Lyorn and Taskmaster
Taskmaster s17e3 -- SPOILERS right from the top I'm so glad my boy John finally won a thing! Maybe he can relax a little now XD (doubtful)
Prize task -- a bit relieved to see that Steve is not vastly overprepared for EVERY prize task and some of his are fairly shit XD John's elephant chair was glorious and he sold it well, so that definitely deserved 5 points. I'm very amused by the contrasting prizes of trough (Joanne) and automatic pet feeder (Sophie: "I thought it would be quite good for you. Just a little bit of discipline and structure in your life. [...] I was worried about fat shaming. I did asked the producer. They said, 'No, no, it's fine, he needs to hear it.'"), but am not surprised Greg picked the trough XD I didn't think Nick's was that much worse than Steve's, but I guess Greg is conditioned to give Nick low points by now.
Mr Blobby task -- it is dark sorcery or something that Joanne's apparently completely random questions approach and not knowing any of the animals (I mean, she did say she had very little animal experience) still led to her win somehow, and after she guessed Mr Blobby for the SECOND time. John's seemed to take forever, but I was glad that he got the 4 points, and also that there was method behind the madness of asking if it was a cable (because what else is not human or animal but has gender), and not him having some kind of breakdown. Both John and Steve had a pretty solid approach, and then we had Nick asking questions about everything in the universe (yep), and Sophie thinking she was playing a completely different game ("Have you used an Excel sheet?" "Have we been drunk together?") and then accidentally disqualifying herself by glimpsing the thing. Also, I enjoyed Steve and Sophie remarking on the weird bonnets, though Sophie did say the name of the book wrong, and Steve's was a deep pull with "Gilead". Oh, and Greg apparently doesn't know what an amphibian is either.
"Don't spill the baby" jobstacle course -- WELL DONE, JOHN for hacking that one! All that Taskmaster cramming is clearly paying off. Greg and Alex messing with him some more are going to give him an actual heart attack before episode 10 is done, aren't they... (His opening thing about imagining himself wearing a bulletproof vest gave me very strong Brooklyn Nine-Nine vibes, btw.) This was fairly entertaining to watch all around, especially as people were mopping Greg statue's shoes with spilled baby, LOL. I don't know how I feel about letting Steve get away with topping the baby off with the bottle, but it didn't say that was a disqualifiable offense/it wasn't straight-up cheating, and I guess they just couldn't accurately measure the spillage... And Steve was very cute with the baby, using his last 3 seconds to say "love you" to the baby. My favorite to watch in this task was Joanne, though, and her assorted comments about the patriarchy ("any excuse!"): “Daddy Horne outside doing fuck all.” and "There's a suffragette turning in her grave somewhere." Also, "least baby spilled" is just an incredible phrase. XD
Tension task -- I don't know if I should be concerned that my first thought was also tension in the purely physical sense, of force applied to an elastic, like John's. This was clearly not a winning strategy, but still. I was not super impressed with Steve's -- the production values were good, and the no vowels rule is legitimately a great addition, but it's just hangman -- until I saw the word he'd picked. ADJUTANT -- "means assistant". Nicely played! I don't really agree with Nick getting the same amount of points as Steve for the mess of eggs and wineglasses, but there was something to Greg's reasoning that in that case the tension came from being worried that someone was going to get hurt through Nick's incompetence. I'm not sure why Sophie's go-to for open-ended tasks is putting something on her head, and also what's with all the standing on one leg, but I'm very amused she tried to convince Greg about the tension in her attempt by making him sit on the floor. (Reddit mentioned this too, but I was definitely reminded of Bridget Christie in that moment.) Also, that cheer was at Sophie's cleavage, right? XD It's certainly worth a cheer. But, yeah, obviously Joanne takes this with her Sally Phillips approach to making Alex tense, and of course Greg loved that.
Studio task (catching monsters) -- cute and simple. Greg is clearly feeling generous towards the stragglers since he let Sophie have her floor monsters and did not disqualify Nick for cheating. I was very relieved that the late-breaking reveals were not about John after I concluded he had safely won.
This continues to be a very close series up top, with Steve, John, and Joanne. Per Ed's podcast, John and Steve are actually tied for first, with Joanne one point behind.
*
13. Steven Brust, Lyorn (Vlad Taltos #17) -- like the last couple, I read this one in <24 hours. I kept checking my email and Kindle app starting Monday night, and it appeared just after 9 p.m. my time. I was going to work the next day, so couldn't read as long as I wanted, but ended up getting to ~20% (and also 4 hours of sleep, AFTER I oversept by 25 min, lol), reading throughout my commute (which caused me to miss a stop once, almost miss a stop twice, and only did not miss another stop because I get off at the terminus, lol). So, it was certainly engrossing (also, qite a short book; 275 pages according to my Kindle), and a fun read, and it is doing a lot of interesting things, and setting up some big stuff (much more clearly than I expected at this juncture, tbh), and deploying an unprecedented amount of trolly references. I don't think it's going to be a personal favorite, and it's not a book I see myself needing to reread, except for a few sections to see if I can make any more sense of what people are thinking, lol. It's kind of like Vallista in that way -- structured around a conceit SKZB is having fun with, allowing Vlad to run around in a new milieu/genre, finding room to reveal a bunch of info important to the larger series. I enjoyed the ~heist at the climax. I enjoyed some unexpected cameos and some different-POV looks at familiar characters, but none of the theater people or other new characters stood out as a character to me (porbably because none of them were Dragonlords, lol), and I missed seeing more of -- I was going to say "my faves", but you all know what I mean by that XP (But I got Tsalmoth last year, so I can't complain.) SPOILERS from here!
I'm not a theater person, and was never even that close with any theater nerds or theater tech people, and I'm definitely not a musical person, so the conceit itself did not resonate with me particularly, but it is always interesting to see Vlad plunked down in a new to him environment and see what he makes of it. Do I buy that hiding out in a theater was the most logical place for Vlad to go to ground while trying to deal with the Left Hand? I emphatically do not. Yes, they are powerful sorcerecess, but we do in fact see later that the Left Hand is unwilling to tangle with Sethra, Morrolan, and Aliera, Vlad's powerful sorcerer friends. I suppose I could convince myself that *Vlad* does not realize this -- he explicitly thinks about how, unlike the Right Hand, he doesn't know how the Left Hand operates and so can't assess risk the same way -- and, well, the Right Hand *was* willing to tangle with Morrolan in Jhereg (albeit for much more universally important to the Organization reasons than a personal grudge). But it still feels like Brust decided he wanted Vlad to hide out in a theater and then tried to make the case for why that makes sense. I'm amused by the idea that powerful sorcery is being used to prevent plagiarism or whatever, but every time a new person learned where Vlad was hiding and went "ohh, that makes sense, clever!" (the Demon, or Zerika, e.g.), the more it felt like SKZB doing a hard sell on this arbitrary choice, which is not a complaint I usually have about his writing. But... given the Vlad hiding out in a theater premise, I did enjoy the new things Vlad got to learn, and the weird echoes he found to his previous experiences. First, one of my big delights with the series as a whole is the random worldbuilding of showing how various things would work in a world like Dragaera. So, the multi-day musicals -- duh, of course! I liked the idea of a six-sided stage, and the conventions about where which characters/things enter, and the sorcerer in charge of changing the color of the lights and also general sorcerous security being referred to as "Side Four" (because that side of the stage is the entrance for forces of nature, demons, and magic) I am surprised sorcery is not used for more things than just lights... it seems like it would be helpful for lots of special effects type stuff. Is it just traditional NOT to use it for anything else? Like, teleportation would help a lot with scene changes, you know? It was neat to see how Vlad related various experiences at the theater to bits of his past life -- how all the careful directing and blocking and order of things reminded him of setting up a hit; the "tension and then the release" of waiting to go on stage reminding him of doing witchcraft; being part of a group reminded me several times of being in the army in Dragon, including the fear of letting down people who are counting on you, but also more minor moments like food distribution en masse. And Vlad not being great at taking critique also felt spot on. Vlad going "We're all going to die" before the show, showing that he's assimilated into the theater troupe was a nice touch. It's an interesting point to see Vlad being pleasantly weirded out by people NOT being hostile or looking down on him when they first meet him, because theater folks all see themselves as outsiders, and so tend to be more open-minded about things, including Easterners. (Certainly, Vlad has made close friends among Dragaerans, but they accepted him after working side by side (his Jhereg) or intense shared experiences, so I can see this being different. Randomly: Vlad let them shave his mustache! I did not foresee that! (and now I want post-Lyorn fic of various friends of his reacting to his mustacheless appearance.) But it was interesting to see that even the outsider theater folks are still as completely dismissive of Tecklas as anyone else (when talking about a fire started when Side Four screwed up a light spell, "Anyone hurt?" "No. Killed a Teckla.")
