The New Readers Malazan Read-Along, Dust of Dreams, Week 5, Chapter 8 (Part Two)
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Important: This is the discussion post for new readers. If you have ever attempted this book before, please don't talk about events from later chapters. Err on the side of caution and use spoiler tags if you're not sure. Head to the Spoilers MBotF discussion post if you are rereading.
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Welcome to Week Five
This week we cover Dust of Dreams from Chapters 7 & 8 (This post only contains Chapter 8)
Summaries
Chapter 8
I've always liked this epigraph. It's obviously riffing on Darwin, though it notably says nothing about speciation, adaptive radiation, etc. -- all hallmarks of On the Origin of Species. Instead, it asks the opposite question; instead of "how do we get all these forms of life" it's "how have we lost all these forms of life". But the conclusion is the same: some are just better at competing than others.[1] It's an appropriately Malazan twist, especially in a book that can't get its mind off of extinction.
Kalyth and her Che'malle are being hunted, so Gunth Mach decides the best option is to... grow a saddle for the Destriant. Yes, apparently they can do that. Sag'Churok is ranging out ahead, almost invisible to Kalyth. She knows the Che'malle are afraid, but not of what, and it frustrates her that she's the only one ignorant of the nature of the threat.
They stop when the arrive at a field of enormous bones: a dragon, a creature Kalyth never really believed in. She surmises that the Che'malle religion must be about these creatures but still has no idea what they expect of her in this apparently sacred place.
The skull is pierced with a fang of another color, red and metallic. Sag'Churok confirms (for the readers) that this is indeed an otataral fang and it is inhibiting his ability to speak with the human. But speak he does, painting a sort of modern Manichean cosmology with a distinctly postmodern spin.[2] But it also takes Voltaire's famous "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" and flips it to something more along the lines of "even if God was omnipotent, it would be necessary for it to share its power" -- which is all rather interesting.
To us. Interesting to us. Kalyth is just frustrated.
But she's trying to hold on, and Sag'Churok keeps pushing and at this point I'm just going to selectively quote:
‘In its knowledge, the god would understand the necessity for that which lies outside itself, beyond its direct control.[3] In that tension meaning will be found. In that struggle value is born.... Choose to live within one god as you like, but in so doing be certain to acknowledge that there is an “other”, an existence beyond your god.... In such comprehension, Destriant, will you come to grasp the freedom that lies at the heart of all life; that choice is the singular moral act and all one chooses can only be considered in a moral context if that choice is free.’
So, to break that down:
- An omnipotent god must give up its omnipotence, to share its ultimate existence with another free entity.
- Denial of the other is denial of the self's very capacity for choice.
- Only free choice can be moral.
Kalyth is hanging in there, but still wants to know more about otataral (which she has never heard of). Sag'Churok stays mystical at first,[4] declaring that all life is sorcery. Humans see it as the other, but that's a mistaken perspective: it's not the Other, it's the self. Otataral is the Other, perfect negation, absence. Together, otataral and sorcery form the dualism of the world and both are necessary.
Further, Sag'Churok claims that this is all intuitive understanding for most living things. It's only the ones with capacity for reason and self-awareness that deny this reality:
‘The lesser creatures of this and every other world do not question any of this. Their comprehension is implicit. When we kill the beasts living on this plain, when we close our jaws about the back of the neck. When we grip hard to choke off the wind pipe. When we do all this, we watch, with intimate compassion, with profound understanding, the light of life leave our victim’s eyes. We see the struggle give way to acceptance, and in our souls, Destriant, we weep.’
He says that the Otataral Dragon will be released on the world, unchained. "They" will seek to control it, but it can't be controlled. And then he asks for the face of the K'Chain Che'malle god, but Kalyth can't do it. She doesn't have faith in gods; they don't care about mortals.[5]
For the first time, Gunth Mach speaks to the Destriant and sends her into a vision where she sees the Otataral Dragon, still bound. She strives to make sense of it all. When the Otataral Dragon is free, the Other, the K'Chain god, might return, but to what end? There will be a return to war between life and death, sorcery and otataral, and there's still not place for mortals. And those mortals will just play out the same dualities they see, warring with one another.
