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Reread of The White-Luck Warrior: Chapter Eight

Reread of The Aspect-Emperor Series

Book 2: The White-Luck Warrior

by R. Scott Bakker

Chapter Eight

The Western Three Seas

Welcome to Chapter Eight of my reread. Click here if you missed Chapter Seven!

Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy.

—AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN

My Thoughts

When things are complicated, men can muddy the waters. They can use it to promote their prejudice or greed. It’s that murkiness that the media and politicians thrive in. When things are complicated, you can make a simple statement that is factually true and yet how you present it can give an inference the opposite of what happened.

And this is where the Dûnyain live. In ambiguity.

Late Spring, 20 New Imperial Year (4132 Year-of-the-Tusk), the Nansurium, somewhere south of Momemn

In Gielgath, two thieves assailed him, and the White-Luck Warrior watched them scuffle, drunk and desperate, with the man who was their doom. They lurched out of alleyway shadows, their cries choked to murmurs for fear of being heard. They sprawled dead and dying across cobble and filth, the one inert, the other twitching. He wiped his Seleukaran blade clean across the dead one, even as he raised the sword to counter their manic rush. He stepped clear of the one who stumbled, raised his blade to parry the panicked swing of the other… the wing that would notch the scimitar’s honed edge—as thin as an eyelid.

The notch that would shatter his sword, so allowing the broken blade to plunge into the Aspect-Emperor’s heart. He could even feel the blood slick his thumb and fingers, as he followed himself into the gloomy peril of the alley.

The White-Luck Warrior sees himself marching on and on to the end of his journey, killing Kellhus. He’s seeing time all at once. He’s moving through past and present and future. He’s crossing the world. After killing the thieves, no one noticed him as he effortlessly passes through the crowd that’s gathered. A priestess beggar sees him and recognizes him. He sees her joy a million times.

He passes slave plantations, “following his following.” He rubs his blood into the tops of wheat, which makes Yatwer happy. He rubs a cow’s afterbirth into his ears. He finds a child hiding in a ditch and says, “There is no greater Gift than to give unto death.” He touches the boy and sees the child’s head also decaying in the grass.

He spots a stork. He walks forever, trailing after himself and leading himself all at the same time. He walks all the way to the moment when he kills the False Prophet because it’s already happened. He keeps walking until he reaches Momemn. He sees everything he’s going to do here. How he’ll stand in the throne room.

Where the Gift-of-Yatwer glimpsed himself peering back, the Holy Empress beside him.

Momemn

Inrilatas asks Esmenet why it troubles her to see him masturbating. Though she really can’t see it as she peers through the window just infer he’s doing it. She stares at him with “a mother’s flat gaze.” She’s not impressed. Maybe her years as a whore or maybe she just was exhausted by his behavior was why.

When she’s done, he’ll be chained to the wall and servants will search carefully for any dropped item, even the little thing. He’d made a shiv using his semen to stiffen cloth into a point. She tells him that she’s going to have Maithanet brought to him.

She could feel him peering into her face, the strange tickle of being known. She experienced some sense of exposure with almost all her children by Kellhus, but it differed with each one. With Kayûtas, it simply seemed to render her irrelevant, a problem easily dismissed or solved. With Serwa, it raised her ire because she knew the girl could see the pain she had caused her mother and yet chose to ignore it. With Theliopa, it was simply a fact of the time they spent together, and a convenience as well, since it allowed the girl to completely subordinate herself to her mother’s wishes.

But with Inrilatas it always seemed more proud, more intrusive, somehow…

Like the way she felt in her husband’s eyes, only without the sense of… resignation.

He says they can smell fear on her. She knows this and remembers how Kellhus said that Inrilatas’s soul was equal Kellhus’s intellect and her heart. The Dûnyain never mastered passion but destroyed it. “My intellect is simply not robust enough to leash your heart. Imagine bridling a lion with string.” He mocks her being a mere whore with delusions of commanding Men. She knows this, too.

While Inrilatas could make the most iron-hard general to tears, all his wounds against her only increased her pity for her son. He seems to try so hard to hurt her because of it. She was “a summit he must conquer.” Despite his intelligence, to her he’s just “an anguished little boy.”

It was hard to play God in the eyes of a heartbroken mother.

He climaxes and she tries to ignore the product landing on the floor. He always had to mark the space around him with body fluids. He’s driven to desecrate because all men love to break the rules because it means they have power. And the greatest form of power is to “violate another’s body or desire.” Inrilatas is trapped in a world of “thoughtless custom” other men use to judge one another.