When I saw from the blurb a little while ago that the book was set in a theater, I was quite confused by how that would relate to the eponymous House, since I associate theater quite strongly with Issola -- although looks like there were a lot of Tiassa (makes sense, too), Tsalmoth, and Chreotha involved. Which I suppose is less of a House skills/tendency thing and more of a class thing. But anyway, I was puzzled as to how Lyorn were going to enter into it at all, and looking back on it, it's still kind of tenuous, IMO. It does feel very, very fitting that the main Lyorn the book is about is a historical one -- the emperor in the play within a play, whom Vlad reads about in a history book (and some nice stuff in the introduction there about the inevitably biased nature of historical writing -- from another Hawk historian, I note). I really enjoyed the history book. Pseudo-historical writing is a strength of SKZB's, especially when it's not dressed up in flowery Paarfi nonsense (sorry, Paarfi!), and it was really neat to see, in snatches, how disparate forces and random missteps added up to a history -- and the ways in which that history was presented to the public consciousness, first in the original, contemporary play, then in the play about a play that the Crying Clown bunch are putting on. I hadn't really thought about censorship as something that would be very relevant to the house of Lyorn, but that makes a lot of sense, since it is about the tension between record-keeping and reputation. Speaking of reputation, I got very strong Vorkosigan Saga conversation about honor vs reputation vibes in the explanation between the two different types of honor Lyorn are concerned with (kitaweh and hijasik, "honor of the heart, honor of the eye"). Kitaweh, honor of the heart, "refers to integrity, to fulfilling promises, to accepting responsibility; that characteristic that any Dzurlord or Dragonlord would accept as honor". Hijasik is "the importance of appearing to act with honor," "It refers, first of all, to preserving the honor of the House, so that no enemy has grounds to criticize it; and second, to avoid acting in such a way as to appear to have been dishonorable, third, to maintain the traditions of the House and, in general, all traditions and customs deemed worth preserving; and, fourth, and most difficult, to not engage in actions that would force another to lose kitwaeh. There is also [...] the requirement to be gracious in victory, and graceful in defeat." And all that is really neat! Because Lyorn honor did feel different from Dzur and Dragonlord honor, if you look at the Paarfi books and compare, say, Aerich with Taz, Adron, Aliera, Morrolan, but I wouldn't have been able to put my finger on the distinction, and it's nice to have it isolated. I didn't really get much from the two present-day Lyorn characters, and I thought Vlad's plan hinging on the random Lyorn feeling duty-bound to prevent the killing of an unarmed Easterner by Jhereg was a little too cartoon logic. I mean, Lyorn are kind of cartoon logic, a lot of Dragaerans are, but IDK, it didn't feel terribly satisfying to me. And I was not really sure, while reading, what Vlad's connection to the House was in this case -- just understanding a lot more of his history? -- but with the very last paragraph, I guess it's also about how all of that history has led to the present circumstances where he cannot NOT take action, as much as he hates the thought of being used.
Oh, and it was interesting to have Zerika involved, however tangentially, in a book about a play about a tyrannical Emperor. I have noticed that Zerika seems particularly sensitive about being seen as tyrannical; the advocate mentions the events in South Adrilankha, but I always assumed it was just the difficulty of being a Phoenix Emperor following a Decadent Phoenix ones. And the events of the inciting incident in the play absolutely reminded me of Tirma/the events in Iorich, before the advocate raised that similarity. On a separate note, I'm amused to learn that Zerika likes musicals.
Right, so, the macro stuff, in terms of both world and series arc. Verra was talking about Jenoine-enforced stagnation of Dragaeran society and how Adron's Disaster broke that back in Vallista (very interesting discussion by sholio and others here and rachelmanija and others here), but her conversation with Vlad in this book makes it much clearer what-all is going on (at least to the extent that Verra a) accurately understands it and b) is telling Vlad the truth, which are significant caveats normally in this series, but I think we're close enough to the end that it's plausible it is fairly accurate. And this is also consistent with the Sethra POV scene, where she has gathered a bunch of the most powerful sorcerers she knows -- the Necromancer, Aliera, Morrolan, Sethra the Younger (who has apparently been sufficiently forgiven by Sethra, but the Sorceress in Green doesn't seem so buddy buddy with her anymore), the Sorceress in Green, and Telnan. (I note once again the absence of Kosadr, who is mentioned later in the book by the Left Hand ladies. What the hell is up with Kosadr? Does Sethra just not like him? Is Brust just trolling me personally? XD) -- and it looks like her little demonstration is also consistent with the Cycle being broken. Morrolan goes off to talk to Verra, and I wonder if he gets the same sort of explanation as Vlad does. So, listening to Verra's explanation, the first arc was the beginning of the Jenoine experiment. The second arc was Verra and "her sisters" escaping and creating the Great Sea of amorphia. The third arc was the creation of the Halls of Judgement. The fourth arc was Verra giving the e'Kieron line the ability to create amorphia. The fifth was Verra messing with the Cycle by leading to the creation of the Jhereg (and Devera tapping Dolivar/Vlad for that role). Verra says that Adron's Disaster "marked the point where that last arc, the creation of the Cycle, ended" -- this is consistent with what she says in Vallista, too, that the Cycle was broken then, they just weren't sure yet. And, the Jhereg were instrumental to Adron's Disaster, right? Because it was Mario assassinating Tortaalik at the same time as Adron cast his spell to wrest the Orb from him that created the "divide by zero" error that led to the Disaster. And/but Mario was only involved because of Aliera -- and it was the insult to Aliera that got Adron sufficiently riled up to take action, too -- and of course Verra had more than a little to do with Aliera's existence. Verra says Adron's disaster also ends the fourth arc (e'Kieron amorphia creation) -- I guess that also has played its role? The Halls of Judgement apparently also served their purpose when Zerika retrieved the Orb from there, so that's the closing of arc 3. The second arc, Verra says, ends with the battle against a Jenoine in Issola and the creation of Godslayer. It's interesting that these are nested arcs -- Adron's Disaster ends the fifth and fourth simultaneously, then the third ends ~250 years later when Zerika ends the Interregnum, then Issola and Godslayer end the second another ~250 years after that. So I guess there remains whatever will close the original Jenoine experiment arc (by breaking it irreparably like Verra wants), which presumably will take place in The Last Contract. I think this was the first time we got explicit confirmation that Godslayer is meant to slay specifically Verra? And also the first insight into Verra's motivations for what she is doing to thwart the Jenoine (firstly, to get the Jenoine to bugger off for good, second out of spite, and third because the Jenoine experiment is "profoundly evil"). I actually don't really care about the macro world implications, so my main hope in all this is that the characters I care about come through the end of the series OK.
Speaking of that, I spent a large chunk of the book afraid that something terrible was going to happen to Kragar -- either he was going to die, or his kid would -- just, we were getting all this Kragar detail all of a sudden, and, you know, Issola being a thing... -- and also there was a line about how in musicals "the lightness lets it come up under your guard" (which possibly was specifically meant to make the reader worried about something like that, knowing Brust). So, it was a big relief that Deragar was rescued and Kragar was OK, and hopefully he and Vlad go get that drink together once he's had a chance to sleep a bit. I'm still kind of trying to wrap my brain about Kragar being a widower (and that his wife was an artist, Jhereg but with no ties to the Organization) and having a son, and I'm still intensely curious about what his history with Aliera is -- is he an ex-e'Kieron and she, and Morrolan, part of that family who don't acknoweldge him? And it was also interesting to have Kragar say, to Vlad's attempts to, what, tell Kragar he'd understand if Kragar wanted to turn him in to save his kid? -- "Vlad, you probably know what it means that I was born into the House of the Dragon." "Um, I think so, yeah." "I still have that in me." "I know." "It seems like Caola doesn't. And however this goes, she's going to find out." You will all be completely unsurprised that I am extremely here for the opportunity for Kragar to get back in touch with his Dragon roots. I'm not sure if there will be opportunity for him to do so in The Last Contract, since the Caola problem seems to be sorted, but I liked that hint. And in general, it was nice to meet Deragar properly, and to get a look at Kragar from the POV of someone other than Vlad.