She awakens. And she does indeed have a face to give them:
‘I give you this. Find your faith in each other. Look no further. The gods will war, and all that we do will remain beneath their notice. Stay low. Move quietly. Out of sight. We are ants in the grass, lizards among the rocks.’ She paused. ‘Somewhere, out there, you will find the purest essence of that philosophy. Perhaps in one person, perhaps in ten thousand. Looking to no other entity, no other force, no other will. Bound solely in comradeship, in loyalty honed absolute. Yet devoid of all arrogance. Wise in humility. And that one, or ten thousand, is on a path. Unerring, it readies itself, not to shake a fist at the heavens. But to lift a lone hand, a hand filled with tears.’ She found she was glaring at the giant reptiles. ‘You want a faith? You want someone or something to believe in? No, do not worship the one or the ten thousand. Worship the sacrifice they will make, for they make it in the name of compassion—the only cause worth fighting and dying for.’
The Che'malle will worship compassion. They set off to find a Mortal Sword and Shield Anvil.
The bodies of White Faces killed by Gu'rull return to camp in a wagon, spurring pandemonium. The Gadra are hell-bent on going to war against someone -- with the Akrynnai as the obvious target -- and Setoc wants nothing to do with it. Cafal has had no luck talking their warchief, Stolmen, out of his mistake.
Setoc, Cafal, and Torrent converge. They all plan to leave before all hell breaks loose. Torrent, last of the Awl, clearly sees the problem; it's the same one that killed his people. He plans to ride to Tool and ask forgiveness for getting Toc killed in his place and then just... leave.
Cafal offers to take Torrent by warren, but Setoc warns against it. The Barghast gods aren't strong enough. Talamandas insists it can be done, but Setoc argues it's been too long since the Barghast lived on these plains. She unleashes a... torrent... of admonishment against the stupid war, but that only serves to draw more attention their way. Stolmen's wife, Sekara the Vile,[6] nearly attacks the girl physically but her husband and Torrent intervene.
And we get our second version of female-on-female hate (the first was Shurq's "golden chains" way back in chapter 3):
Setoc had long sensed the animosity building among the women in this clan. She drew too many eyes among the men. Her wildness made them hungry, curious—she was not blind to any of this. Even so, this burst of spite startled her, frightened her. She forced herself to meet Sekara’s blazing eyes. ‘I am the holder of a thousand hearts.’ Saying this, she looked to Sekara’s husband and smiled a knowing smile.[7]
...
The mob had grown and now surrounded them. And, she saw at last, there were far more women than men in it. She felt herself withering beneath the hateful stares fixed upon her. Not just wives, either. That she was sitting snug against Torrent was setting fires in the eyes of the younger women, the maidens.
Cafal jumps in to get them out. Setoc tries to warn him against it one last time but it's too late. Talamandas ends up burnt to a crisp and the three travelers -- plus one horse[8] -- are trapped in a cave.
Or, as it turns out, a barrow. There are bats, indicating there must be some way out, and so Cafal and Torrent dig as Setoc pokes around as best she can. She finds a coin but Cafal doesn't recognize it.[9] They conclude that they are in another world, something Setoc already suspected from the absence of wolves in her mind.
They manage to scramble out, horse in tow. The stars, as expected, are unknown. Setoc can now tell that the wolves have been hunted to extinction, and she asks Cafal why in a quick exchange:
He shrugged. ‘We hate rivals, Setoc. We hate seeing the knowing burn in their eyes. You have not seen civilized lands. The animals go away. And they never return. They leave silence, and that silence is filled with the chatter of our kind. Given the ability, we kill even the night.’ His eyes fell to the lantern in her hand.
Scowling, she doused it.
In the sudden darkness, Torrent cursed. ‘That does not help, wolf-child. We light fires, but the darkness remains—in our minds. Cast light within and you will not like what you see.’
Alright, let's spend way too much time on three quick paragraphs, because the beauty of this book is in moments like this.[10]
- There's an obvious read here that calls back to the epigraph's "betrayal of the fittest" and the general extinction theme.
