Coldfire re-read: Black Sun Rising - chapters 29 & 30

[trobadora]

Click the cut and read all about our heroes' terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day ... ;-)

Plot Summary

Chapter 29
The Master of Lema summons the demon Calesta and orders him to go after Ciani and her companions himself this time.

Chapter 30
Damien dreams of a battlefield. He tries to Heal, but finds there is no fae - he is utterly helpless. He wakes in terror and rejoins Gerald, who's just had a good meal. *g* The party discusses the weakness of the currents, and the possible location of their enemy. They travel along the shore, and then up the Achron river. When they find shelter for the day, Damien twigs to the fact that there's something going on between Tarrant and Ciani, and he doesn't like it one bit. The next night, they are surprised by an earthquake, and Damien nearly drowns in the river before Tarrant rescues him - and, as if that wasn't enough, a group of rakh are threatening them with spears. Bad day, all around!

Quotes

• And nothing responds. Absolutely nothing. The planet is dead, unresponsive to his will. He feels the first cold bite of despair, then, a kind of fear he’s never experienced before. Danger he can deal with, death he’s confronted on at least a dozen occasions, but there’s never been anything like this before - never such absolute helplessness in the face of human suffering, such sudden awareness that his will doesn’t matter, he doesn’t matter, he has no more power to affect the patterns of fate than the dismembered limbs on this field, or the cooling blood that turns the dry earth to mud under his feet.


• “That was Earth, you know.”
  
  “Your vision of it.”
  
  “It’s the dream you serve. A future the Church hopes to make possible. A land in which the fae has no power, to alter fate or man . . . how do you like the taste of it, priest? The special savor of Terran impotence.”


• “The earth-fae is, and always has been, a predictable, ordered force. Faithful to its own laws of motion and power which, when understood, can be manipulated. Or have you forgotten your Prophet’s teachings?” he asked dryly.
  
  “Excuse me for challenging your canon.”


• “It’s a survey map,” the Hunter informed him. “A tectonic extrapolation. Done on board the Earth-ship, before the Landing. According to one document in my possession, that was standard procedure aboard such vessels. They would scan each possible landing site for seis­mic activity - and other variables - to assess the dangers that the colonists might face. It normally took five to ten Earth-years to determine whether or not a planet was suitable for colonization. In the case of Erna, nearly ninety were invested.” He tapped the map with a slender forefinger. “This was the reason.”
  
  “Seismic activity.” Damien’s tone was bitter.
  
  The Hunter nodded. “Enough to make colonization difficult, if not downright impossible. Maybe if there’d been an alternative, the ship would have moved on. Maybe somehow it knew that there was nothing beyond this - that it had come so far, rejecting so many planets along the way, that if it rejected this one there was no­where left to go. It was balanced on the brink of the galaxy, with nothing but darkness ahead of it, and it knew only two options: wake up the colonists and settle them here, or move on. No turning back. No going home. Those were the rules.”


• As he had guided their boat through the rakhland’s shallows, he now guided his party along the shoreline, across terrain that shifted from pebbled beach to half-submerged boulders to waist-high waters in a matter of minutes. And no one else could do it as well as he could. That was simple fact. The priest specialized in Healing skills, the arts of Life; the adept Gerald Tarrant, for all his awesome power, seemed ill at ease Working through the water, and preferred to leave that duty to another. And Ciani . . . it hurt him to think he was benefiting from her disability, but the truth was that he had never experienced this kind of pleasure be­fore - this absolute certainty of being needed, of having the skills which the moment required and needing to use them. Of being the only one who could use them. His years with her had been rich ones, in both experience and friendship, but he realized now just what it had cost him to function in her shadow all these years. How much of him had never lived, before this moment.


• “How are you at parting the waters?” Damien yelled to Tarrant - and it must have been some kind of religious joke, because the Hunter smiled dryly.


• Tarrant will gain strength, then, he thought. He’ll come into his true power for the first time since our landing. It was a chilling thought, but somehow it lacked the power of his previous fears. Was it possible that Tarrant’s usefulness was beginning to outweigh the abhorrence of his nature, in Damien’s mind? That was dangerous, the priest reflected. That was truly frightening. That worried him more than the true night itself - more than all the rest of it combined. Could one become inured to the presence of such an evil? So much so that one lost sight of what it truly was, and saw no further than the elegant facade which housed it? He shivered at the thought, and swore he would keep it from happening. Prayed to his God that he could keep it from happening.

Thoughts

• Gerald and Damien really speak the same language, don't they? It's very obvious here, with the parting-the-water joke and the vision of Earth, even the idea of regaining the stars. And already Damien is having trouble not forgetting that he should hate Tarrant. Justified though it is, he does sound a bit like he's talking himself into abhorrence, doesn't he? *g*


• Friedman paints a very chilling picture of Earth - and I don't mean the battle. The idea of a world that is oblivious to the people who live on it - something so ordinary shouldn't be so terrible, should it? But she makes her world real enough that we can see ours from Erna's perspective, at least for a moment.


• I'm really starting to think it was a good thing that I never paid that much attention to Senzei before - he's starting to seriously annoy me with his constant whining of I WANNA BE EXTRA-SPESHUL TOOOOO. The way he puts down his friendship with Ciani here really bugs me. How did she ever tolerate him?


• That bit about the Earth-ship - fascinating, isn't it? We know so very little about the colonists, and the Earth they came from, but you have to wonder how they must have felt about being woken on this planet, with all its seismic activity, barely suited for colonisation - even before they found out about the fae, they must have had their share of trouble.


• And finally, we're meeting the rakh. Not that we see much of them in this chapter, but this is the start. Do any of you remember what you thought about the rakh when you first read the books? what you expected them to be like? Did you expect them to become as important to the plot as they turn out to be?

On Thursday, we'll be continuing with chapters 31 and 32.

Comments

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

I imagined them as cat-people. I was surprised when they made a recurrence later in the series; I'd expected it to mainly be a chance for them to pick up Hesseth as the colorful native guide. But I was surprised and pleased to see them depicted as people with their own instincts, patterns, and goals. I think it was one of my first exposures to an alien race that wasn't fairly stereotypical.

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

I expected them to matter somewhat to the plot. They get too much attention early on to be easily ignored after a short interlude, and that they had Hesseth along made me expect encounters with native species, either rakh or something related that only a rakh could properly communicate with.

Admittedly I find them rather cliché in BSR. It gets better in WTNF with the matrias, but here it is a bit stereotyped. The encounter, as well as the social structures and the eventual assistance leading to victory.