Coldfire re-read: When True Night Falls - chapter 37

[trobadora]

We're headed into the Wasting today ... lovely scenery, I'm told! :D

Plot summary

Our heroes find themselves on a less-than-pleasant hiking trip, and Damien dearly misses his horse. And that's before they even hit the Wasting itself. To everyone's surprise, there's no sign of any Working there. Damien realises again something's wrong with Tarrant when the Hunter doesn't argue with him over a delay, and eventually arrives at an interesting if mistaken conclusion.

Quotes

• It was hard traveling - harder, in a way, than any which Damien had done before. The joint strains of looking after Jenseny and worrying about Tarrant - not to mention waiting for Tarrant to blow up because he was looking after Jenseny - frayed at his nerves constantly. So did the very real difficulties involved in bringing a small child with them. She could not match their pace. She could not equal their endurance. She could not do as they did, force their bodies to push on long after exhaustion had set in, because they had not yet found a site defensible enough to serve as a resting place. And yet she struggled to keep up with them and bore all her pains in silence, even when the blisters on her feet broke open along one particularly rough stretch of ground. If not for Tarrant's special senses, preternaturally attuned to the smell of human blood, they might never have known that anything was wrong at all.


• It was vast. It was lifeless. It was utterly dark. A land as black as the thick night which enshrouded it, all but invisible from their vantage point. Valley bled into mountains bled into the night sky, and even the illumination of Prima's slender crescent failed to distinguish between them. In such a darkness it was impossible to make out any details of the land before them, or to estimate its dangers. It was there, black and forbidding; that was the sum total of their knowledge.


• "A simple Warding would have left its mark on the currents here, or even an Obscuring. But there are other Workings that might not be as visible." He turned back to Damien. "You saw my Forest. I evolved each species in it with painstaking care, and set them loose in an environment which my power had nurtured. Generations later, when those altered creatures had hunted and mated and born their own young in a wholly natural manner, would my sorcerous mark still have been visible on them? I think not. And yet, they still served my purpose." He nodded toward the black plain that awaited them. "Knowing what we do of the Prince's power, I would suspect his techniques are . . . similar."


• For a moment - a brief moment - he thought the Hunter was going to argue with him. But all he said was, "As you wish, then." Just that. Damien was struck with a sudden urge to strike him, to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, to shout at the top of his lungs, Argue with me, dammit! Tell me I'm wrong! Tell me that I don't understand the dynamics of this place, or that my vision is too limited, or that we need to keep moving . . . anything! He wanted the old Gerald Tarrant back, the one he understood. The arrogant, exasperating Neocount who had saved his life in the rakhlands even while threatening to destroy him. That Tarrant he knew how to deal with. That Tarrant he trusted.


• After a while Jenseny began to come up with questions - mostly about volcanoes - but though he answered them thoroughly and honestly there were things in his experience he was careful not to tell her about. Like the cloud he had witnessed from a distance, that had descended without warning from Mount Kali and scalded nearly twenty thousand people to death. Like the molten boulders he'd had to dodge when he was searching for passage through the Dividers. Like the volcano-born tsunami he had once seen, a wall of water nearly three hundred feet high that had crashed into the shore by Herzog, swallowing half the town in minutes. Those were the kinds of images that would give a child nightmares, and he was careful not to share them with her.


• Fortunately he had purchased an assemblage of pills in Esperanova that should keep them nutritionally fit; he doled them as the tea brewed, vitamins and minerals and amino acids in thin gelatinous shells that should supplement the nutritive limitations, if not the boredom, of their fare.


• And suddenly it all came together, and he understood.
  The Prince is a sorcerer of his own dark caliber. His equal, perhaps, or maybe even his better. When's the last time there was someone like that in his world? Was there ever?
  He doesn't know how to deal with it. He's afraid and, at the same time, fascinated. He knows we can't afford a direct confrontation, yet he hungers for knowledge of the enemy. The concept was both reassuring and unnerving. Reassuring because it offered an explanation for the Hunter's bizarre behavior. Unnerving because it implied that Tarrant had lost his objectivity without even realizing it.
  I wonder how much he's aware of the struggle going on inside him. How much of it is conscious, and how much is masked by his unwillingness to look too deeply into his own soul.

Thoughts

• I'm glad the book doesn't completely gloss over the problems of travelling with a child in tow, but if you're sensitive to the Saintly Child trope, this one really gets a bit too close. *eyerolls*


• I do like that Damien likes Tarrant better when he argues with him and criticises him. :-)


• We hear a little bit more about the many things Damien has seen and experienced - he's really been everywhere, hasn't he? *g* I'm finding myself increasingly irritated but the sheer multitude of tidbits we're given that simply seem excessive in total because there's no coherent narrative tying them together. Is that just me? *g*


• Vitamin pills? Really? I suppose it's no more out of place than anything else in the weird mix of modern and historical that seems to be present-day Erna, but I did find that a bit jarring. At any rate, I wonder how the pills are made. Thoughts?


