Coldfire re-read: When True Night Falls - chapters 7 and 8

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

Tonight it's time for chapters 7 and 8 - Toshida dutifully reports, Damien sets some things in motion, and there are fireworks.


Plot Summary
Chapter 7
As soon as he gets back on dry land, Toshida rushes off to make his report (only to find out that like everywhere else, the rainbow press was faster). He informs the Matria of Mercia of the new ship, with the kind of mental grumbling and resentment that should make rulers everywhere turn a wary eye on their second-in-command. It's decided to let the newcomers land and treat them well, since they carry so much money that can be used for much better purposes than it would ever serve in their coffers. The Matria is also a little disappointed that her visions of a dark creature on the ship haven't proven to be true, but of course she'd never let Toshida feel any dissatisfaction about that.

Chapter 8
Damien gets questioned and puts quite a few thoughts into Toshida's head that weren't there before and which the Matria would certainly prefer had never been passed along. In response, Toshida throws them a party designed to impress, with plenty of fireworks. Which is, of course by pure coincidence, a demonstration of how firm the faith is in Mercia. Damien gets the point, is suitably moved, and retreats to the cathedral for a prayer and possibly escape from the noise. Captain Rozca follows him, and Damien gets to share a bit of theological philosophy and adds a new lamb to his flock.


Quotes

• His face had been in at least a thousand newspapier features, not to mention the Mercian five dollar credit note and an Octecentennial coin; if they didn't know it by now, he wasn't going to waste time educating them.


• One was of a sailing ship that had clearly seen better days; its sails were tattered and its mizzenmast had been split in a storm and black ash coated the standard that had been rigged to fly from a forward jib. That would be the First Holy Expedition, Lopescu's company. The second depicted a handful of ships coming into a primitive harbor; that would be Nyquist. The other walls featured paintings of nature, trees and flowers and a brilliant seascape that stretched across three large panels. No pictures of the other expeditions, he thought. Is that a sign of our honesty, or of hypocrisy?


• I Healed them, you son of a bitch. With my Church-sanctioned powers I Worked the fae and used it on each and every one of them, to make sure that when we got to this precious city of yours we wouldn't spread eight hundred years of bacterial evolution among your people. I did that. I. And I used the fae to strengthen their immune systems so that they could survive your diseases, and took a few other precautions as well, whose names you wouldn't even recognize. That's what I do, Regent. That's what I am.


• "My rank is as high as a man can aspire to in these lands. But I'm surprised you didn't know that, Reverend Vryce. Wasn't it the Prophet himself who established that pattern?"


• Was there anything other than religious faith that could have kept this man from demanding his own long ago, from toppling kingdoms to achieve it? Was there anything that could succeed in holding him down now, once he fully understood his options? Damien felt like he had indeed thrown a match into a powder keg. And that keg was sitting on an arsenal.


• "No," Toshida said softly. "Thank you."


• Here, where relative stability had been achieved a mere three centuries after the Landing, oral tradition had preserved much more of Earth's heritage. The West might have recorded Earth's facts in its struggle to preserve its scientific heritage, Damien reflected. But the East alone remembered Earth's spirit.


• Fear had a way of feeding on itself and then altering the fae, which in turn was capable of affecting any physical event. Did these people have such faith in their leaders that they no longer questioned their decisions? Or had centuries of faith finally weakened the link between fearing and being - as it had been meant to do, as the Prophet had designed it to do, so many years ago? The thought was almost too awesome to contemplate.


• Very neat, Damien thought. Despising himself for his cynicism, even as his brain analyzed the facts. In other words, this is God's show and nothing - not your fears and not the fae - is going to spoil it. A specific targeting of mob faith to the issue at hand. Nicely done. He remembered the robed figures on Toshida's ship, and suddenly understood what they'd been doing there. A timely blessing on each cannon, on the ammo, on the act of ignition . . . so that the soldiers believed, with all the passion of religious fervor and on every level of their being, that the cannon would work exactly as planned. These people knew the Prophet's theories, all right. And had taken them one step further than the Prophet ever did. Damien wondered if those selfsame prayers would abort a "natural" misfire. Hell . . . was anything really "natural" on this world?
  Today fireworks, Damien mused. Tomorrow the stars.