- We're clearly playing with different versions of the dualism from the last section: animal as Other to human, civilization as Other to wilderness, and the most directly Manichean reference we get in light as Other to darkness (or the other way around?).
- Back on the surface, we get mopey Torrent sounding like Hull Beddict without the classic Beddict eloquence. Or, more recently, Cutter walking the graveyard before he meets Challice while the surviving Bridgeburners are being slaughtered a few streets away.
- But then on the deeper level, Torrent has the same basic insight that Kalyth does: that duality isn't going away no matter what choices we make and we, as mortals, have to make due whether we like it or not. And at least we have the capacity to look at ourselves critically and make choices.
Back on track. Cafal can sense residual power and asks Setoc to help by gathering the ghost wolves to help open a portal back home. In exchange, they can come along as well and reunite with their living kin.[11] Against all odds, this works. The wolves are eager to gather and Cafal manages to open a tiny portal. And the wolves keep coming, enlarging the portal.
The ghost continues to shadow his dysfunctional band as they explore the Che'malle fortress, Taxillian and Rautos in the lead as Breath holds back and mutters about drowning.[12] The dynamics haven't really changed: Sheb and Nappet want to kill each other, Breath saves Rautos from a fall but says she regrets it, etc.
They come across some of the machinery of the keep. Taxillian declares it a sort of engine and wants to figure out what it's for and how it might work.[13] Last wants to get higher to check for tracks in the dust to verify that whatever killed the K'Chain Che'malle in the vestibule isn't still here.
The ghost knows the name of the keep: Kalse Rooted, a border keep.[14] And he knows that a Shi'gal killed the K'ell. And he knows that Kalse itself could be raised again if only Taxillian can figure out how.
Asane is dying (though the prognosis is not known, leading one to believe that her ailment is simply "growing older") and is horrified by this fact. She fears the inevitability of her death, but fears the slow decay of her mortal body more - it's only a matter of time until one wins out over the other.[15]
Last has a memory of accidentally crushing a nest of baby mice and only realizing it later, "like a god come too late". His father took him to his mother's "modest barrow" and sat together until the boy finally cried - for the mice, but his father didn't know that.
We get some backstory on Sheb -- extortion of a Hivanar merchant -- and Nappet -- beating his sister's husband nearly to death for beating her -- as they walk. Nappet is sure (correctly) that Sheb has spent time in prison and that the two of them will end up sleeping together whether entirely willing or not.[16]
Breath's background more or less confirms that she is Feather Witch if the casting and drowning wasn't enough. She thinks back on Udinaas:
And there was one man, maybe the only one among them all, who did not look on her with hunger. No, in his eyes there had been love. That real thing, that genuine thing that girls dreamed of finding. But he was lowborn. He was nothing. A mender of nets, a man whose red hands shed fish scales when he returned from his day’s work.
The tragedy was this, then. The girl had not yet found her Tiles. Had she done so early enough, she would have taken that man to her bed. She would have made him her first man. So that what was born between her legs was not born in pain. So that it would not become so dark in its delicious desires.
Before the Tiles, then, she had given herself to other men, unloving men. She’d given herself over to be used.
So that's all ridiculously tragic. In death, she now realizes what could have been.
Rautos thinks back on his marriage and the tragedy of its last few years. He regrets never learning to talk to her, to actually engage.[17]
Taxilian is sure that the keep is still alive on some level even though he can't find evidence of it. He can tell there are vast constructs at work, and thinks on the very idea of morality:[18]
Moral constructs—oh, they were a madman’s dreams, to be sure. Humans insisted on others behaving properly, but rarely forced the same standards upon themselves. Justifications dispensed with logic, thriving on opportunism and delusions of pious propriety.
As a child he had heard tales of heroes, tall, stern-faced adventurers who claimed the banners of honour and loyalty, of truthfulness and integrity. And yet, as the tales spun out, Taxilian would find himself assailed by a growing horror, as the great hero slashed and murdered his way through countless victims, all in pursuit of whatever he (and the world) deemed a righteous goal. His justice was sharp, but it bore but one edge, and the effort of the victims to preserve their lives was somehow made sordid, even evil.