She asks if he’s curious about Maithanet. He says she wants him to see if Maithanet is treacherous or not. He then says she doesn’t want to know if he’s treacherous, that’s her excuse. She knows she’ll fail and Maithanet will have to seize power to keep things from falling apart not out of greed or selflessness, but duty.

This is the game where Inrilatas will try to hurt her and prod her with truth. As Kellhus told her, “He will answer questions that you have never asked yet lay aching in your heart nonetheless.” If she has any revelation it’s because Inrilatas wants her to believe it.

Thus had her husband, in the course of arming her against their mad son, also warned her against himself. As well as confirmed what Achamian had said so very long ago.

She says she won’t fail even if Maithanet assumes so. He’s wrong. And if he turns on her, he’s broken Kellhus’s law. Her son laughs and says she will fail. He then asks why he should help her and not help Maithanet, saying only he can save the Empire. She wonders how she can trust her son. Then she says he’ll help because he has her heart. “Because half of your madness is mine…” She trails off, troubled by how he can reveal her words as false when they had seemed so “simple and true.”

She finally says he’ll do it because he wants the Empire to fall. His laughter is curious. He asks if she’d even trust him since he’s mad. She will because “I know that Truth is your madness.” She feels joy for a moment before feeling guilty. He son saw it, of course. No she’s afraid he’ll say no just to deny her for the fun of it. He liked to crush joy in her.

“Inspired words, Mother.” His tone was thin and blank, almost as if he mocked his older sister, Theliopa. “The very kind Father has warned you not to trust. You cannot see the darkness that precedes your thoughts, but unlike most souls you know it exists. You appreciate how rarely you are the author of what you say and do…” He readied his shackled hands for a clap that never came. “I’m impressed, Mother. You understand this trick the world calls a soul.”

“A trick that can be saved… or damned.”

“What if redemption were simply another form of damnation? What if the only true salvation lay in seeing through the trick and embracing oblivion?”

She asks if there’s no way to resolve such a debate, annoyed. He stops pretending to be Theliopa and acts more apish, laughing that Kellhus has rubbed off on her. She might have been amused if she wasn’t so hurt by his words. She gets angry, tired of these games. She snaps that she knows he can see right through her, understanding her predicament just by looking at her. He laughs and says she doesn’t understand him. If she did, she would have killed him. She leaps to her feet but Kellhus’s warning to not let her emotions rule her with Inrilatas. “Only by twisting, reflecting upon your reflections, will you be able to slip his grasp.”

“You lean heavily on Father’s advice…” he said, his voice reaching for intonations that almost matched Kellhus’s. “But you should know that I am your husband as he really is. Even Uncle, when he speaks, parses and pitches his words to mimic the way others sound—to conceal the inhumanity I so love to flaunt. We Dûnyain… we are not human, Mother. And you… You are children to us. Ridiculous and adorable. And so insufferably stupid.”

The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas could only stare in horror.

“But yo know this…” Inrilatas continued, his gaze fixed upon her. “Someone else has told you this… And in almost precisely the same words! Who? That Wizard? The legendary Drusas Achamian—yes! He told you this in a final effort to rescue your heart, didn’t he? Ah… Mother! I see you so much more clearly now! All the years of regret and recrimination, torn between terror and love, stranded with children—such wicked, gifted children!—ones you can never hope to fathom, never hope to love.”

“But I do love you!”

“There is no love without trust, Mother. Only need… hunger. I am reflex, nothing more, nothing less.”

He finally succeeded. She cries and screeches at him, saying she made a mistake. She just starts to leave when he says Kellhus cut off communication and that she’s “lost in a wilderness of subtleties you cannot fathom.” She admits it and looks at him, asking him to do this for him.

“Trust. Trust is the one thing you seek.”

“Yes… I…” A kind of resignation overwhelmed her. “I need you.”

Invisible things boiled through the heartbeat that followed. Portents. Ruminations. Lusts.

He says there can only be three present. She thinks he means her, him, and Maithanet, but he means his brothers. She’s confused by the plural. It frightens her because she thinks he’s talking about Kel and Sammi. She’s confused, unable to say Samarmas is dead. He is standing before her then throws himself at her, the chains stopping him before he can reach her. Her shield-bearers hid behind the wicked protection meant for her as he croons for her to come closer.

Mother!” her son shrieked, his eyes shining with murder. “Mother! Come! Closer!”

Something of her original imperviousness returned. This… This was her son as she knew him best.

The beast.

Let me see your mouth, Mother!”