• Friedman first draws attention to Tarrant's behaviour and then offers a seemingly convincing explanation for it. Of course we know better, but nonetheless - how convincing does this explanation seem to you? It does, after all, hinge on Damien underestimating Tarrant's levels of self-awareness, which strikes me as slightly problematic. Opinions?

On Thursday, we'll be continuing with chapter 38 ...

Comments

[fyrie.livejournal.com]

I actually like the fact Jen is so scared of being left behind, she'll do anything to make sure she doesn't get abandoned by them. After all, these are literally the only people she has left in the world :)

And I still adore the fact that Gerald, for all his existence and experience, still can't hide the fact that something is amiss.

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

After all, these are literally the only people she has left in the world :)

She can certainly claim one of the more interesting adoptive families around. A traveling priest, a rakh, and an undead ex-prophet. In a way, it's like the "herd" in Ice Age.

[fyrie.livejournal.com]

So, out of morbid curiosity, who would be who? ;) (Incidentally, the idea of Gerald going "where's the baby?" just cracked me up something chronic)

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

*sputter* I hadn't remembered that bit!

(And really, there's no way around Gerald for Diego. Hesseth's a bit troublesome as Sid. ;-)

[fyrie.livejournal.com]

Damien is totally Manny :D Especially with Diego saving his butt time and again ;) Although Manny does have Hesseth's back issues of lost family and suchlike...

[fragorl.livejournal.com]

Its interesting to me that it is Gerald who notices that the blisters break and presumably him to suggest they do something about it - i mean he could just have kept silent and Damien woulnt have known would he? It seemed odd to me that Gerald couldnt keep a perfect mask in place - the hunter one would have thought would be quite capable of steering them into a trap without them ever realising.

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

The blisters got me too. If he really disliked her as much as he sometimes acts, he wouldn't have bothered to point it out. After all, who's to know that he could smell the blood? And she's so determined to go on that she wouldn't have slowed. Just a touch of compassion, once again - and he keeps giving her those little moments, doesn't he? The toys, the advice about how to keep her healthy...

[trobadora]

Just coming back to this ... I'm fascinated by the (non-)relationship between Tarrant and Jenseny, and I can't help but feel he doesn't dislike her half as much as he pretends. He finds her unsettling, certainly, and near impossible to predict, which is a problem under the circumstances - but apart from that, I think he's quite fascinated with her and would have loved the chance to find out more about her adaptation to Erna.

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

Awww, poor Damien, he misses the bickering...

The pills are something I can't imagine. To extract vitamins, minerals and especially amino acids takes advanced chemistry. On a planet where something as simple as gunpowder with its three components isn't reliable, I can't see it working. Possibly the minerals, if we're talking simple salts, but nothing that takes complex organic chemistry. You need too many pure base products to distill/synthesize vitamins and amino acids that don't come naturally, and I can't see Erna having the kind of chemical industry this would require.

[trobadora]

Oops, I missed this comment last time. prettyarbitrary says the vitamin supplements might not actually be such a big deal, but I still found them startling. Then again, a lot of Erna is made up of things that would seem anachronistic in any other fantasy setting, so in a way it actually fits the spirit of the thing, at least.

[shadowystar.livejournal.com]

I'm finding myself increasingly irritated but the sheer multitude of tidbits we're given that simply seem excessive in total because there's no coherent narrative tying them together.
No, it's not just you. I got bothered with that right from the start. Did I mention it somewhere here how unfair I think the fact we know much of Gerald's past but close to nothing of Damien's? Almost like completing each other, isn't it? ;-)
Vitamin pills?
Something I wondered about, too. Since it requires complex chemistry and even more complex technology I wonder how it could be done. My only guess are Unworked machines just like Gerald's pistol. OTOH, Damien has a quite profound knowledge on biochemistry and physiology. So I guess not everything got lost with the Sacrifice....

[trobadora]

Sorry, I seem to have missed this comment the last time round! Glad you're finding Damien confusing, too .

I find their knowledge of physiology quite unproblematic given their ability to See, but I'm not so sure about the biochemical side of things. Can one See that, too? I wonder how far fae-enhanced Sight reaches ...

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

Damien's so damn mysterious! Who'd have thought that he'd be the one with the shadowy past that never gets entirely revealed?

The vitamins don't seem too out there. They might not be as effective or pure as ours, but if you know what nutrients various plants contain, you wouldn't need much more than an old-fashioned apothecary setup to crush, distill and combine plants and essences into food supplements. And gelatin isn't all that tricky to produce, if you know how.

[trobadora]

Hehehe, too true about Damien. Although the problem almost is that too much is piled into his past, too many hints, and it's hard to think of a story that might possibly combine all of them!

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when you realize he's 34... Crap, I'm 31 and I feel like I'm only getting started. When'd he find time for all this?

[trobadora]

He's my age! When would I have had time to fit all that in? (Well I suppose Damien saved some time by not reading copious amounts of fanfic ... Poor Damien, really. *g*)

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

He would have loved the fanfic! It contains so much advice for how he and Tarrant can get together.

[trobadora]

You know, Erna's such a strange blend of modern and medieval - I'm sure they must have fandom, too. And zines! *g*