Coldfire re-read: When True Night Falls - chapters 45 and 46

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

Enhanced cutlery, desperate measures, a million-to-one chance and a revealed plot - all that and more in tonight's chapters!


Plot summary

Chapter 45
Tarrant comes down into the dungeon for a visit, and gets a less than enthusiastic response. He explains himself (in the vague way we're quickly becoming accustomed to), introduces his new snack named Sisa, and then leaves Damien with the most startling gift of cutlery ever.

Chapter 46
Damien and Jenseny are taken up to the Prince for another audience. A bit of snark is attempted, though the Prince doesn't play along nearly as well as Tarrant usually does. Damien finally gets his chance and manages one lucky stab with the knife that kills the Prince. Only it doesn't kill him because he has body-hopped into Katassah, and the whole scheme is now out in the open. Tarrant is incapacitated by light and dragged off, and the Prince starts eyeing up Damien as a potential host until Jenseny steps in. She offers him her access to the tidal fae, and he jumps at the opportunity and has her taken away while Damien gets shoved back down into the dungeons.



Quotes

• Then he turned back to the pile of items before him and picked up a coin. With studied disdain he cast it through the bars to the Hunter's feet; it rolled to a stop against his boot.
  "You can leave it by the bars," he said shortly. "We'll get to it when we're done."



• "Immortality," the Hunter said.
  Stunned, Damien couldn't find his voice.
  "The real thing."
  "God," he whispered. He shut his eyes. "No. I can't outbid that. Good God."



• "We didn't have a chance," the Hunter told him. "Not with a Iezu involved. I couldn't get within ten feet of the Prince without half a dozen wards attacking, and you . . . you wouldn't last a minute. The first time you even hinted at a threatening gesture your senses would be so warped by Iezu sorcery that you couldn't tell dream from reality, and then it would all be over. No contest at all."



• "But you gave it to them! Slim or not. You told them that if they could evade you for three nights you'd let them go free. Didn't you?" He waited for an answer, and when none came pressed on. "You told me how you hunted them on foot, and how you wouldn't Work even if you wanted to because then they would have no chance at all. Remember that? Remember how you told me that at the end of three nights they would either die for your pleasure or be free of you forever, that that was part of the game?" He drew in a deep breath, struggling to make his voice steady. "What you did to those women was finite, Tarrant. It tore them apart, but it ended. What you're doing here . . ." He couldn't look at the woman's face. It would bring tears to his eyes, to match those which were forming in hers. "This place is corrupting you," he whispered. "First your loyalties, now your pleasures . . . what will you be when it's all finished? Immortal and independent? Or a slave of the Black Lands?"



• That lying, scheming bastard . . . but Tarrant had given them this. One chance. One slim, almost nonexistent hope.
  The only hope we had, he realized suddenly. The only possible chance he could see.



• "You claim to be a man of justice. Tell me, then: what judgment should I render to a man who has interfered with my army, disrupted my most vital project, invaded my lands, and plotted the overthrow of my government?"
  Damien shrugged. "How about some clean clothes and a bath?"
  For a second the Prince's expression seemed to darken; then he glanced over at Tarrant and asked, "Was he always like this?"
  It seemed to Damien that the Hunter smiled slightly. "Unfortunately."



• "You can't kill me," he said coldly. "Not with your knives and not with your Workings. All you can do is force me to take another body before I'm ready, and that will hurt me a bit. But the pain is nothing permanent, I assure you - and in the end you'll answer for my discomfort."



• The rakh smiled coldly. "I took a woman for a host once," he told them. "I lived in her for nearly forty years. When I left her at last, her mind snapped; apparently the gender change combined with the loss of adeptitude was a little too much for her."



• "I don't want to be alone," she said. "And I don't want to be afraid any more. I'm tired of running and I want to have a place to live and I want the voices to stop. I think you know how to stop them. Don't you?"

Thoughts

• The Prince and his thousand wards, all waiting for Tarrant to misstep. Surely he can't really expect Tarrant to be that foolish?



• I'm still not quite sure how the Prince's immortality differs from what Tarrant has right now. There is the lack of risk from sunlight, of course, but on the whole it seems no better. With the constant need to groom the next body, it also doesn't sound less complicated. Unless it's the compact with the Unnamed he wants to get out of, but I never really thought it bothered him that much. Tell me I've been missing something obvious here?