Speaking of POVs other than Vlad -- I guess that's a thing we're doing now? I mean, I wasn't complaining when it was Morrolan in Tsalmoth! And I'm not complaining now -- I enjoyed getting Sethra's very unexpected POV and learning that she doesn't like being the center of attention; I enjoyed getting Daymar's POV (and, I know people who read him as on the spectrum before, and his own POV definitely seems to support that reading, what with behaving politely to people being a strain he's aware of and so on, and also I find it adorable that he thinks of himself as a desecrator first and the psionics just as a side hobby and being sad that people only seem to value him for the latter); it was interesting to see the Demon without a filter of Paarfi nonsense (and he's got a theater now. Good for him XD) I also appreciated the various random Jhereg and theater people POVs, just for local color. One thing that jumped out at me was how much these random people use nicknames/shortened forms of names (e.g. Derr for Deragar, Loni for Lonora, Desi for Desentin), which does not appear to be a thing among Vlad's high-born friends (outside of Devera referring to Morrolan as Uncle Rollan). Anyway, I don't mind all the extra POVs, but I do feel like the reason for getting them all of a sudden is contrived -- that Vlad's (recovered) demon nature gives him head-jumping powers -- but not in any useful way. It does make me wonder, though: is that whose POV Tiassa 2 is from? That is, Daro-filtered-through-Vlad? (he would've had to have gotten it after Hawk, but Sethra does say it can be things in the past). Verra does say that these dreams/visions can be false (from, like, parallel universes where things happen differently, maybe?), so there's still that unreliability.
Oh right, and we get a full-fledged Teldra POV, but that's obviously a different thing entirely. We get a brief lecture on the Lyorn from Lady Teldra, but one bit in her POV really gave me pause: "Honor. A concept I had never before had cause to consider." Really, while being Morrolan's senechal (and etiquette teacher, essentially) for a couple of hundred years? She thinks later that "Honor means something different to every House" (and its origins via commerce and borrowing, so that the Jhereg and the Orca use it in its oldest, purest form), so maybe what she means is that she never had to consider honor more deeply than a Dragonlord would consider it? But it still seems like a very odd thing to encounter in her POV of all people...
It's interesting to read a late Vlad book right on the heels of an early Vald book like Tsalmoth. Right, Cawti made him go to the theater as well as read books. But even more relevant and explicit is Vlad not just reflecting on how much he's changed viz reaching for violence, which he's been doing since ~Dzur, but sort of worred about whether he can be that person anymore, the violent thug. Good news, he certainly still can! And him squaring off with Striker and threatening Montorri over extortion of the actors, all for a good cause, was all very satisfying to read about. And Vlad joking about understudies was pretty funny.
I talked about the theater as a thing Vlad experiences, and I talked about the history behind the play, but let me now talk about the play itself as a thing, starting with the epigraphs. Like, am I surprised that Brust decided to write 19 Dragaeran filks of songs from musicals? I am totally not surprised, because I know he posts filks, and a man who would pastiche The Three Musketeers is absolutely a man who would filk Gilbert & Sullivan. I am a bit surprised he convinced people to publish them as part of a novel, but more power to him, I guess. I only recognized a couple -- "The Modern Major-General" by osmosis, and "My Favorite Things" and "Sunrise, Sunset". I was looking for a Hamilton song but did not spot it (I have not listened to Hamilton, but I've heard several of the songs, although maybe not this one), and totally failed to recognize the songs from Guys & Dolls and West Side Story (which I've seen in one form or another), and most embarrassingly, the song from BtVS "Once More with Feeling" -- and I KNOW SKZB is a huge Whedon fan, so I should've known to be on the lookout for something from there. The filks are fine? I liked the "Modern Major-General" -- I mean, the Fourtheenth Cycle dramaturge -- one the most, I think, because I like patter songs and they are most interesting to filk. I don't think any of them add deeply to the narrative, but I didn't think the punny Gothics titles in Vallista added deeply to the narrative, either. My favorite thing about the whole play was the existence of the in-play character "Lethra Savode". Of course thinly fictionalized Sethra would be a character in historical plays! Clearly the thing I was missing in my Sethra watches the soaps fic was Sethra watching a soapy historical drama and having to contend with Lethra Savode being part of the soapy action XD
Character things: I find Sara SO DULL, and am negative amounts of invested in the progression of her and Vlad's relationship. (I am, however, glad to see that Vlad and Cawti are less fraught together.) I got one (1) scene with Morrolan, in which he says one (1) thing, because SKZB does not want me to be happy. But he was mentioned a few more times, as Vlad thinks about him approving of Vlad's playing-a-Dragonlord-guard marching. Vlad also mentions not being the best witch and listing the Warlock and Morrolan as people who are better. Leaving aside the fact that Noish-Pa should obviously also be on that list, I continue to be hugely amused by Vlad's admission that Morrolan is better than him at witchcraft, in light of Morrolan asking him for witchy advice in the early books. I'm just going to keep with my theory that this was the equivalent of the nerdy girl who asks her crush to tutor her in math despite secretly having a higher grade than him. Oh, also, Vlad amuses himself by thinking that Verra's double doors that wing open is a trick she had gotten from Morrolan rather than vice versa; in fact Paarfi suggests that Morrolan got it from Sethra, and in this case it amuses me to both believe Paarfi and further conclude that Verra got it from Sethra, too. There was also not that much present-day Sethra, but I'm glad she got to do something she's never done before (I am surprised there are still magical things she hasn't done before, especially things that sound relatively simple in concept, but magic *is* evolving as we have seen, and things that are simple in concept are often very hard to actually do, so I can accept that). And reforming the Lavodes! I am less excited about the Lavodes as a thing than a lot of Dragaera fans, but it's still need to get to that point, and to know that Aliera is one of the first to be approached. (And Telnan, but I was fully expecting that's what Sethra was doing with Telnan.) I wonder if Aliera accepting the uniform means she has to give up any Imperial military responsibilities, or if she never picked any back up after Iorich...
Random things:
A Lochran wall is something that Morrolan recognizes by sight and Telnan at least knows the term. Telnan thinks it's something to do with predicting the future, but it's actually for revealing "hidden things about the present [...] that are tangled in strands of destiny and choice, fate and possibility." So it does seem like some kind of probabilistic prediction thing?
Dragaerans invest in things via "sticks" (...is that a pun on stocks? XD) -- the whole broken into 17 parts, of course, so each stick is 1/17 of the investment.
Rehearsal in progress is denoted by a hanging green cloth. The dancing numbers in theater come from when early Issola dancers formalized traditional Teckla dances. The sides of the stage: side one is for love interest and family, side two is for the hero, side three is for gods, fate and the emperor, side four is for magic, demons, and forces of nature, side five is for the enemy, side six is for the moral center. (And "side seven" is the equivalent of backstage, I guess. And clapping by "slapping the sticks" ("clackers"), which can be kept as souvenirs of the play (Cawti collects them) -- I wonder if that's an actual tradition from somewhere.
I still get a kick out of Dragaeran titles of office (in translation), especially ones that have a gender marker that does not match the gender of the office holder (e.g. Thalick the Lyorn introducing himsels as "the First Lady of Arms for Prince Yeselik, Lyorn Heir" and whatever the hell "The Lord of the Stool" is XD (in the play).
The custom of dueling (according to Teldra) began with the Lyorn in the Third Cycle, and from there developed by the Tiassa (huh! because it required some imagination to formalize? that surprises me, though...), the Dragons and the Dzur. As of the Eighth Cycle, the Orca, Jhereg, Tsalmoth, Chreotha, Jhegaala, and of course Teckla, "even when at the top of the Cycle" are considered to be "unworthy to issue a challenge to or accept a challenge from".