But a moral machine, ah, would it not be forced by mechanics alone to hold itself to the same standard it set upon every other sentient entity? Immune to hypocrisy, its rule would be absolute and absolutely just.
A young man’s dreams, assuredly. Such a machine, he now knew, would quickly conclude that the only truly just act was the thorough annihilation of every form of intelligent life in every realm known to it. Intelligence was incomplete—perhaps it always would be—it was flawed. It could not distinguish its own lies from its own truths. Upon the scale of the self, they often weighed the same. Mistakes and malice were arguments of intent alone, not effect.[19]
And so we're back to the central issue of the chapter: the proper way to choose how to act.[20] Taxillian thinks there is an ancient truth to this place, one that might "awaken... perfection".[21]
The ghost is horrified. He can see that justice without compassion is "a slayer blind to empathy" (just in case you wondered if we were going to get a consistent lesson: yes, yes we are).
Oh, and we get a hell of a quick line:
And, the ghost now knew, he had a thing about time.
Twilight is in a bind. The Shake and some of the islanders have gathered together for protection from mobs of former prisoners angry at the idea of heading to an unknown land on a legendary road. There's active fighting and much of the island is on fire, and she's facing down a mob of at least a thousand rioters.
She hears an organized advance and a wedge of Letheri soldiers breaks through the mob -- led, of course, by Yedan Derryg. She goes to meet her brother, who urges her to use the last of the night to open the Road of Gallan. Yan Tovis agrees (very grudingly) and assigns Pithy and Brevity to help the Watch as she goes to talk to Pully and Skwish.[22]
Yan Tovis opens her forearms and drips blood into the shore. The witches soak in her blood[23] and a portal opens. The Shake and refugees begin to enter.
Yedan tries to convince Brevity to leave the defense to him and his troop but she and Pithy refuse. The mob advances and the troops begin a slaughter with a slow retreat to the portal behind them. As the troop reaches the portal, Pithy and Brevity and impressed:
‘We can get moving now,’ Brevity said, tugging at his shield arm. ‘We can just walk on through to . . . wherever. You, Watch, you need to be in charge of the Shake army, did you know that?’
‘The Shake have no army—’
‘They better get one and soon.’
‘Besides, I am an outlaw—I slaughtered—’
‘We know what you did. You’re an Errant-damned up-the-wall madman, Yedan Derryg. Best kinda commander an army could have.’
Pithy said, ‘Leave the petitioning to us, sweetie.’ And she smiled.
Yedan, last of all, walks onto the Road without looking back.[24] The portal closes, the Shake on the road to Kharkanas.
Badalle sits with Rutt, Saddic, and Brayderal. It was another hard day. The Snake is at the edge of the Glass Desert and there doesn't appear to be a way around. We get a full accounting of the book two name in case you were wondering:
Here, at the very edge of the Glass, there were only the opals—fat carrion beetles migrating in from the blasted, lifeless flanks to either side of the trail. And the diamonds—glittering spiked lizards that sucked blood from the fingertips their jaws clamped tight round every night—diamonds becoming rubies as they grew engorged. And there were the Shards, the devouring locusts sweeping down in glittering storms, stripping children almost where they stood, leaving behind snarls of rags, tufts of hair and pink bones.
In other words: not hospitable. Even the watering hole they found that day ended up killing a few of the children.
Saddic plans to record all of Badalle's poems and sayings. He adores her, which makes her sick in her present state of mind. She at least hopes that he will capture moments like this one with huge numbers of blank pages so that she can look at them, nod, and agree that was how it was.[25]
Brayderal breaks the silence. They have to go back. No one answers. Badalle hates her. She reminds Badalle of a Quitter.
Rutt responds without words, turning to the Glass Desert. They'll go in, regardless of the risk. There's simply no other choice.
Badalle leaves and Saddic follows. He knows she has a poem, which she does. It's... bleak. Saddic agrees not to put it on one of the blank pages and curls up to sleep at Badalle's feet. She dreams of eating his arms.