Thoughts

• I find it quite intriguing that Toshida, as Regent, is important enough (and long-lasting enough) to be featured on Mercian money. (And the economist in me wonders what it means for the continent when a city-state like Mercia has its own currency.) Again we get a character whose real importance and official role isn't sketched out with all that much detail. To me it always sounded as though the Regency is short-lived and limited in its power, especially after his talk with the Matria, but with little details like that I'm beginning to doubt it.


• Did you suspect that something might be off about the Matria at this point? I remember not liking her much on my first read - I was rooting for Toshida as a potential Gerald-in-training. How about you?


• We've had the sexism debate before, but it shows up once again here in the role distribution in Mercia (which turns the Revivalist notion of women's role upside down, but to my ears manages to make it sound just as bad).


• It's never felt quite right to me that Toshida would let himself be restricted in his role by religion alone. He's so obviously burning for more power that I find it hard to believe he never tried to do anything about it. History has plenty of similar cases which ended in rebellion, after all. Do you think he might have given it a try at some point if things hadn't turned out the way they did and if Damien hadn't put ideas in his mind?


• There's a lot of thinking about the Prophet in this chapter, mainly from Damien but also from Toshida. When you know what comes next it's an obvious contrast setup, but it's still interesting to see how, at least for the moment, it looks as if here all his theories have been put into practice and are working.


• Today fireworks, Damien mused. Tomorrow the stars.
- in my opinion, possibly the best summary of the Prophet's faith we ever get.

• I've always liked the final scene of this chapter, Damien's prayer in the cathedral and then Rozca giving his oath. It really shows just what the idea is behind the faith of the Church, in a very pure and simple way. It makes me quite happy that Damien gets to have this moment where everything seems to be fine and where his faith really works.

On Monday it's time for chapters 9-11 - revelations are made, Damien and Tarrant get to be snarky at each other again, and more facts are revealed.

Comments

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

Actually, at first I wondered if this were a sort of roundabout way of glimpsing Damien's Matriarch, but the Matrias quickly became suspicious. I suspected the Matria of being a bad egg, but I don't think I zeroed in on her being one of the Bad Guys--just a likely complication, like the Patriarch but more malicious (maybe what the Patriarch could've been if he weren't so upstanding).

If there was a point here with the women being in charge, I took it to be that it doesn't matter who's doing the oppressing, it always sucks.

Toshida hit me as a Gerald-type right off the bat: brilliant, capable, gifted, insightful, ambitious. But I think it's more than faith that keeps him down. He has a basic respect for order (another thing he shares with Gerald). In Mercia (and in the Prophet's vision) faith=order. Society=order. Justice=order. He would no sooner damage society by forcing his way into power that tradition denies him than he would be willing to harm his faith (till he discovers his bosses are evil cat-women, at least). Which, I think, is what Damien gives him: a key that allows him to leverage tradition for his own ends.

I Healed them, you son of a bitch. With my Church-sanctioned powers I Worked the fae and used it on each and every one of them, to make sure that when we got to this precious city of yours we wouldn't spread eight hundred years of bacterial evolution among your people. I did that. I. And I used the fae to strengthen their immune systems so that they could survive your diseases, and took a few other precautions as well, whose names you wouldn't even recognize. That's what I do, Regent. That's what I am.

I always found this interesting. Damien's usually fairly quiet about himself, but every so often it becomes clear just how much he identifies as being a sorcerer. It's definitely far more than just having a skill set that's useful to him in his job. We saw it with the Patriarch, too: to reject Damien's sorcery is to reject Damien.

...Or maybe I'm seeing that from the wrong angle. He only reacts that vehemently when it's someone he perceives as potentially having authority over him. So maybe it's a case of his awareness of the prejudices of his own group and reacting to being labeled. Still, he can't or won't distance himself from it.

It's yet another connection between him and Tarrant, who also clearly takes pride in his ability to Work the fae and harness it for his own purposes. And it creates a weird sort of tension, where Tarrant, a potential enemy, accepts him so easily where his own people (their own people) are so ready to condemn them both--for the same sin!