Vlad is afraid of heights, becasue he's got that impulse to jump (I'm actually not surprised). And also has stage fright, I guess, but it sounds like even Sethra doesn't like being the center of attention... (contrasted with the Tiassa actor's singer friend who decided that since he was one of those people who go through life saying, 'Look at me, look at me!' "he owed it to anyone who looked to make sure there was something worth looking at." <-- which is such a Humanist (from Terra Ignota) approach, heh.) Which, the conversation with the Tiassa where he doesn't get scared by Vlad's threat makes Vlad reflect that, "I guess if you're going to get up in front of a thousand people and take the chance of making an idiot of yourself: it takes either guts or that thing Dzurlords have instead, that thing where you just don't care what happens." -- and there are a couple of things about that. First, I'm not at all surprised that Vlad is scared of looking like an idiot in front of people more than the average person; that's always been one of his buttons (the scene afterwards, where he reflects on being scared of admitting to Cawti he's been scared, supports that, too). But second, the distinction between courage and "that thing Dzurlords have" is also interesting... And that Vlad understands/thinks there's such a distinction. It makes me want to reread Dzur from the point of view of being in a "just don't care" frame of mind (and it makes sense that this comes to an end when Vlad learns he has a child).
It's kind of interesting to see just how little the Right Hand and the Left Hand of the Jhereg know how the other side runs their organization. Vlad doesn't really know what the Left Hand customs are, and Kragar's people don't seem to know how the Left Hand are organized (that there are no territories as such, just sort of alliances). Nikka doesn't know how to refer to Kragar's people -- "all your vassals -- or whatever you call them" (Kragar tells her "let's go with minions"). And I was surprised, but I guess shouldn't have been, that both sides seem only too happy to completely destroy the other side in an all out war.
I'm sure this also came up in Iorich, but I forgot: the equivalent of "The People v" in Dragaera is "The Orb vs" (or in the case here, "[someone] vs The Orb"
Series continuity: I was wondering at the end of Tsalmoth how much of Vlad's demon nature others remembered. It sounds from the conversation in this one that Cawti remembered Vlad was a demon, but maybe had some perceptions/connection making abilities messed with, but also Sethra told her Vlad didn't want to know about it. I assume that Vlad's other friends who knew, like Aliera and Morrolan, also got the same talk? and possibly the same whatever-it-was affecting them... And Noish-Pa, who I forgot had known about the demon thing.
OK, but so where does all this leave us? I was surprised that this book seems to be leading quite directly into the final conflict in The Last Contract, since Vlad's remaining troubles with the Left Hand (or at least D'nilla's faction) and the worldscale conflict with the Jenoine are revealed to be linked. So where does that leave Chreotha? Before this book came out, I was assuming that Lyorn would see Vlad learning some stuff about his past (which he did, kind of, but it was just the one conversation with Verra), and Chreotha would be the book which lined up the dominoes for the final conflict, because that seems what a Chreotha book wold be for. But the dominoes seem to all be lined up already, and set up to be resolved in the last book. So is Chreotha just going to be a random Vlad story jumping back in time, maybe filling in any gaps that The Last Contract requires? (It doesn't seem like Brust has said anything about when Chreotha is set.)
Random things AROUND the book: Whatever page my Kindle app opened the book to, I missed the dedication to John M. Ford until I saw it in someone else's post, and when I went looking for it, I also found "Author's Note" with "Content warning: snark, irony, self-referential humor". Which I guess is one way to snark about content notes. I'm not a fan of content notes in books (though I do think it's fine/nice if a writer wants to write up their content warnings somehwere separate from the book where people can find them if they want to. Or, of course, do what Ada Palmer did and have in-universe content notes, although I'm not convinced they are useful as such), but also you just don't have to use them if you don't want to. I'm not sure snarking about it does anything beneficial. Though come to think of it, there's actually not that many content warnings that would apply to this book specifically. There are tense situations and the threat of violence, but nothing worse than a slap actually happens on-page in terms of physical violence, and Deragar is drugged and kidnapped, but comes out of it OK. This is downright wholesome by fantasy standards! Well, outside of the historical events, which feature wars, a massacre of troops who had surrendered, imprisonment and execution under false pretenses, and also everything that had happened during Adron's Disaster.
Quotes:
"If I had to guess, I'd say you could fit at least a thousand people in it, but I'm terrible at estimating things like that, so I could be wrong." [Thanks, Vlad. That's super helpful information XD]
re: the Battle of the Cliffs: "Envisca e'Terics, who is supposed to have, on ordering her battalion forward, pointed to Deathgate Falls and said, 'Don't worry, my loves. If it should go badly, at least we're close by.' Most historians doubt this tale, because, in fact, Dethgate Falls is several hundred miles south of the site of the battle and couldn't be seen from there, but the story persists."
"See, that's what happens when you do things: things happen."
"a meeting like this always has the danger of starting something that ends with damaging someone's outfit and making more work for the embalmers."
re: coming face to face with a god: "I guess for Dragaerans, it's more like something you put on your to-do list between shopping for oysters and kicking beggars."
"I hesitated, trying to figure out what I was feeling, which has never been one of my skills." [You don't say XD]
"No way was I letting Kragar down. I wasn't excited about letting them kill me either. I mean, not only would that mean I let them win, but I'd also be dead. That means no more klava." [This is so much Vlad in a nutshell, I love it.]
"Loiosh and Rocza seemed to enjoy their pieces of kethna ["that was too tough, too fatty, and too salty"] but I'm pretty sure that was more for the challene than the flavor."
"I carefully hung p the Dragonlord on the hook on the door, and donned my old self again." <-- instant flash to sysann's fic XD
Vlad: "There you are. Full payment in advance."
"Well. You're a trusting soul, aren't you?"
"No."
He glanced down at the steel hanging from my belt, and nodded."
"But I'm an Easterner who used to be a Jhereg; we don't find metaphors, we just sell onions."
"The expressions on the faces of those around me reflected not what I was feeling, but my efforts not to show what I was feeling."
"I [...] slowly felt myself relax to the soothing voice in my head of Loiosh chewing me ot (literally, at one point)." <3
"And I could change that, I could give an entire world, each person, a freedom none of them knew they didn't have."
**
Brust has helpfully provided links to the sources for the filks here (spoilery discussion of the book in comments). Sounds like some of those links are geo-locked, though, so for anyone who can't see them, here's the list: spoilers? if you want to figure it out for yourself?
Prologue - Modern Major-General | The Pirates of Penzance (amusingly, I went looking for other versions because I thought there was a Simpsons one -- there isn't, I think, there's a Family Guy one, but the thing I'd been thinking of, with Sideshow Bob singing, is actally H.M.S.Pinafore -- YouTube decided that I just want all the versions of Modern Major General now, and supplied me with one performed by Alexander Armstrong (whom I know solely from Pointless, via Britcom people. It's all connected!)
Chapet 1 -- My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music
Chapter 2 -- Cabaret from Cabaret
Chapter 3 -- Sunrise, Sunset from Fiddler on the Roof
Chapter 4 -- The Music Man "Seventy-Six Trombones"
Chapter 5 -- West Side Story - Gee Officer Krupke!
Chapter 6 -- "Save the City" - Rogers: The Musical
Chapter 7 -- "Hello, Dolly!" from Hello, Dolly
Chapter 8 -- Pinball Wizard (apparently from rock opera Tommy?)