Notes
[1]: The fact that it's not great biology doesn't really bother me. Yes, we obviously get plenty of non-competitive interactions, but that's not what this book is about.
Crap biology aside, this echoes a particular sentiment from a wholly another book series, where it seems Steve expounds on a similar idea of, er, "betrayal of the fittest." (FYI, it's Kharkanas: Caplo & Resh in Chapter 9 of FoD, and Ivis in Chapter 13).
Yes, it's the first footnote in and I'm already plugging Kharkanas. Sue me.
[2]: Seriously, this whole passage wouldn't have been out of place in any of my (far too many) courses on religion and postmodernity.
[3]: Which is the godly equivalent of Cassa's "It is the stepping outside of oneself that gifts a mortal with (the) virtue (of compassion)." See House of Chains, Chapter 13, for more.
Interestingly, Cassa claims that "it's not the gods themselves that are important" right before this - so viewing Sag'Churok's words through a similar lens, this "omnipotent being" that must share its omnipotence is further abstracted, since Sag'Churok declares that "there can never be a single god", which raises the question: what value/virtue is granted by the god itself stepping outside itself?
Kalyth nails it later down the line in the "worship compassion" line. In case it wasn't obvious yet: I love Kalyth. Moving on.
[4]: I finally get to talk about this:
‘We are reviled for revealing the face of that other god—that god of negation.
[...]
If life is your god, then otataral is the other god, and that god is death. But, please understand, it is not an enemy. It is the necessary manifestation of a force in opposition. Both are essential, and together they are bound in the nature of existence itself. We are reviled for revealing the truth.
Fascinating K'Chain mysticism aside, what Sag'Churok is describing here is the flawed understanding that other races have about entropy. When the Sengar brothers visit the Stone Bowl and talk about how the K'Chain "set the world in a track towards annihilation" with metaphor and allegory about Light & Mother Dark & the like? That's what they're talking about.
And it irks me. I study this stuff for a living - I'm obviously biased - but pop science misunderstandings of the concept of entropy are the bane of my existence.
Sag'Churok at least approaches the reality of what entropy is in a better manner than Fear (at least as far as the allegory is concerned), but it still irks me.
Digression over, I just had to sit with this for four books, and it got to my head.
[5]: And she's clearly right. Even the most benevolent gods -- Mael, perhaps -- don't act in the name of mortals. The more malevolent ones want to wipe our mortals altogether, with the neutral ones in between just wanting to toy with them and use them to their own ends.
[6]: Might as well get used to these names. They'll come up quite a bit for awhile. And yes, Sekara has earned her honorific.
[7]: Friendly reminder that Stayandi was ten. Setoc is probably younger than Felisin was in Deadhouse Gates. In case you're wondering why Sekara is "vile."
[8]: Torrent has a bit of a fit about the horse -- and about the entire situation -- but it does seem like he's earned it. Bottom line: if he can't get the horse out, he'll stay in the barrow with her. Setoc, normally sympathetic to Torrent, even thinks how much easier it would be if they'd just eat the damn horse.
[9]: Reminder: the White Face make armor out of coins (or at least many of the tribes do, including Cafal's Senan). He's about as qualified as anyone to identify foreign currency, though it's at least a little funny to think of these hulking warriors as numismatists.
[10]: I'll be honest: I don't even love this section, but I swear you could do this almost cover to cover and this one is just so flagrant that it seems necessary.
[11]: We get several references here that lead one to believe that the group may have stumbled on our world. There are certainly examples of coins with crossed swords and a woman on them. The crossed swords and Seven Cities feel immediately evoke the crest of the House of Saud, though I'm quite certain they've never minted a coin with a woman's face on it for any number of reasons.
[12]: Shocking, I know, but at least she's consistent.