[aubrem.livejournal.com]

Interesting comments on Damien - insightful, thanks. He seems to always set himself up as the "other" - a sorcerer to the Patriarch, a priest to Gerald. He didn't set himself up as the "other" with Ciani though, and was pretty cooperative with Senzei re sorcery most of the time - though I just last night read the bit where Damien and Senzei are looking at maps at the cathedral preparing for their journey and Damien wouldn't let Senzei talk about sorcery there - he called it inappropriate.

I'm not sure what the line is - maybe he just reacts to antagonistic men. That would fit in with the author's gender themes. Damien sets himself up with marked out territory in opposition to alpha males, doesn't mind cooperating with lesser males and women.

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

That's an excellent point. The alpha male thing has come up with him before.

[aubrem.livejournal.com]

Damien's alpha-maleness always interests me because he's forever having to use all his (considerable) strength of will to repress it. He's clearly a leader and someone who likes to make his own decisions - he's at his absolutely most comfortable of the three books at the beginning of book 1 when he's sauntering into Jaggonath, checking out what interests him, telling this pretty adept he's just met that he doesn't have to check in with anyone for another week. He also sidesteps authority whenever he can - like taking off on his second quest without checking in with the Patriarch.

Still, he picked a life path that puts him perpetually under someone's authority. His faith is all about being under someone's authority. Then he takes up with Gerald and has to trust Gerald's knowledge and judgment time and again. In the first book there's a severe struggle between the two for control of the group - at one point someone says the big muscley human dominates, but that's questionable - it goes back and forth. I think Gerald actually could dominate through all three books but he steps back most of the time on moral grounds - he knows Damien totally dominates morally and Damien doesn't hesitate to use that to keep him in his place. And Gerald does care, very deeply, about morality. Or maybe that's just what I take away from it. : ) I love complicated alpha male battles.

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

I agree about Tarrant caring about morals. Not for himself...but it'd undermine all his work if people just went around being evil. I think it's something he values in others (doesn't he even say as much to Damien?).

Though I think it may be less that Damien dominates morally (though, yes, he does, not that it's hard when he's up against an undead serial killer), because on a personal level I don't know that Tarrant cares so much. But he may realize that if he forced the issue about doing things his way, he and Damien would likely find themselves squaring off on the spot.

...For that matter, Tarrant ends up getting things his way more often as not anyway. :D I'm with you on questioning who's really in charge half the time.

[aubrem.livejournal.com]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that my intepretation based on Gerald in the three books is that he does care about his own fall - very deeply - and not just because it means he has to fry in hell. I think he's a man of his time - revivalist with all the social structure and deference to authority that goes with it. I think he chose his path, undestanding it fully, because he felt he had to for his own rational reasons, but that he mourns the loss of the man he could have been. He's angry with the church for doing this to him (in his mind) but he loves the church.

My evidence is scant - his attraction toadmiration for Damien, his obsession with Damien being a priest (constantly harping on it, usually calling him "priest" or "reverend"), his continued love for things revivalist, his caring about the future of humanity and the larger concepts of justice (if he's all evil why would he?). He didn't like the child sacrifice in this book. There's no actual reason for him to care though unless he retains ideas of justice, mercy, pity. Also, his evil identity thing is over the top - it's played up for maximum effect. The actual evil done is minimal within the context of what he is. He kills one individual slowly, over time rather than feeding on mass armies slaughtering each other. To me it reads as form over content. He's hanging signs all over saying he's the most evil person in the land but he doesn't actually do that much. Surely these occasional single person hunts were the minimum he could have done without reneging on his deal with the Unnamed. I think he does the minimum, and while the fear is very tasty and all I think he hates himself for it deep down. Then he keeps telling Damien and anyone who will listen how badass he is. You know people like that - who do wrong and then punish themselves by acting like they're proud of it.

[fallintosanity.livejournal.com]

Hmm, you make a really good point here about minimum effort for maximum impact. I'm not sure Tarrant does it to punish himself - I never got the feeling from him that he'd obliquely punish himself like that, and if he felt that bad about it he'd find a different way of doing things. He's surprisingly straightforward for such a conniving guy.