Chapter 9 -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer - Going Through The Motions
Chapter 10 -- "Shall We Dance" from The King and I
Chapter 11 -- A Bushel and a Peck (From "Guys and Dolls")
Chapter 12 -- Rocky Horror Picture Show-Bless my soul
Chapter 13 - What comes next? - Hamilton
Chapter 14 - The Wizard Of Oz - If I only had a Brain
Chapter 15 -'The flowers that bloom in the spring' - The Mikado
Chapter 16 - There's No Business Like Show Business - Annie Get Your Gun
Chapter 17 - Age of Aquarius from Hair
Encore - Call the Understudy (I Can't Go On Tonight) from Slings and Arrows
Prize task -- a bit relieved to see that Steve is not vastly overprepared for EVERY prize task and some of his are fairly shit XD John's elephant chair was glorious and he sold it well, so that definitely deserved 5 points. I'm very amused by the contrasting prizes of trough (Joanne) and automatic pet feeder (Sophie: "I thought it would be quite good for you. Just a little bit of discipline and structure in your life. [...] I was worried about fat shaming. I did asked the producer. They said, 'No, no, it's fine, he needs to hear it.'"), but am not surprised Greg picked the trough XD I didn't think Nick's was that much worse than Steve's, but I guess Greg is conditioned to give Nick low points by now.
Mr Blobby task -- it is dark sorcery or something that Joanne's apparently completely random questions approach and not knowing any of the animals (I mean, she did say she had very little animal experience) still led to her win somehow, and after she guessed Mr Blobby for the SECOND time. John's seemed to take forever, but I was glad that he got the 4 points, and also that there was method behind the madness of asking if it was a cable (because what else is not human or animal but has gender), and not him having some kind of breakdown. Both John and Steve had a pretty solid approach, and then we had Nick asking questions about everything in the universe (yep), and Sophie thinking she was playing a completely different game ("Have you used an Excel sheet?" "Have we been drunk together?") and then accidentally disqualifying herself by glimpsing the thing. Also, I enjoyed Steve and Sophie remarking on the weird bonnets, though Sophie did say the name of the book wrong, and Steve's was a deep pull with "Gilead". Oh, and Greg apparently doesn't know what an amphibian is either.
"Don't spill the baby" jobstacle course -- WELL DONE, JOHN for hacking that one! All that Taskmaster cramming is clearly paying off. Greg and Alex messing with him some more are going to give him an actual heart attack before episode 10 is done, aren't they... (His opening thing about imagining himself wearing a bulletproof vest gave me very strong Brooklyn Nine-Nine vibes, btw.) This was fairly entertaining to watch all around, especially as people were mopping Greg statue's shoes with spilled baby, LOL. I don't know how I feel about letting Steve get away with topping the baby off with the bottle, but it didn't say that was a disqualifiable offense/it wasn't straight-up cheating, and I guess they just couldn't accurately measure the spillage... And Steve was very cute with the baby, using his last 3 seconds to say "love you" to the baby. My favorite to watch in this task was Joanne, though, and her assorted comments about the patriarchy ("any excuse!"): “Daddy Horne outside doing fuck all.” and "There's a suffragette turning in her grave somewhere." Also, "least baby spilled" is just an incredible phrase. XD
Tension task -- I don't know if I should be concerned that my first thought was also tension in the purely physical sense, of force applied to an elastic, like John's. This was clearly not a winning strategy, but still. I was not super impressed with Steve's -- the production values were good, and the no vowels rule is legitimately a great addition, but it's just hangman -- until I saw the word he'd picked. ADJUTANT -- "means assistant". Nicely played! I don't really agree with Nick getting the same amount of points as Steve for the mess of eggs and wineglasses, but there was something to Greg's reasoning that in that case the tension came from being worried that someone was going to get hurt through Nick's incompetence. I'm not sure why Sophie's go-to for open-ended tasks is putting something on her head, and also what's with all the standing on one leg, but I'm very amused she tried to convince Greg about the tension in her attempt by making him sit on the floor. (Reddit mentioned this too, but I was definitely reminded of Bridget Christie in that moment.) Also, that cheer was at Sophie's cleavage, right? XD It's certainly worth a cheer. But, yeah, obviously Joanne takes this with her Sally Phillips approach to making Alex tense, and of course Greg loved that.
Studio task (catching monsters) -- cute and simple. Greg is clearly feeling generous towards the stragglers since he let Sophie have her floor monsters and did not disqualify Nick for cheating. I was very relieved that the late-breaking reveals were not about John after I concluded he had safely won.
This continues to be a very close series up top, with Steve, John, and Joanne. Per Ed's podcast, John and Steve are actually tied for first, with Joanne one point behind.
*
13. Steven Brust, Lyorn (Vlad Taltos #17) -- like the last couple, I read this one in <24 hours. I kept checking my email and Kindle app starting Monday night, and it appeared just after 9 p.m. my time. I was going to work the next day, so couldn't read as long as I wanted, but ended up getting to ~20% (and also 4 hours of sleep, AFTER I oversept by 25 min, lol), reading throughout my commute (which caused me to miss a stop once, almost miss a stop twice, and only did not miss another stop because I get off at the terminus, lol). So, it was certainly engrossing (also, qite a short book; 275 pages according to my Kindle), and a fun read, and it is doing a lot of interesting things, and setting up some big stuff (much more clearly than I expected at this juncture, tbh), and deploying an unprecedented amount of trolly references. I don't think it's going to be a personal favorite, and it's not a book I see myself needing to reread, except for a few sections to see if I can make any more sense of what people are thinking, lol. It's kind of like Vallista in that way -- structured around a conceit SKZB is having fun with, allowing Vlad to run around in a new milieu/genre, finding room to reveal a bunch of info important to the larger series. I enjoyed the ~heist at the climax. I enjoyed some unexpected cameos and some different-POV looks at familiar characters, but none of the theater people or other new characters stood out as a character to me (porbably because none of them were Dragonlords, lol), and I missed seeing more of -- I was going to say "my faves", but you all know what I mean by that XP (But I got Tsalmoth last year, so I can't complain.) SPOILERS from here!
I'm not a theater person, and was never even that close with any theater nerds or theater tech people, and I'm definitely not a musical person, so the conceit itself did not resonate with me particularly, but it is always interesting to see Vlad plunked down in a new to him environment and see what he makes of it. Do I buy that hiding out in a theater was the most logical place for Vlad to go to ground while trying to deal with the Left Hand? I emphatically do not. Yes, they are powerful sorcerecess, but we do in fact see later that the Left Hand is unwilling to tangle with Sethra, Morrolan, and Aliera, Vlad's powerful sorcerer friends. I suppose I could convince myself that *Vlad* does not realize this -- he explicitly thinks about how, unlike the Right Hand, he doesn't know how the Left Hand operates and so can't assess risk the same way -- and, well, the Right Hand *was* willing to tangle with Morrolan in Jhereg (albeit for much more universally important to the Organization reasons than a personal grudge). But it still feels like Brust decided he wanted Vlad to hide out in a theater and then tried to make the case for why that makes sense. I'm amused by the idea that powerful sorcery is being used to prevent plagiarism or whatever, but every time a new person learned where Vlad was hiding and went "ohh, that makes sense, clever!" (the Demon, or Zerika, e.g.), the more it felt like SKZB doing a hard sell on this arbitrary choice, which is not a complaint I usually have about his writing. But... given the Vlad hiding out in a theater premise, I did enjoy the new things Vlad got to learn, and the weird echoes he found to his previous experiences. First, one of my big delights with the series as a whole is the random worldbuilding of showing how various things would work in a world like Dragaera. So, the multi-day musicals -- duh, of course! I liked the idea of a six-sided stage, and the conventions about where which characters/things enter, and the sorcerer in charge of changing the color of the lights and also general sorcerous security being referred to as "Side Four" (because that side of the stage is the entrance for forces of nature, demons, and magic) I am surprised sorcery is not used for more things than just lights... it seems like it would be helpful for lots of special effects type stuff. Is it just traditional NOT to use it for anything else? Like, teleportation would help a lot with scene changes, you know? It was neat to see how Vlad related various experiences at the theater to bits of his past life -- how all the careful directing and blocking and order of things reminded him of setting up a hit; the "tension and then the release" of waiting to go on stage reminding him of doing witchcraft; being part of a group reminded me several times of being in the army in Dragon, including the fear of letting down people who are counting on you, but also more minor moments like food distribution en masse. And Vlad not being great at taking critique also felt spot on. Vlad going "We're all going to die" before the show, showing that he's assimilated into the theater troupe was a nice touch. It's an interesting point to see Vlad being pleasantly weirded out by people NOT being hostile or looking down on him when they first meet him, because theater folks all see themselves as outsiders, and so tend to be more open-minded about things, including Easterners. (Certainly, Vlad has made close friends among Dragaerans, but they accepted him after working side by side (his Jhereg) or intense shared experiences, so I can see this being different. Randomly: Vlad let them shave his mustache! I did not foresee that! (and now I want post-Lyorn fic of various friends of his reacting to his mustacheless appearance.) But it was interesting to see that even the outsider theater folks are still as completely dismissive of Tecklas as anyone else (when talking about a fire started when Side Four screwed up a light spell, "Anyone hurt?" "No. Killed a Teckla.")