[13]: Indulge a chemistry nerd for a moment:
'... Even more relevantly, you can seal things and make use of alternating pressures, and so move things from one place to another. It’s a common practice in alchemy, especially if one conjures such pressures using heat and cold. I once saw a sorcerous invention that could draw the ether out of a glass jar, thus quenching the lit candle within it. A pump bound in wards was used to draw out the life force that exists in the air.’ He waved one hand at the towers. ‘Heat, cold—I think these are vast pressure chambers of some sort.’
Mention of ether (not the organic class of molecules, alas) and "sorcerous inventions" echoing Samar's... stuff quite interests me (even though it's probably all fictitious). Nonetheless, this "ether" isn't such an outlandish idea -- even for our world -- as it was believed to be a means through which light is propagated and whose existence was only disproven in the Michelson-Morley Experiment in the late 1880s. So props to the alchemists of the world of Malaz for at least entertaining the idea.
Taxilian is an architect & not an alchemist, so I'll forgive him the fact that he never replicated the effect of "burning all the oxygen within a jar" and instead attributed it to a "sorcerous device."
In any case: there's a clear steampunk aesthetic with the Che'Malle Keeps, which at least has some basis in reality.
[14]: That's two out of three "chained dragons in Emurlahn" as keeps, if you're counting.
[15]: This talk of decay & an "indifferent past" echoes aptly the ghost's own thoughts:
But with that release—for all she knew—all that she called herself would be lost. Asane would end. Cease, and that which was born from the ashes held no regard for the living left behind, no regard for that world of aches, pain, and suffering. It was transformed into indifference, and all that was past—all that belonged to the mortal life now done—meant nothing to it; she could not comprehend such a cruel rebirth.
That's the one-paragraph description of the ghost's own predicament. Apt.
[16]: Which - while, admittedly, yikes - is at least an interesting mention of the Letherii prison system. The Drownings are spectacle, but when you well & truly want to get rid of and dehumanise a convict, the quarries will most assuredly do them in.
[17]: I already talked about Asane mirroring the ghost, but Rautos does so as well:
As if . . . as if Rautos was losing his sense of himself, was losing talents he had long taken for granted. How could knowledge collapse so quickly? What was happening to him? Could the mind sink into a formless, unstructured thing to match the flesh that held it?
[18]: Though it does bear mentioning that Taxilian arrives at morality slowly, by first tackling the material problems of the world: transportation, a sense of immortality, the end of hunger, of poverty... before he arrives at more abstract concepts:
Creations... to crush avarice before it was born, to cast out cruelty and indifference, to defy every inequity and deny the lure of sadistic pleasure.
Which is fascinating because Taxilian never really thought this way. Granted, he was definitely fascinated by the materialist aspects of the world - it's what led him to observe the effects of Icarium's machine & his subsequent incineration - but his thoughts and dialogues with Samar never brought up such abstract concepts. "Avarice" and "inequity" can be justified by his time in Lether, as can "cruelty" and "sadistic pleasure" (see Feather Witch), but as he goes on?
These thoughts are much more akin to the Ghost's, rather than his, per se.
[19]: Taxilian dives headfirst into deontological arguments of morality. If he declared that his "moral machine" would "act only according to the maxim whereby it can at the same time will that it should become a universal law," I wouldn't be terribly surprised.
Though his version of deontology leads his argument down to a version of Forkrul-adjacent "justice" -- as in, Taxilian has made of justice an absolute thing, governed by determinist laws of "mechanics," which would inevitably conclude that "intelligence itself is flawed" and would therefore annihilate all intelligent life.
And because I can't help myself, fuck it, I'm quoting again:
Cogent reasoning could lead a man, step by logical step, into horror. (Seerdomin) now carried with him a list of names, the sordid details of a scheme to drive out the Tiste Andii, and while he knew it was destined to fail, to leave it free was to invite chaos and misery. And so he would have to kill again. Quietly, revealing nothing to anyone, for this was an act of shame. For his kind, for humans and their stupid, vicious inclinations.
Yet he did not want to be the hand of justice, for that hand was ever bloody and often indiscriminate, prone to excesses of all sorts.
This isn't the first exhibit of rebuttal of such absolutist approaches to the notion of justice (that'd be Silchas in Midnight Tides by my reckoning), and it most assuredly won't be the last.