Iothiah

“The woman called Psatama Nannaferi” is taken before Fanayal with all the other captives, but Malowebi notes that unlike other attractive women, she’s not being catcalled and humiliated. They’ve heard rumors of the woman, Malowebi realizes, and did not share them with him, reminding him he’s still an outsider here.

Fanayal set up court in one of the temples to hold curt. All the trappings of the Tractate and the Tusk were destroyed. The parts celebrating the First Holy War now lined the horse’s stalls. Despite that, Tusks and Circumfixes abounded, “unscathed evidence of the Aspect-Emperor and his faith.”

Fanayal’s men saw no irony in wearing the trappings of their conquered enemy, doing to Iothiah what the Holy War had done to them. After being hunted in the desert for decades, they are feasting on the rewards.

Even still, they looked more a carnival of dangerous fools than a possible ally of High Holy Zeüm.

Only Fanayal doesn’t indulge. He sits on a plan wooden chair with the “elegance and reserve” in a white tunic with a coat of golden mail the armor that the Coyauri he’d commanded in the First Holy War. Meppa’s at his right hand while Malowebi is in the shadows to the left. He watches as hundreds of prisoners coming before Fanayal to suffer his “vengeful whims.” The men are given the choice to repudiate the Aspect-Emperor and embrace Fane. If they did, they were sold as slaves. If not, executed on the spot. The women were just given out to his men as spoils. It went on and on, “becoming more sordid and farcical” until it became boring. His feet start hurting and back aching.

Something about Psatama Nannaferi, however, instantly dispelled his boredom and discomfort.

The guards throw her done before Fanayal, but not with their glee but with “mechanical reluctance.” Fanayal, for the first time, leans forward and studied her. She stands with grace despite being naked and changed. Though she looks like a young, beautiful woman, her posture and her eyes appear someone far older. Fanayal says that he’s been told she’s the Mother Supreme of Yatwer. She says she is while smiling with condensation. Fanayal adds she is the reason these lands were already in revolt. She nods but says she’s merely a vessel that has no control of what she spreads.

Even after so few words, Malowebi knew her for a formidable woman. Here she stood, naked and manacled, yet her gaze and bearing communicated a confidence too profound to be named pride, a majesty that somehow upended the stakes between her and the famed Bandit Padirajah.

“And now that your Goddess has betrayed you?”

“Betrayed?” she snorted. “This is not a sum. This is not a wager of advantages over loss. This is a gift! Our Mother Goddess’s will.”

Fanayal is doubtful that Yatwer wanted her followers killed and raped, her temples pillaged. Malowebi feels a with pressing on him the longer he stares at her. He’s feeling an attraction to her almost virginal figure. Though she feels ancient, she feels like a fertile and nubile woman that he aches for. He feels something reptilian is peering through her as she talks about how ever much they suffer in this world, Yatwer will save them in the other. So suffering is her gift because they will have glory in the afterlife.

Fanayal laughs and scoffs that her captivity is a gift. It is. And if he lets his men rape her? She says he won’t. Why? She says she’s been reborn “as black as earth, as rain and sweating sun.” She is the image of her fertile goddess. He won’t let other men have her because his loins burn for her. He cuts her off, thinking it’s ridiculous that he would ache for her. But it’s forced.

She mocks him and says he’s eager to spill in her “soft earth deeply ploughed.” More laughter echoes but it all falters. A tightness grips Malowebi. He can feel that Yatwer is here. Nannaferi has one foot in the outside. He wants to cry out in warning, but he stops himself. He remembers he’s not friends with these men. He’s an observer to see if Zeümi is served helping Fanayal. But he’s worried that Fanayal is a fanatic who calls the gods demons, and if he becomes Yatwer’s enemy, Zeümi would be a fool to help him. His people didn’t pray to them, but they did respect the Hundred.

“’Soft earth deeply ploughed,’” Fanayal repeated, gazing upon her form with frank hunger. He turned to the lean and warlike men of his court. “Such are the temptations of evil, my friends!” he called, shaking his head. “Such are the temptations!”

More laughter greeted these words.

He continues that all her sisters are dead and temples destroyed. “If these are gifts, as you say, then I am in a most generous mood.” He pauses for the laughter, but it’s just a few pathetic chortles. He debates hanging her or whipping her or having Meppa use Psûkhe on her. Nannaferi doesn’t even blink. Malowebi can’t believe that Fanayal acts with such thoughtless ease. Is he oblivious to the danger, or is he just as much a fanatic as Nannaferi. Either possibility are bad.