When I saw from the blurb a little while ago that the book was set in a theater, I was quite confused by how that would relate to the eponymous House, since I associate theater quite strongly with Issola -- although looks like there were a lot of Tiassa (makes sense, too), Tsalmoth, and Chreotha involved. Which I suppose is less of a House skills/tendency thing and more of a class thing. But anyway, I was puzzled as to how Lyorn were going to enter into it at all, and looking back on it, it's still kind of tenuous, IMO. It does feel very, very fitting that the main Lyorn the book is about is a historical one -- the emperor in the play within a play, whom Vlad reads about in a history book (and some nice stuff in the introduction there about the inevitably biased nature of historical writing -- from another Hawk historian, I note). I really enjoyed the history book. Pseudo-historical writing is a strength of SKZB's, especially when it's not dressed up in flowery Paarfi nonsense (sorry, Paarfi!), and it was really neat to see, in snatches, how disparate forces and random missteps added up to a history -- and the ways in which that history was presented to the public consciousness, first in the original, contemporary play, then in the play about a play that the Crying Clown bunch are putting on. I hadn't really thought about censorship as something that would be very relevant to the house of Lyorn, but that makes a lot of sense, since it is about the tension between record-keeping and reputation. Speaking of reputation, I got very strong Vorkosigan Saga conversation about honor vs reputation vibes in the explanation between the two different types of honor Lyorn are concerned with (kitaweh and hijasik, "honor of the heart, honor of the eye"). Kitaweh, honor of the heart, "refers to integrity, to fulfilling promises, to accepting responsibility; that characteristic that any Dzurlord or Dragonlord would accept as honor". Hijasik is "the importance of appearing to act with honor," "It refers, first of all, to preserving the honor of the House, so that no enemy has grounds to criticize it; and second, to avoid acting in such a way as to appear to have been dishonorable, third, to maintain the traditions of the House and, in general, all traditions and customs deemed worth preserving; and, fourth, and most difficult, to not engage in actions that would force another to lose kitwaeh. There is also [...] the requirement to be gracious in victory, and graceful in defeat." And all that is really neat! Because Lyorn honor did feel different from Dzur and Dragonlord honor, if you look at the Paarfi books and compare, say, Aerich with Taz, Adron, Aliera, Morrolan, but I wouldn't have been able to put my finger on the distinction, and it's nice to have it isolated. I didn't really get much from the two present-day Lyorn characters, and I thought Vlad's plan hinging on the random Lyorn feeling duty-bound to prevent the killing of an unarmed Easterner by Jhereg was a little too cartoon logic. I mean, Lyorn are kind of cartoon logic, a lot of Dragaerans are, but IDK, it didn't feel terribly satisfying to me. And I was not really sure, while reading, what Vlad's connection to the House was in this case -- just understanding a lot more of his history? -- but with the very last paragraph, I guess it's also about how all of that history has led to the present circumstances where he cannot NOT take action, as much as he hates the thought of being used.
Oh, and it was interesting to have Zerika involved, however tangentially, in a book about a play about a tyrannical Emperor. I have noticed that Zerika seems particularly sensitive about being seen as tyrannical; the advocate mentions the events in South Adrilankha, but I always assumed it was just the difficulty of being a Phoenix Emperor following a Decadent Phoenix ones. And the events of the inciting incident in the play absolutely reminded me of Tirma/the events in Iorich, before the advocate raised that similarity. On a separate note, I'm amused to learn that Zerika likes musicals.
Right, so, the macro stuff, in terms of both world and series arc. Verra was talking about Jenoine-enforced stagnation of Dragaeran society and how Adron's Disaster broke that back in Vallista (very interesting discussion by sholio and others here and rachelmanija and others here), but her conversation with Vlad in this book makes it much clearer what-all is going on (at least to the extent that Verra a) accurately understands it and b) is telling Vlad the truth, which are significant caveats normally in this series, but I think we're close enough to the end that it's plausible it is fairly accurate. And this is also consistent with the Sethra POV scene, where she has gathered a bunch of the most powerful sorcerers she knows -- the Necromancer, Aliera, Morrolan, Sethra the Younger (who has apparently been sufficiently forgiven by Sethra, but the Sorceress in Green doesn't seem so buddy buddy with her anymore), the Sorceress in Green, and Telnan. (I note once again the absence of Kosadr, who is mentioned later in the book by the Left Hand ladies. What the hell is up with Kosadr? Does Sethra just not like him? Is Brust just trolling me personally? XD) -- and it looks like her little demonstration is also consistent with the Cycle being broken. Morrolan goes off to talk to Verra, and I wonder if he gets the same sort of explanation as Vlad does. So, listening to Verra's explanation, the first arc was the beginning of the Jenoine experiment. The second arc was Verra and "her sisters" escaping and creating the Great Sea of amorphia. The third arc was the creation of the Halls of Judgement. The fourth arc was Verra giving the e'Kieron line the ability to create amorphia. The fifth was Verra messing with the Cycle by leading to the creation of the Jhereg (and Devera tapping Dolivar/Vlad for that role). Verra says that Adron's Disaster "marked the point where that last arc, the creation of the Cycle, ended" -- this is consistent with what she says in Vallista, too, that the Cycle was broken then, they just weren't sure yet. And, the Jhereg were instrumental to Adron's Disaster, right? Because it was Mario assassinating Tortaalik at the same time as Adron cast his spell to wrest the Orb from him that created the "divide by zero" error that led to the Disaster. And/but Mario was only involved because of Aliera -- and it was the insult to Aliera that got Adron sufficiently riled up to take action, too -- and of course Verra had more than a little to do with Aliera's existence. Verra says Adron's disaster also ends the fourth arc (e'Kieron amorphia creation) -- I guess that also has played its role? The Halls of Judgement apparently also served their purpose when Zerika retrieved the Orb from there, so that's the closing of arc 3. The second arc, Verra says, ends with the battle against a Jenoine in Issola and the creation of Godslayer. It's interesting that these are nested arcs -- Adron's Disaster ends the fifth and fourth simultaneously, then the third ends ~250 years later when Zerika ends the Interregnum, then Issola and Godslayer end the second another ~250 years after that. So I guess there remains whatever will close the original Jenoine experiment arc (by breaking it irreparably like Verra wants), which presumably will take place in The Last Contract. I think this was the first time we got explicit confirmation that Godslayer is meant to slay specifically Verra? And also the first insight into Verra's motivations for what she is doing to thwart the Jenoine (firstly, to get the Jenoine to bugger off for good, second out of spite, and third because the Jenoine experiment is "profoundly evil"). I actually don't really care about the macro world implications, so my main hope in all this is that the characters I care about come through the end of the series OK.
Speaking of that, I spent a large chunk of the book afraid that something terrible was going to happen to Kragar -- either he was going to die, or his kid would -- just, we were getting all this Kragar detail all of a sudden, and, you know, Issola being a thing... -- and also there was a line about how in musicals "the lightness lets it come up under your guard" (which possibly was specifically meant to make the reader worried about something like that, knowing Brust). So, it was a big relief that Deragar was rescued and Kragar was OK, and hopefully he and Vlad go get that drink together once he's had a chance to sleep a bit. I'm still kind of trying to wrap my brain about Kragar being a widower (and that his wife was an artist, Jhereg but with no ties to the Organization) and having a son, and I'm still intensely curious about what his history with Aliera is -- is he an ex-e'Kieron and she, and Morrolan, part of that family who don't acknoweldge him? And it was also interesting to have Kragar say, to Vlad's attempts to, what, tell Kragar he'd understand if Kragar wanted to turn him in to save his kid? -- "Vlad, you probably know what it means that I was born into the House of the Dragon." "Um, I think so, yeah." "I still have that in me." "I know." "It seems like Caola doesn't. And however this goes, she's going to find out." You will all be completely unsurprised that I am extremely here for the opportunity for Kragar to get back in touch with his Dragon roots. I'm not sure if there will be opportunity for him to do so in The Last Contract, since the Caola problem seems to be sorted, but I liked that hint. And in general, it was nice to meet Deragar properly, and to get a look at Kragar from the POV of someone other than Vlad.
