hunters_forest | Coldfire re-read: Crown of Shadows

Apologizing for delayed posts is turning into a tradition, and who am I to break with that? So, sorry. :-)

Today it's chapter 38 - Tarrant is not dead after all, Damien's propensity to curse increases drastically, and we get some answers. Of the sort that cause even more questions.

Plot Summary

In a long anticipated plot twist, it turns out that the Iezu are half human, and that they've been created by an alien life form we've come to know as the Mother of the Iezu. She's using them as a communication device with humanity, but without all that much success so far. Once Damien's had all this dumped into his mind, he gets one more surprise to deal with - Tarrant is still (again?) breathing, and currently being used by the Mother of the Iezu to make Baby Iezus.

Never one to pass up a chance for a dramatic rescue, Damien grabs him and drags him off before there's any more dying, or any more alien sex. Tarrant then, after nine centuries of not having to bother with whether his body is in working order, promptly has heart failure in response. This allows Damien to do even more heroic rescuing, and it also shows us all that an altruistic self-sacrifice by the Hunter was enough of a shock to the planet itself that the fae patterns are changed. Damien, of course, doesn't let that stop him and gets to perform emergency heart surgery while surrounded by steaming geysers, falling ash, and equally dramatic background decoration. And in true form, once it's all over and done with, they make new travel plans. What better place to go to right now than the Hunter's Keep, to pick up a few books?

Quotes

Each child bred for a single purpose, focused and pure in its substance. One to read the stars and choose a course. One to gather up the thin energies of the void and make food from them. One to steer and one to record and one to dream and one-more precious than any other-to carry the patterns of inheritance of their race, so that when the time is right, a whole new world can be peopled with her children.

"You're human," Damien whispered. The words made his throat burn.
The Iezu nodded slowly. "Half," he agreed, in a voice that trembled with awe. "And half . . ." He looked up at the mother. "Something else."

What happened to those men? he wondered suddenly. Did Karril's human father leave this place in the same condition he had come to it, or did he leave behind him that capacity for pleasure which made human existence bearable? What would be left of Gerald Tarrant when the process of replacement was over?

God has given you a second chance, he thought in wonder, as he touched trembling fingers to the silk veil that protected Tarrant's face. After so many centuries of evil that your soul must surely be black as jet.

Great. Just great. Here they had faced Hell and worse, vanquished the son of an alien life-form and rescued Tarrant from the ranks of the undead... all to be buried alive while they were on the way home? Not likely, he swore.

Again Damien tried to tackle the elusive earth-power, pouring everything he had into the effort. And for an instant he seemed to make real contact with it. For an instant he could taste what was wrong, and though he didn't know its cause, the result was all too clear. The fae could be Worked, all right, but at a terrible price to the Worker.

You were willing to give up your life on Shaitan to save mankind from Calesta. You were willing to face Hell for that. I can't let you die now, at the very threshold of salvation. I can't rob you of the chance to make your peace with God at last ... not even to save my own skin.

"It seems," the Hunter whispered hoarsely, "that I owe you once again."
"Yeah." He shrugged off what promised to be an awkward expression of gratitude. "And you took me traveling to new and exciting places. Let's just call it even, okay?"

"The whole goddamn world's at peace and I didn't figure we'd both still be part of it, so I don't have the kind of food and water it would take for two people to go off and do something stupid. Whatever that stupid thing happened to be. -Are you listening to me, Gerald?"

"The Iezu were bred to interact with humans, and must do so for their own survival. There's no food here to sustain them, nor anything else that they require. And even if they could stay, what would become of the temples they're nurtured, the cults that have declared them gods, the human symbionts they must support? Oh, some of them will remain here for a time, but will those few be enough? When will the critical mass of this gathering be weakened enough that the mother's voice loses its coherency, and humanity loses its most valuable ally?"

"There's a war on in the Forest. Have you forgotten that? More enemies than you can count, all focused on your destruction-"
"And they mean to burn the Forest to the ground when they're done, and all my possessions along with it. Which means that in a few days' time my notebooks will be ash, and the Iezu's history lost forever."

The last thing anyone here needed was to risk all that they had won for a handful of books-books, God damn it! Even if those books were the key to humanity's future, and that of the Iezu. Even if those books might allow both species to return to the stars.

"All right," he muttered. Sighing heavily. "What the hell. Let's do it."
Tarrant nodded. "I thought you might feel that way."
He sounded relieved, Damien thought. As well he should.

Thoughts

So Tarrant is not dead after all. I wasn't too surprised after my first read (there still were too many pages left for him to be permanently gone). Besides, the resurrection at this point is a nice, neat way of getting him out of his compact with the Unnamed. Now if we could just have gone a different route from here...

The new nature of fae usage is one of those things which I feel causes more questions than it really answers. So there needs to be a willingness to sacrifice one's life. But for how long? Or is it enough to sacrifice a bit of yourself? Friedman mentioned somewhere that she thought a bit of blood wouldn't be enough, but that leaves open more than a few loopholes. Chop off a finger and you get to perform a Working? And even if it's limited to being willing to perform a self-sacrifice, then what about the permanence of the working? Does it work for as long as you are willing to make that sacrifice, or is it enough to show that will the moment you Work?

I'm not sure I buy the entire "write a family history of the Iezu so we understand the Mother" aspect. She created her children in an attempt to communicate, but it sounds like that was mostly trial-and-error, without an intended pattern to it. So what exactly is Tarrant hoping to get out of it if he sees that she tried to talk about, say, pleasure first, then aesthetics, then got angry and focused on sadism for a change?

On the other hand, I really like the idea of a Iezu gathering enabling the communication between the Mother and humans because someone will always be able to translate the message along the chain. I wonder if that wouldn't actually be easier to achieve: now that Shaitan is a mere volcano and no longer a reservoir of dark fae currents and evil creepy-crawlies, just get enough humans there so the Iezu can feed on someone, and have a group chat.

I love it that the final quest is about rescuing books. Not only do they do proper research, they also recognize the value of it. Even if Damien may be a bit cranky about it right now.

I don't think Damien has ever spent so much time swearing before, especially towards the end of the chapter.

Once again I'm speculating just how much of the Hunter is left in Tarrant. First Andrys either makes a copy or draws some of the essence towards himself. Now the Mother of the Iezu takes that aspect of Tarrant to create Riven. I wish we'd gotten a bit more time with the revived Gerald Tarrant so there'd be a chance to tell whether he still is the Hunter or not. Even Damien, our current ultimate authority, doesn't seem to know.

How good a healer is Damien? It sounds as if Healing a heart is incredibly tricky, and he manages to pull it off under more than difficult circumstances. And we know Gerald wasn't able to fix this, which probably counts for something - Healing may not have been something they used a lot when he was able to do it, but I bet he spent every waking moment on the problem once he had the first attack.