She says she’s been reborn, so she’s beyond any torment he can inflict. He calls her a stubborn, devil-worshiping witch. This time, there’s lots of laughter. But Meppa says he would not use his power on her. She sneers at him and says she’s behind his devilry. She serves Yatwer.

Never had Malowebi witnessed an exchange more uncanny, the blinded man speaking as if to a void, the shackled woman as if she were a mad queen among hereditary slaves.

He accuses her of worshiping a demon. She laughs at the absurdity of it. She cackles, reducing the men to boys who’ve had their pride batted from them. She doesn’t care if they call Yatwer a demon. She’ll probably worship her. After all, the hundred aren’t good. “Madness governs the Outside, Snakeheads, not gods or demons—or even the God!” People worship them because they have power over people and Yatwer is the strongest.

Malowebi wants to beg the Fanim to let her go and sacrifice a hundred bulls to Yatwer because she’s here. Meppa scoffs that the Gods are anything more than powerful demons who just want to devour human souls. He thinks she’s a fool for not seeing that. She agrees that the “fat” will be eaten but the faithful will be celebrated.

Meppa’s voice was no mean one, yet its timbre paled in the wake of the Mother-Supreme’s clawing rasp. Even still he pressed, a tone of urgent sincerity the only finger he had to balance the scales. “We are a narcotic to them. They eat our smoke. They make jewelry of our thoughts and passions. They are beguiled by our torment, our ecstasy, so they collect us, pluck us like strings, make chords of nations, play the music of our anguish over endless ages. We have seen this, woman. We have seen this with our missing eyes!”

Malowebi scowled. Fanim madness… It had to be.

Nannaferi is pleased that Meppa knows he’ll be endless eaten by Yatwer. She mocks his Solitary God, saying its hubris that he can create borders in the outside. Just like the idiot Sejenus. “Birth and War alone can seize—and seize She does!”

This outrages the other Fanim men. Some of them make warding gestures as they realize “something profound was amiss.” Fanayal shouts at her to stay her curses, losing his cool. Nannaferi cackles and says that it would be a delight to seize him. Meppa shouts out he knows the “true compass of your power.” He reminds her that all men can fail and that she’ll be defeated when her tool breaks. Nannaferi agrees that all men save one. Meppa says, “The White-Luck.” Fanayal is confused by that but Malowebi realizes that the Hundred are at war.

“There are infinite paths through the tumble of events,” Meppa explained to his sovereign. “The White-Luck, the idolaters believe, is the perfect line of action and happenstance that can see any outcome come to pass. The White-Luck Warrior is the man who walks that line. Everything that he needs, happens, not because he wills it but because his need is identical to what happens. Every step, ever toss of the number-sticks, is a…” He turned back to the fierce glare of the Yatwerian Mother-Supreme.

“Is a what?” Fanayal demanded.

Meppa shrugged. “A gift.”

Nannaferi laughs and says they’re but a temporary blight. A trial for the faithful while a greater war wages. The Cults against the Thousand Temples. She urges him to conquer what he can because in the end, they are serving Yatwer and will be eaten. Fanayal realizes that the White-Luck Warrior is after Kellhus. “The Goddess hunts the Demon.”

Fanayal asks Meppa if he likes her. The blind man does not and is nonplussed by what is an obvious joke. Fanayal likes her and is pleased by her curse. He wants her spared because she knows things. Malowebi realizes the truth, though, that Fanayal is making excuses. He wants Nannaferi’s fertile soil.

And the dread Mother of Birth would work her inscrutable will.

Momemn

Esmenet has been crippled by grief for Samarmas and for Mimara running away. Only anger saves her. At Kellhus for abandoning her and her servants for doubting her. That and her love for Kelmomas. She’s having trouble sleeping and stalks the palace. She’s caught guardsmen gambling and slaves making love. Kellhus would have punished them, but she pretends not to notice. When she enters the Imperial Audience Hall she finds herself gawking like a caste-menial, which she was.

How? How did a low and mean whore, the kind who would sell her daughter in times of famine, become the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas? This, she had always thought, was the great question of her life, the remarkable fact that historians would ponder in future generations.

She had been the rut, the track long muddied, and now she found herself the charioteer.

The inversion is the paradox of the Circumfix where the “God Almighty” had hung upside down. Though all men are born helpless, they grow complicated until they reach their summit. Even when groveling, they look down on the world. Even slaves would become emperors when the taskmasters aren’t looking. Her rise was miraculous. She’s becomes a beacon, striking fear in the nobles who beat their slaves harder and for the slaves, she reminds them how much their lives suck.

But their question was essentially the same. Who was she to be exalted so?