But it is pretty clear in retrospect that his reputation outstrips his actual evil. It may well be because it's the easiest way (after all, while a feast of armies butchering each other would be delicious, it's pretty darn hard to find one on a regular basis...), or perhaps it's just the way that interferes the least with his busy research schedule. It's also possible that his extreme badass reputation is carefully calculated to enhance the fear of the victims he does choose, making each individual meal that much more delicious, that much more filling. (I could also argue that the three-day-long torture of an individual combined with the perpetual terrorizing of an entire region is more evil than feeding off the residual fear of a large battle, but that may be a personal thing. :) )

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've ever been entirely sure what to make of the Matrias. Certainly not the first time, and even after re-reads, they stayed hard to interpret for me as far as their role is concerned. I know I didn't pick up on the corruption issue at first - I thought of her as part of the system, and a result of the twists and turns that came from the centuries-long division.

Toshida's ambition is what makes me wonder about him holding back. It's his driving motivation, but at the same time he seems to have accepted his role (until the cat women revelation, like you say). He's too full of resentment for me to believe that he'll keep quiet forever. Your point about order being central to him is something I wholeheartedly agree with, but I think he'd risk it eventually. Maybe not just yet, but in a few years... He's getting the taste of power here, and he knows there can be more.

Damien's usually fairly quiet about himself, but every so often it becomes clear just how much he identifies as being a sorcerer.

I'd agree with all that if it were about Gerald, but with Damien I'm not so sure. He's used to having the fae at his disposal and in his arsenal, but I've never seen him as someone who'd care about sorcery for sorcery's sake. The times he gets angry at sorcery being dismissed as evil/dangerous, I see it as an absolutely exasperated and frustration at someone who rejects the best tool for a job. It's the limits that get to him, and the rules imposed on him without his consent. aubrem already said it much better than I ever could - he doesn't accept another's authority unless he can agree with it. And the fae prohibitions he doesn't agree with because, I think, he doesn't see the point in it.

[aubrem.livejournal.com]

Chapter 8 was very interesting for me when I first read it. There's a lot to think about and speculate on - as to where it's all going with Toshida's ambitions, that Damien has Toshida slightly in his debt with the information passed and the agreement to not mention it. They almost feel like allies.

The fireworks and the prayer in the cathedral were very intense and I felt Damien's faith the most I ever did in the three books I think. It feels so unfair, reading it, knowing how badly Damien will get hurt - I wondered if he'd lose his faith altogether.

Rozca I didn't believe. I suspected it was a set up - that Rozca was somebody's minion sent to fool Damien somehow. It was too out of the blue and too perfect. My thought was that if was real and Damien's prayer was so immediately answered that Damien's god did exist in a real way in the books and did act in a personal and direct manner and that meant that these were different books than I thought they were. As it turned out it was somewhere in between - Damien's god might have acted somewhat in these books but not enough to be significant?

Regarding the matria, clearly something was very wrong because they were using the fae in some way - making Toshida dizzy.

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

They almost feel like allies.

I never thought of them like that, but it's an interesting angle. In a way, Damien could be of use to Toshida if it ever comes to confirming that in the west the Church can be (and is) led by men. It obviously never plays out that way, but it could have been an intriguing turn.

I wondered if he'd lose his faith altogether.

I don't think I ever felt that way, at least not until the very end. I expected his faith to change, but it's such an integral part to him that I couldn't imagine it gone completely. He needs his dream, and it's the one thing he manages to hang on to until the end.

Damien's god might have acted somewhat in these books but not enough to be significant?

Personally I don't think their God ever came into existence. Maybe, just for a moment, Damien managed to make something manifest later in WTNF, but aside from that there's nothing that can convince me of the existence of such a being. There'S just no interference at all. And in part, I think they might even be sabotaging themselves there - Damien does think a few times that he doesn't expect god to listen to his prayers and take action.

Regarding the matria, clearly something was very wrong because they were using the fae in some way - making Toshida dizzy.

A bit reminiscent of Damien's first encounter with the Patriarch in BSR, isn't it? Only Toshida doesn't realize what's going on yet.