• Damien's approach to getting Tarrant to rethink is quite interesting. He's certainly picked up on Tarrant's greatest concerns and fears - corruption of loyalties, pleasures and, implied, honour; and also the risk of turning into a mere servant.



• It's startling how quickly Damien switches from loathing Tarrant to trusting him again. There isn't even a moment when he thinks about Tarrant's motives, and he is so sure he's reading him correctly.



• I love that little exchange between Damien, Tarrant and the Prince. Am I alone in reading a bit of satisfaction into it from Tarrant's side at how Damien is being all snarky, and for once at someone other than him? And really, he's been talking of Damien's strength, endurance and vitality?



• We talked about this back when we met the Master of Lema, but since we've got a few new players around here and we never really reached a conclusion anyway, I'd like to bring it up again: the Prince talks about how he lived in a woman's body once. Was that her, or someone else?



• Ah, Jenseny. This is the point where I finally liked her character, and I remember having a really bad feeling about it on my first read. How about you?

The climax comes on Monday with chapters 47 and 48 - only three more discussions and we'll be done with WTNF! Where did the time go?

Comments

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

Wow, nobody ever replied to this one? I'm sad, I think these are great chapters. Among other things, we see Damien and Tarrant both lay out pretty much everything they understand about each other.

For a second the Prince's expression seemed to darken; then he glanced over at Tarrant and asked, "Was he always like this?"
It seemed to Damien that the Hunter smiled slightly. "Unfortunately."

Oh yeah, I think Tarrant's pretty amused here. Damien's sarcasm has never seemed to bother him; in fact he tends to rise to the challenge and give back as good as he gets. Obviously the Prince's sense of humor doesn't tend the same way.

You know, if Tarrant could get out of that pact with the Unnamed, I think he would? He's willing and able to do what he has to in order to survive, but from everything we've seen, it's not really his personal preference. Not to mention there's that talk he had with Damien after the divine intervention.

And the immortality the Prince has is living, breathing, and alive. It can walk in sunlight. It doesn't have to isolate itself from the rest of humanity in order to preserve an artificially monstrous nature. And best of all, it's not beholden to anybody else.

But the immortality he's offering Tarrant is actually godhood. The Prince plans to corrupt the Church, and as the Prophet, Tarrant has the ability to take his place as the focal point of all the Church's power. It's kind of a shame we don't get to see more of the external conflict in these books, because it's honestly a pretty vicious setup, especially given what we see has happened to society on the eastern continent. The Prince really is a cagey bastard--maybe even almost equal to Tarrant--but we spend so much of the books living in our heroes' heads that we don't ever see much of the threat they're facing.

Mind you, I think our heroes' heads are more interesting places to be...and it's deeply interesting that on the POV level, they're so wrapped up in their own thoughts and, well, each other that so little of the outside world filters through to the reader.

Friedman does her best. There's that introductory conversation between Tarrant and the Prince in chapter 43, where we get to see that the Prince's aesthetic and approach to things is quite similar to Tarrant's (use the environment to best advantage, maintain balance, redirect force rather than meet it head-on). His power, it's established, is at a similar level. But we never really see much of him, and we've spent enough time around Tarrant that it's hard to believe anybody could be as formidable as he is.

[trobadora]

You know, if Tarrant could get out of that pact with the Unnamed, I think he would? He's willing and able to do what he has to in order to survive, but from everything we've seen, it's not really his personal preference. Not to mention there's that talk he had with Damien after the divine intervention.

Oh, absolutely - I have no doubt about that at all. He never made that pact because he so very much wanted to deal with the Unnamed; he did it because it seemed like the only option at the time that would accomplish what he needed. If he could have got immortality some more pleasant way, he certainly would have spared himself the trouble.

Which makes me wonder ... what if he had? What would he have been, after 900 years, if he hadn't become the Hunter? Intriguing ... *g*

Or even what if he'd been able to pick up the Prince's method of immortality and get out of the pact, without turning him into a god and destroying the very Church he's protected for 900 years? What would have become of him then?

Plot bunnies, plot bunnies, OMG ... ;)