That’s the real question. How “could a whore be an empress.” Why her? She would show them why. It’s why she’s been working so hard since Iothiah’s fall. She’s been having emergency meetings with the Home Exalt-General, Caxes Anthirul. With Werjau, the Prime Nascenti of the Ministrate. Weirdly, the Scylvendi have all but stopped their raids allowing her to redeploy soldiers while worrying her because they destroyed empires.

She knows the Scylvendi are deadly and cunning. After all, she knew Cnaiür and raised his son Moënghus. So the change worries her but she still gambles on stripping soldiers from the frontier to put down Fanayal and the Yatwer revolts. She needed to strengthen Gedea to buy time for reinforcement from western territories. She has to respond because Fanayal has attacked her legitimacy.

Esmenet would make him suffer. She’s actually eager to destroy someone. She’s never felt that before. Nor does Esmenet care that her old self would be horrified that she could have such “malevolent passions.” She wanted him to scream for Mercy. She meets often with her Master of Spies and Vizier-in-Proxy. She expects them to fold, but they are thriving. She is surprised that her husband’s ministers are rallying about her. But the Empire’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. It’s too big to act swiftly, so her people had to believe that she could act swiftly so they didn’t revolt. Now that the cracks were showing, it was falling apart.

And Iothiah’s fall only made it worse. Losing it was nothing. A minor province. The symbol, however, was devastating. She is facing a crisis of confidence. Her empire was no longer balanced, and she had to rise to the occasion to save it. She had to act like she would save it and spite the naysayer. And by acting like she would succeed, everyone believed that she could. Kellhus had impressed this truth on her many times.

To know is to have power over the world; to believe is to have power over men.

She would use that belief to save the Empire because if she failed, her children were doomed. And she cannot face having another death like Samarmas. In the coming days, she realizes why functionaries are so important and why Kellhus always spared them They know how to speak the language of the bureaucrats and get things done swiftly. The only thing out of her reach is the Thousand Temples, but she thinks that she’s about to expose Maithanet of treachery and remove him.

As she gazes out at the city, made up of all these little parts like “innumerable larva” all piled together, she thinks of Kellhus’s worlds. “We walk the Shortest Path… …the Labyrinth of the Thousandfold Thought. This is the burden the God has laid upon us, and the burden of the Gods begrudge…”

Expediency would be her rule. As ruthless as it was holy.

She knows Kelmomas will be awake when she returns because he always as. Because she was so busy, she let him sleep in her bed. Unless she was horny and took Sankas or Imhailas to her bed.

On a windy day, she sits with Theliopa at a table on a veranda outside the Imperial Audience Hall. Maithanet steps out, confused and angry about why he’s spurning his council while everything is falling apart.

She hopes she looks impressive all her finery while wearing a porcelain mask. That only makes him more exasperated. She had thought about how he would act, and after talking with Inrilatas, she realized he would prey on her doubts so she was ready for it. He says this is about Sharacinth and how she believes he killed the Yatwer’s cult “official” head. But she doesn’t answer because she could trust herself unless she felt cold inside. Theliopa’s instructions.

So he takes the waiting seat acting furious. Then he makes it seem like Samarmas’s death has made her mad with grief. She knows he phrases this to cajole her into shared commiseration over the child’s death so he can “pry open her trust.”

But she had already decided the path this conversation would take.

She dips some bread and shredded pork into a sauce and hands it to him. He doesn’t hesitate. And since he didn’t use her honorifics, she chooses to call him Maitha as she asks him if she ever told him about the time Proyas took her hunting antelope. He hadn’t.

The mask tingled against her cheeks. She found herself wondering if this was how skin-spies felt behind the digits of their false faces. Safe.

She talks about how they tracked a mother and her foal only to find wolves were also stalking them. They arrived in time to see the wolves spring their trap, but the mother bolts and escapes, rushing almost straight at them. She even kicks at the wolves. Esmenet is exultant that she escaped only for Proyas to point out it was all part of the wolves plan to separate her from her fawn. They killed the fawn then allowed themselves to be driven off by the mother. They waited for her to abandon her child’s corpse so they could feast. The wolves could do this because they knew how she would react.

She had practiced this story hoping he wouldn’t be able to tell much from her voice. She fought to conceal passion and asks if he understands that she has to know if he’s the wolf about to kill her. Anger and compassion seems to war through him as he asks how she could think that.

She breathed deep. How had she come by her suspicions? So often the past seemed a cistern sloshing with dissolved voices. Inrilatas had said she feared Maithanet because she despised herself. How could he not try to save the Empire from her incapacity? But something in her balked at the possibility. Her entire life, it seemed, she had fears without clear origin.

