely-unreasonable view that for all his awfulness, Skirmig is a mortal wizard who's about to imitate Aesop's famous bullfrog and do an overfilled-balloon imitation, and it shouldn't be too hard to make him pop sooner, but in any case he can hardly avoid it for very much longer, and then their major challenge and where their major efforts should be focused would be on getting ready to pick up the pieces, since as we find out his enchantments don't survive his death (naturally enough, being all fueled out of his own willpower.)
57. Before employing any captured artifacts or machinery, I will carefully read the owner's manual.
This one applies to both Skirmig using the View and Talyn using the Hagedwar, although to be fair, both of them are sneaking around trying to get more power behind each other's back, even when they're [both] pretending to be honest and open and truly, madly, deeply in love with each other. So they can't exactly consult with other living experts and make sure that they're not doing anything potentially-terminally dumb, out of sheer ignorance of possible problems.
27. I will never build only one of anything important. All important systems will have redundant control panels and power supplies. For the same reason I will always carry at least two fully loaded weapons at all times.
Granted, when you're tricking an outside expert into making your Doomsday Device for you, this may not be in your control, but it doesn't seem to even occur to Skirmig that this is a point of vulnerability to him, to have all his stolen View power channeling through one small piece of ordinary (ie regular melting-point) silver! (At least it wasn't a lead figurine...)
17. When I employ people as advisors, I will occasionally listen to their advice.
In this case, we have to kind of extrapolate again, because Skirmig doesn't have any advisors, counselors, or, for that matter, even any loyal henchmen - all he has are minions whom he's not just lured to his service, but who to varying (and increasing) degrees he simply manipulates like puppets, via his magic. So we have to add a corollary - I will employ people as advisors, to catch my obvious errors before I commit to them. --Errors like setting up zombie pyramid schemes, frex; or leaving your mortal enemies alive after revealing your hatred of them, because you think they're insignificant threats, for another. This whole "fleshmage" thing - the name used for the zombie-magic thing, the highly-inaccurate and misleading name, I should add, given that the people who are involuntarily enthralled by it (tho' while still living, unlike the Cauldron-born) don't actually gain the ability to work any magic after they've been made into the legendary, scare-children-with-stories-of fleshmages; they just become magically-linked slaves to the real mage who controls their flesh. I guess just "slaves" or "slaves of the wizard" wasn't cool 'n' scary-sounding enough.
Because we find out in the end that plenty of the Feegash mercs weren't happy or voluntary participants in the conquest and enslavement of Hyre, either, and they too were freed and horrified by what had been done to them, after Skirmig gets his reward. Not only that, some of the Tonks found that being tools used to torture each other really rocked for them, and thus deserved to be hunted down and killed in post-war purges, we learn at the end of the book. (Which is plausible, but hardly used as an occasion for the sort of self-examination of conscience and loss of hubris which leads to what Lisle/Talyn would dismiss as weakness and "moral relativism," -- you know, the old fandom chestnut that goes right along with the power/responsibility equation, "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.")
But! we've earlier learned that the Hagedwar magic system is something which is common to the Feegash, at least the male Feegash, at least their aristocracy - and yet none of them seem to be aware that one of their number is using it against them, to sieze vast amounts of power over them from in their midst, as a stepping stone to World Domination™. Which is really, really Improbable, for more reasons than I could possibly catalogue, except to say that 1) a bunch of power-hungry greedy brutal warlords 2) are probably going to be suspicious of each other, based on Primary World historical experience, and 3) if they all know about and use this same 4) detectable type of magic which they 5) guard jealously from outsiders, including their own womenfolk, then 6) it seems fairly likely that they'd be aware of one of their own using it to Level Up, or at least 7) the possibility of this, and be on guard for it. It shouldn't be a walk in the park, whereby he becomes The Necromancer unopposed save by Talyn, Gair, and St. Ethebet and her goopy angel.
--Except if Skirmig is the Antichrist. Because being the Antichrist means you automatically get +10 Charisma, and the ability to Charm anyone into not suspecting you or erase memories without hardly lifting a finger, whether they're fellow Evil, hapless Neutral, or even more hapless Good - unless they're Sworn Paladins of Yawheh. That's just the way the Rules work, in Apocalyptiverse Roleplaying Games.
Next: Volunteer Armies are for pussies! Let's bring back the cat' while we're at it!