Speaking of POVs other than Vlad -- I guess that's a thing we're doing now? I mean, I wasn't complaining when it was Morrolan in Tsalmoth! And I'm not complaining now -- I enjoyed getting Sethra's very unexpected POV and learning that she doesn't like being the center of attention; I enjoyed getting Daymar's POV (and, I know people who read him as on the spectrum before, and his own POV definitely seems to support that reading, what with behaving politely to people being a strain he's aware of and so on, and also I find it adorable that he thinks of himself as a desecrator first and the psionics just as a side hobby and being sad that people only seem to value him for the latter); it was interesting to see the Demon without a filter of Paarfi nonsense (and he's got a theater now. Good for him XD) I also appreciated the various random Jhereg and theater people POVs, just for local color. One thing that jumped out at me was how much these random people use nicknames/shortened forms of names (e.g. Derr for Deragar, Loni for Lonora, Desi for Desentin), which does not appear to be a thing among Vlad's high-born friends (outside of Devera referring to Morrolan as Uncle Rollan). Anyway, I don't mind all the extra POVs, but I do feel like the reason for getting them all of a sudden is contrived -- that Vlad's (recovered) demon nature gives him head-jumping powers -- but not in any useful way. It does make me wonder, though: is that whose POV Tiassa 2 is from? That is, Daro-filtered-through-Vlad? (he would've had to have gotten it after Hawk, but Sethra does say it can be things in the past). Verra does say that these dreams/visions can be false (from, like, parallel universes where things happen differently, maybe?), so there's still that unreliability.
Oh right, and we get a full-fledged Teldra POV, but that's obviously a different thing entirely. We get a brief lecture on the Lyorn from Lady Teldra, but one bit in her POV really gave me pause: "Honor. A concept I had never before had cause to consider." Really, while being Morrolan's senechal (and etiquette teacher, essentially) for a couple of hundred years? She thinks later that "Honor means something different to every House" (and its origins via commerce and borrowing, so that the Jhereg and the Orca use it in its oldest, purest form), so maybe what she means is that she never had to consider honor more deeply than a Dragonlord would consider it? But it still seems like a very odd thing to encounter in her POV of all people...
It's interesting to read a late Vlad book right on the heels of an early Vald book like Tsalmoth. Right, Cawti made him go to the theater as well as read books. But even more relevant and explicit is Vlad not just reflecting on how much he's changed viz reaching for violence, which he's been doing since ~Dzur, but sort of worred about whether he can be that person anymore, the violent thug. Good news, he certainly still can! And him squaring off with Striker and threatening Montorri over extortion of the actors, all for a good cause, was all very satisfying to read about. And Vlad joking about understudies was pretty funny.
I talked about the theater as a thing Vlad experiences, and I talked about the history behind the play, but let me now talk about the play itself as a thing, starting with the epigraphs. Like, am I surprised that Brust decided to write 19 Dragaeran filks of songs from musicals? I am totally not surprised, because I know he posts filks, and a man who would pastiche The Three Musketeers is absolutely a man who would filk Gilbert & Sullivan. I am a bit surprised he convinced people to publish them as part of a novel, but more power to him, I guess. I only recognized a couple -- "The Modern Major-General" by osmosis, and "My Favorite Things" and "Sunrise, Sunset". I was looking for a Hamilton song but did not spot it (I have not listened to Hamilton, but I've heard several of the songs, although maybe not this one), and totally failed to recognize the songs from Guys & Dolls and West Side Story (which I've seen in one form or another), and most embarrassingly, the song from BtVS "Once More with Feeling" -- and I KNOW SKZB is a huge Whedon fan, so I should've known to be on the lookout for something from there. The filks are fine? I liked the "Modern Major-General" -- I mean, the Fourtheenth Cycle dramaturge -- one the most, I think, because I like patter songs and they are most interesting to filk. I don't think any of them add deeply to the narrative, but I didn't think the punny Gothics titles in Vallista added deeply to the narrative, either. My favorite thing about the whole play was the existence of the in-play character "Lethra Savode". Of course thinly fictionalized Sethra would be a character in historical plays! Clearly the thing I was missing in my Sethra watches the soaps fic was Sethra watching a soapy historical drama and having to contend with Lethra Savode being part of the soapy action XD
Character things: I find Sara SO DULL, and am negative amounts of invested in the progression of her and Vlad's relationship. (I am, however, glad to see that Vlad and Cawti are less fraught together.) I got one (1) scene with Morrolan, in which he says one (1) thing, because SKZB does not want me to be happy. But he was mentioned a few more times, as Vlad thinks about him approving of Vlad's playing-a-Dragonlord-guard marching. Vlad also mentions not being the best witch and listing the Warlock and Morrolan as people who are better. Leaving aside the fact that Noish-Pa should obviously also be on that list, I continue to be hugely amused by Vlad's admission that Morrolan is better than him at witchcraft, in light of Morrolan asking him for witchy advice in the early books. I'm just going to keep with my theory that this was the equivalent of the nerdy girl who asks her crush to tutor her in math despite secretly having a higher grade than him. Oh, also, Vlad amuses himself by thinking that Verra's double doors that wing open is a trick she had gotten from Morrolan rather than vice versa; in fact Paarfi suggests that Morrolan got it from Sethra, and in this case it amuses me to both believe Paarfi and further conclude that Verra got it from Sethra, too. There was also not that much present-day Sethra, but I'm glad she got to do something she's never done before (I am surprised there are still magical things she hasn't done before, especially things that sound relatively simple in concept, but magic *is* evolving as we have seen, and things that are simple in concept are often very hard to actually do, so I can accept that). And reforming the Lavodes! I am less excited about the Lavodes as a thing than a lot of Dragaera fans, but it's still need to get to that point, and to know that Aliera is one of the first to be approached. (And Telnan, but I was fully expecting that's what Sethra was doing with Telnan.) I wonder if Aliera accepting the uniform means she has to give up any Imperial military responsibilities, or if she never picked any back up after Iorich...
Random things:
A Lochran wall is something that Morrolan recognizes by sight and Telnan at least knows the term. Telnan thinks it's something to do with predicting the future, but it's actually for revealing "hidden things about the present [...] that are tangled in strands of destiny and choice, fate and possibility." So it does seem like some kind of probabilistic prediction thing?
Dragaerans invest in things via "sticks" (...is that a pun on stocks? XD) -- the whole broken into 17 parts, of course, so each stick is 1/17 of the investment.
Rehearsal in progress is denoted by a hanging green cloth. The dancing numbers in theater come from when early Issola dancers formalized traditional Teckla dances. The sides of the stage: side one is for love interest and family, side two is for the hero, side three is for gods, fate and the emperor, side four is for magic, demons, and forces of nature, side five is for the enemy, side six is for the moral center. (And "side seven" is the equivalent of backstage, I guess. And clapping by "slapping the sticks" ("clackers"), which can be kept as souvenirs of the play (Cawti collects them) -- I wonder if that's an actual tradition from somewhere.
I still get a kick out of Dragaeran titles of office (in translation), especially ones that have a gender marker that does not match the gender of the office holder (e.g. Thalick the Lyorn introducing himsels as "the First Lady of Arms for Prince Yeselik, Lyorn Heir" and whatever the hell "The Lord of the Stool" is XD (in the play).
The custom of dueling (according to Teldra) began with the Lyorn in the Third Cycle, and from there developed by the Tiassa (huh! because it required some imagination to formalize? that surprises me, though...), the Dragons and the Dzur. As of the Eighth Cycle, the Orca, Jhereg, Tsalmoth, Chreotha, Jhegaala, and of course Teckla, "even when at the top of the Cycle" are considered to be "unworthy to issue a challenge to or accept a challenge from".