She reminds herself he’s just trying to engage her morally to put her on the defensive. So she taps the mask and says it’s because he’s Dûnyain. For a moment, Esmenet thinks Maithanet will murder her in that moment until he points out Kellhus is Dûnyain. She agrees and realizes how messed up this is. “Was there ever a family so deranged as theirs?”

Maithanet says if he does this test it’s only to reassure her. More than being her brother-in-law, he willingly serves Kellhus as a slave. They are bound. So she insists she do this for her and she’ll apologize if she’s wrong. She’s backed into a corner.

It was all a game for them, she realized. No word, no expression, simply was. Everything was a tool, a tactic meant to further some occult and devious goal.

Even love… Just as Achamian had said.

She had known this, but now she understands it as she plays this game with a Dûnyain. She knows without her mask, she wouldn’t even have chance. Even as Maithanet pretends to be at his wit’s end, he asks if she’d trust what Inrilatas would even say. She trusts her son which makes him ask again if he trusts her son to read his face. She realized that something in her voice had hooked his interest. She agrees.

Maithanet points out it takes training to read faces. Esmenet turns to Theliopa who is Dûnyain who inherited Esmenet’s need to please people. Esmenet thinks she can trust those fracture pieces of her in her children. Without those, she would have to see everyone as an enemy. Theliopa points out that reading face is “largely native” and Inrilatas is second only to Kellhus. Esmenet points out Maithanet knows this.

Gasping in exasperation, the Shriah of the Thousand Temples fell back in his chair. “Esmi…”

The tone and pose of an innocent bewildered and bullied by another’s irrationality. “If his actions conform to your expectations,” Kellhus had told her, “then he deceives you. The more unthinkable the dissembling seems, Esmi, the more he dissembles…” Even though her husband had been referring to their son, the words, she knew, applied all the same to Maithanet. Inrilatas had said it himself: the Dûnyain were not human.

And so she would play the mummer’s role.

She says if he’s innocent, he has nothing to lose. She knows Inrilatas would see the guilt. Maithanet protests the boy is insane. She responds, “He loves his mother.”

Kelmomas is running through the bones of the Andiamine Heights. The hidden tunnels he realized that he had known existed from noticing strange discrepancies in room size. He moves through the dark with a candle for light his hand shields from drafts. He doesn’t need the light to find his way, but he does need it to see if there’s anything interesting. What he does see is Kellhus’s work. How he took existing parts of the old palace and made them into this network of tunnels during the rebuilding. It’s a maze that covers the entire palace.

Sadly, there were a lot of locked doors and hatches, realizing that agents were allowed in here, but controlled where they could go based on what keys they had. Kelmomas has to learn how to pick locks. Though he knows this will anger his mother if she finds out, he has to explore these. He is able to spy on everyone. When he hears a couple having sex, he watches.

“This is the way you are to me,” he whispered to the secret voice.

This is how I am to you.

“One bright.”

One dark.

He realizes that he’s been smelling sex on every man and woman in some strength he’s met, including mother. But he can’t keep watching because he has his own needs to answer so he retreats, letting his candle snuff out. He knows the way back by memory. Despite heading back to beat his mother back, he failed and she’s mad.

She slaps him. He could have stopped her, ducking or catching her hand and breaking her hand. He thinks while she winces, he could rip out her hair pin and kill her. Instead, he leans in and lets her slap him harder than she meant so he could fake crying. She would revel in her “love and regret and horror.”

Iothiah

Psatama Nannaferi rises from Fanayal after they had sex. He’s deep in a post-nut sleep. His seed runs down her thighs, rejected by her womb. He’s so asleep, he doesn’t notice her spitting on him. She could kill him and send him to hell where he would never realize he wasn’t having a nightmare that he could never awake up from.

She laughs at that as she wanders about his tent, looking at the “heirlooms of a destroyed empire.” An old man, a slave, cowers in the corner “watching [Nannaferi] the way a child watches a wolf.” Nannaferi stops before the altar to the Solitary God and says to the slave that he’s loved by Yatwer despite the wickedness he’s made to do. She touches the holy book on the altar, the leather rotting at her touch.

“You give,” she murmured, turning to fix the old man with her gaze. “He takes.”

Tears greased his cheeks.

She will reach for you when your flesh stumbles, and you are pitched into the Outside. But you must reach for Her in turn. Only then…”

He shrank into his refugee as she stepped for him.

“Will you? Will you reach for Her?”