In any case, as the ghost highlights later, the diegesis most assuredly does not agree with Taxilian (or the Forkrul, for that matter) and their approach to justice.
And here I get to plug Kharkanas again. Seriously, if this talk of "justice" even sounds remotely interesting, read Kharkanas.
[20]: Note that this question is independent of what choices are actually made. We're not asking about which acts are moral, just how to make choices themselves moral. It's an interesting distinction, one of learning to derive moral logic versus applying it in a vacuum.
[21]: In spite of his essentially espousing the genocide of all intelligent life, Taxilian himself remains fascinated by the potential of intelligence life, were it led by such a "moral machine" that didn't destroy it at the first chance it got.
There would always be violence, catastrophe, shortsighted stupidity, incompetence and belligerence. The meat of history, after all, was the flyblown legacy of such things.
And yet. And yet. The dragon is home to a city, the city that lives when not even echoes survive to walk its streets. Its very existence is a salutation.
There's a lot of room for nuance here, and - if the sheer amount of footnotes and quotes I've provided just for this passage alone is any indication - I really, really like it.
[22]: I told you keeping these four separate wasn't trivial.
Jests aside, Twilight has a very interesting monologue here:
The Road to Gallan. The road home. Ever leading me to wonder, why did we leave in the first place? What drove us from Gallan? The first shoreline? What so fouled the water that we could no longer live there?
Which feels like a question you should be asking before you're about to open your forearms and the portal itself, but what do I know.
[23]: It's not immediately clear, but the witches also draw power from Twilight. Royal blood isn't just some title here but something that holds very real magic.
Also, Twilight - again - has an excellent monologue:
This—this is what we leave. Remember that. From where she stood, she could not even see her brother.
No one need ever ask why we fled this world.
[...]
Darkness yawned. Impenetrable, a portal immune to the water that its lower end carved into.
The road home.
Weeping, Yan Tovis, Twilight, Queen of the Shake, pulled her arms loose from the witches’ grip, and lunged forward. Into the cold past.
Where none could hear her screams of grief.
In case it's also not immediately obvious, I really like Twilight.
I like a lot of characters in this book, alright?
[24]: Contrast this to Twilight not just looking behind but having to rationalise the fact that she's leaving behind the world she knows for another, with the only thing she knows about that other world is that her ancestors fled it.
Twilight is the Queen of the Shake, and so she needs to have these thoughts. She needs to look after her people, she needs to be indecisive, she needs to exhaust every other option.
Yedan is the Watch, and so he has no time for second-guessing himself. The Road is open, and we march.
[25]: This whole metaphor of blank pages is great. The austerity of a white page ruined by ink just works for the Snake. There's power in what's absent, what remains unsaid and Badalle knows it -- and wants to capture it.
Questions And Comments
- While Bottle certainly isn't an anthropologist, Erikson is, and it shows here (to add to all the other displays of his background). Bottle's haphazard explanation of "what happened to the Eres" is interesting enough unto its own and, combined with our knowledge of the history of the Imass (and, perhaps more pertinently to this book, the Barghast), paints a very fascinating picture of the early Malazan world. I don't really have anything to ask here, so I'll give you this: What do you make of the motivations of the Eres'al?
- I've already raved on long enough about Taxilian & the ghost, so bear with me. A common criticism of Erikson's writing is that "all the philosophy sounds the same," but - if nothing else - this chapter demonstrates how false that is; what Taxilian posits isn't immediately rebutted, and though the ghost disagrees, it falls to us to really make sense of it. His parts combined with Sinn's from the previous chapters beg the question: What do you think about all this?
- I already made my thoughts on Kalyth known in the summary, but god damn. This is the first time Kalyth starts to come into her own as Destriant of Ampelas Rooted, and it's glorious. Any candidates for the Mortal Sword & Shield Anvil that Kalyth seeks (reminder that the Mortal Sword was Redmask so reasonably it could be anybody).
- Yedan's a badass. That's it, that's the note. Also, this chapter is just about when people start to enjoy the Shake storyline.