Vlad is afraid of heights, becasue he's got that impulse to jump (I'm actually not surprised). And also has stage fright, I guess, but it sounds like even Sethra doesn't like being the center of attention... (contrasted with the Tiassa actor's singer friend who decided that since he was one of those people who go through life saying, 'Look at me, look at me!' "he owed it to anyone who looked to make sure there was something worth looking at." <-- which is such a Humanist (from Terra Ignota) approach, heh.) Which, the conversation with the Tiassa where he doesn't get scared by Vlad's threat makes Vlad reflect that, "I guess if you're going to get up in front of a thousand people and take the chance of making an idiot of yourself: it takes either guts or that thing Dzurlords have instead, that thing where you just don't care what happens." -- and there are a couple of things about that. First, I'm not at all surprised that Vlad is scared of looking like an idiot in front of people more than the average person; that's always been one of his buttons (the scene afterwards, where he reflects on being scared of admitting to Cawti he's been scared, supports that, too). But second, the distinction between courage and "that thing Dzurlords have" is also interesting... And that Vlad understands/thinks there's such a distinction. It makes me want to reread Dzur from the point of view of being in a "just don't care" frame of mind (and it makes sense that this comes to an end when Vlad learns he has a child).
It's kind of interesting to see just how little the Right Hand and the Left Hand of the Jhereg know how the other side runs their organization. Vlad doesn't really know what the Left Hand customs are, and Kragar's people don't seem to know how the Left Hand are organized (that there are no territories as such, just sort of alliances). Nikka doesn't know how to refer to Kragar's people -- "all your vassals -- or whatever you call them" (Kragar tells her "let's go with minions"). And I was surprised, but I guess shouldn't have been, that both sides seem only too happy to completely destroy the other side in an all out war.
I'm sure this also came up in Iorich, but I forgot: the equivalent of "The People v" in Dragaera is "The Orb vs" (or in the case here, "[someone] vs The Orb"
Series continuity: I was wondering at the end of Tsalmoth how much of Vlad's demon nature others remembered. It sounds from the conversation in this one that Cawti remembered Vlad was a demon, but maybe had some perceptions/connection making abilities messed with, but also Sethra told her Vlad didn't want to know about it. I assume that Vlad's other friends who knew, like Aliera and Morrolan, also got the same talk? and possibly the same whatever-it-was affecting them... And Noish-Pa, who I forgot had known about the demon thing.
OK, but so where does all this leave us? I was surprised that this book seems to be leading quite directly into the final conflict in The Last Contract, since Vlad's remaining troubles with the Left Hand (or at least D'nilla's faction) and the worldscale conflict with the Jenoine are revealed to be linked. So where does that leave Chreotha? Before this book came out, I was assuming that Lyorn would see Vlad learning some stuff about his past (which he did, kind of, but it was just the one conversation with Verra), and Chreotha would be the book which lined up the dominoes for the final conflict, because that seems what a Chreotha book wold be for. But the dominoes seem to all be lined up already, and set up to be resolved in the last book. So is Chreotha just going to be a random Vlad story jumping back in time, maybe filling in any gaps that The Last Contract requires? (It doesn't seem like Brust has said anything about when Chreotha is set.)
Random things AROUND the book: Whatever page my Kindle app opened the book to, I missed the dedication to John M. Ford until I saw it in someone else's post, and when I went looking for it, I also found "Author's Note" with "Content warning: snark, irony, self-referential humor". Which I guess is one way to snark about content notes. I'm not a fan of content notes in books (though I do think it's fine/nice if a writer wants to write up their content warnings somehwere separate from the book where people can find them if they want to. Or, of course, do what Ada Palmer did and have in-universe content notes, although I'm not convinced they are useful as such), but also you just don't have to use them if you don't want to. I'm not sure snarking about it does anything beneficial. Though come to think of it, there's actually not that many content warnings that would apply to this book specifically. There are tense situations and the threat of violence, but nothing worse than a slap actually happens on-page in terms of physical violence, and Deragar is drugged and kidnapped, but comes out of it OK. This is downright wholesome by fantasy standards! Well, outside of the historical events, which feature wars, a massacre of troops who had surrendered, imprisonment and execution under false pretenses, and also everything that had happened during Adron's Disaster.
Quotes:
"If I had to guess, I'd say you could fit at least a thousand people in it, but I'm terrible at estimating things like that, so I could be wrong." [Thanks, Vlad. That's super helpful information XD]
re: the Battle of the Cliffs: "Envisca e'Terics, who is supposed to have, on ordering her battalion forward, pointed to Deathgate Falls and said, 'Don't worry, my loves. If it should go badly, at least we're close by.' Most historians doubt this tale, because, in fact, Dethgate Falls is several hundred miles south of the site of the battle and couldn't be seen from there, but the story persists."
"See, that's what happens when you do things: things happen."
"a meeting like this always has the danger of starting something that ends with damaging someone's outfit and making more work for the embalmers."
re: coming face to face with a god: "I guess for Dragaerans, it's more like something you put on your to-do list between shopping for oysters and kicking beggars."
"I hesitated, trying to figure out what I was feeling, which has never been one of my skills." [You don't say XD]
"No way was I letting Kragar down. I wasn't excited about letting them kill me either. I mean, not only would that mean I let them win, but I'd also be dead. That means no more klava." [This is so much Vlad in a nutshell, I love it.]
"Loiosh and Rocza seemed to enjoy their pieces of kethna ["that was too tough, too fatty, and too salty"] but I'm pretty sure that was more for the challene than the flavor."
"I carefully hung p the Dragonlord on the hook on the door, and donned my old self again." <-- instant flash to sysann's fic XD
Vlad: "There you are. Full payment in advance."
"Well. You're a trusting soul, aren't you?"
"No."
He glanced down at the steel hanging from my belt, and nodded."
"But I'm an Easterner who used to be a Jhereg; we don't find metaphors, we just sell onions."
"The expressions on the faces of those around me reflected not what I was feeling, but my efforts not to show what I was feeling."
"I [...] slowly felt myself relax to the soothing voice in my head of Loiosh chewing me ot (literally, at one point)." <3
"And I could change that, I could give an entire world, each person, a freedom none of them knew they didn't have."
**
Brust has helpfully provided links to the sources for the filks here (spoilery discussion of the book in comments). Sounds like some of those links are geo-locked, though, so for anyone who can't see them, here's the list: spoilers? if you want to figure it out for yourself?
Prologue - Modern Major-General | The Pirates of Penzance (amusingly, I went looking for other versions because I thought there was a Simpsons one -- there isn't, I think, there's a Family Guy one, but the thing I'd been thinking of, with Sideshow Bob singing, is actally H.M.S.Pinafore -- YouTube decided that I just want all the versions of Modern Major General now, and supplied me with one performed by Alexander Armstrong (whom I know solely from Pointless, via Britcom people. It's all connected!)
Chapet 1 -- My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music
Chapter 2 -- Cabaret from Cabaret
Chapter 3 -- Sunrise, Sunset from Fiddler on the Roof
Chapter 4 -- The Music Man "Seventy-Six Trombones"
Chapter 5 -- West Side Story - Gee Officer Krupke!
Chapter 6 -- "Save the City" - Rogers: The Musical
Chapter 7 -- "Hello, Dolly!" from Hello, Dolly
Chapter 8 -- Pinball Wizard (apparently from rock opera Tommy?)
Chapter 9 -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer - Going Through The Motions
Chapter 10 -- "Shall We Dance" from The King and I
Chapter 11 -- A Bushel and a Peck (From "Guys and Dolls")
Chapter 12 -- Rocky Horror Picture Show-Bless my soul
Chapter 13 - What comes next? - Hamilton
Chapter 14 - The Wizard Of Oz - If I only had a Brain
Chapter 15 -'The flowers that bloom in the spring' - The Mikado
Chapter 16 - There's No Business Like Show Business - Annie Get Your Gun
Chapter 17 - Age of Aquarius from Hair
Encore - Call the Understudy (I Can't Go On Tonight) from Slings and Arrows