She looks away before seeing his nod because she knows his answer. She heads for the entrance, catching her reflection in a mirror. She paused to study her youthful body and likes the sight. She exults in it. Before, she had never cared about sex, only engaging it in as part of her duties. But now to be a mature woman with a young body was exhilarating.

Her temples looted and burned. So many of her sisters raped and put to the sword, and here she stood, drunk with joy.

She calls Meppa a dog as he lurks in the threshold. She faces him, seeing the anger. Though he stares at her, his asp stares at the old man. She knows he’ll be killed before dawn and will reach for Yatwer. She mocks Meppa for guarding his master’s door. He hisses at her to cover herself.

“You do not like what you see?”

“I see the withered old crone that is your soul.”

“So you are a man still, eh, Snakehead? You judge my beauty, my worth, according to the youth of my womb… My fertilt—”

“Still your tongue!”

Bark, dog. Rouse your master. Let us see whose snout he will strike.”

The snake now stares at her as he grimaces. Nannaferi goes back to staring at her reflection, continuing to mock him. He has the Water in him and could easily destroy her, and yet trades insults with her. He says he serves his lord. She laughs as she realizes that this heathen army is her new temple. The Fanim her new priests. It doesn’t matter what they believe so long as they do what Yatwer wants.

She says he lies about serving Fanayal. He says he’s been anointed, but she cuts him off saying he’s been Anointed by Yatwer. That angers him with her blasphemy. She mocks all men as fools who think they are the center of the world. But she points out that Meppa has seen how small humans truly are. Little specks, and he’s still puts his faith in the Solitary God. Instead of gambling on salvation, he just has to kneel and receive it.

He says nothing so she turns and finds Fanayal is awake and standing. Meppa asks his sleeping lord if he can see Nannaferi’s devilry. He roughly orders Meppa to leave.

A moment of equipoise followed, the mutual regard of three overbearing souls. Their breathing abraded the silent air. Then, with the merest of bow, the Cishaurim withdrew.

Fanayal looms over her. He grabs her, calling her a witch, and throws her down, strangling her. She clutches his arms as she wraps her legs around waist. He takes her hard while the doomed slave watches and weeps.

Soft earth deeply ploughed.

There’s little ceremony when Maithanet arrives. Kelmomas is mimicking his mother’s behavior knowing that is how children act. Even the oblivious ones are “ever keen to their parent’s fear and quick to behave accordingly.” Something so momentous even the idiot courtiers notice. Vem-Mithriti can’t believe this is happening.

Momemn

The Shriah of the Thousand Temples was about to be interrogated by their God’s most gifted, destructive son.

Maithanet pushes through the courtiers to kneel before Esmenet. She seems imposing thanks to her mask while Kelmomas hates how much Maithanet occupies the room. He always had an aura of “neck-breaking strength.” He demands that she cancel the frivolities, impatient to get this done. He’s dressed very simply for him. Esmenet merely inclines her head to the exact degree Jnan required while squeezing Kelmomas shoulder. He liked that.

No one spoke on the way to Inrilatas’s quarters except Vem-Mithriti who can’t keep up and asks if he follows at his own pace. They left the old Schoolman behind. Soon, they arrive at the Door. It appears bigger and grander than he remembered maybe because the bronze was polished so no longer was covered in verdigris. He wants to ask if his brother will be set free but the voice tells him to be quiet.

There is silence as Esmenet appears in prayer before the door before Maithanet asks why Kelmomas is here. His tone is clear, saying, “What is this morbid fixation?” She’s not sure. It was Inrilatas’s condition. Maithanet thinks this is to publicly humiliate him, but she says it’ll only be his two nephews.

Madness…” the Shriah muttered in feigned disgust.

At last she turned her mask toward him. “Yes,” she said. “Dûnyain madness.”

She nodded to Imhailas who opens the door. Maithanet took Kelmomas’s hand and ask if he’s also afraid of his uncle. Feigning anxiety, he glances back at Esmenet who reminds him he’s a Prince-Imperial. He follows Maithanet into Inrilatas’s cell.

It’s dark in the cell, the one brazier providing light for the chair and just revealing his brother crouched in his chains. The voice warns Kelmomas they need to figure out what Inrilatas wants from him. Why else had he demanded Kelmomas’s presence?

The moment the door closed, Maithanet lets go of his hand. He then wedges the door shut locking them in. Inrilatas laughs and says, “Truth Shines.” Maithanet repeats it and takes the seat. Kelmomas, however, is unnerved at being locked in here. “It had never occurred to him that Uncle Holy might have plans of his own…”

The voice begs him to shout for Esmenet while Inrilatas grins and winks. Kelmomas is confused. Frightened. He’s missed something. He’s trying to figure it out as Inrilatas asks if Maithanet plots Esmenet’s murder. Maithanet refuses each time it’s asked though with emphasis on different words.

The boy breathed against the iron rod of alarm that held him rigid. Everything was explicable, he decided. Inrilatas played as he always played, violating expectations for violation’s sake. His uncle had stopped the door for contingency’s sake… The little boy almost laughed aloud.

They were all Dûnyain here.

Inrilatas points out that Maithanet has spent so many years plotting, so how can he stop now? He’s suffered being around all these idiots. He has to wonder why one of these children were raised above him. Why would Kellhus choose Esmenet over Maithanet? The Shriah does not know but he suspects that Kellhus doesn’t trust him.

“Because he [Kellhus] knows, doesn’t he? He knows the secret of our blood.”

“Perhaps.”

“He knows you, knows you better than you know yourself.”

“Perhaps.”

“And he has seen the flicker of sedition, the small flame that awaits the kindling of circumstance.”

“Perhaps.”

“And have the circumstances arrived?”

“No,” Maithanet answered bluntly, prompting laughter from Inrilatas who says but they have. Maithanet doesn’t understand but Inrilatas calls him a liar, screeching. Maithanet scrutinizes Inrilatas with full Dûnyain awareness and the voice warns Kelmomas that Maithanet is their first true challenge.

Inrilatas asks how many children Moënghus sired. Maithanet answers six. Both are speaking toneless, abandoning the charade of being “normal.” Inrilatas asks if any of them were like him. Maithanet has no idea, the other five were all drowned at the first sign of “peculiarities.” Maithanet was the only one who was balanced. Inrilatas says Moënghus would have drowned him. Maithanet agrees.

The stark appraisal of a Dûnyain, directly to the point, careless of pride or injury. In an arena packed with the blind and the beggared, he and his family were the only sighted players. They played as the blind played—goading, commiserating, flattering—simply because these were the moves that moved the blind. Only when they fired one against another, the young Prince-Imperial realized, could they dispense with the empty posturing and play the game in its purest, most refined form.

Inrilatas asks why Kellhus spared him. Maithanet says because the world watched him. Inrilatas presses, not because of Esmenet. Maithanet counts her in the world, but Inrilatas points out Maithanet does not believe that. He thinks “Mother has compromised Father.” Maithanet hesitates as he thinks. Inrilatas pounces and continues that Maithanet believes Esmenet has caused Kellhus not to take the Shortest Path but to “walk in arcs to appease his heart.” He should be ruthlessly follow the Thousandfold Thought. Kelmomas thinks Inrilatas might have unmasked Maithanet and starts to think his uncle isn’t a big threat at all.

Maithanet demands to know how Inrilatas knows this while Inrilatas ignores this distraction to say, “You think Father risks the very world for his Empress’s sake—for the absurdity of love!” Maithanet demands to know if Esmenet told him about the Thousandfold Thought while Inrilatas says he is proof of Kellhus’s folly.

Maithanet enters the probability trance while Kelmomas hates he hasn’t been trained to sue all these gifts. Kellhus is only a threat to Kelmomas because he won’t ever help him and can see what he truly is.

Maithanet admits that he does see Inrilatas continued life as a mistake but he points out that if Inrilatas could see this, then so could Kellhus. If he doesn’t fear these seditious thoughts, why should Maithanet. Inrilatas asks how Maithanet will kill him when he seizes power.

“These tricks, Inrilatas. These tactics… They only work when they are hidden. I see things the same as you.”

“Strange, isn’t it, Uncle? The way we Dûnyain, for all our gifts, can never speak?”

“We are speaking now.”

Inrilatas laughed at this, lowered his beard-hazed cheeks to his knees once again. “But how can that be when we mean nothing of what we say?”

“You conf—”

“What would they do, you think, if Men could see us? If they could fathom the way we don and doff them like clothes?”

Maithanet counters with what would a child do if they could understand their fathers. Inrilatas says it depends on the father then adds that’s the answer Maithanet wants. Maithanet disagrees, saying that is the answer. Inrilatas then asked if Dûnyain can be different from one another. Be good or evil. “I know so,” answers Maithanet. Kelmomas realizes that Inrilatas is tense for a strike while acting like an awkward youth to hide his lethal intentions. The secret voice warns that this is all “simply for show.”

And that was the joke, Kelmomas realized: Inrilatas truly meant nothing of what he said.

Inrilatas talks about how they all have their “peculiarities.” They have different strengths or weakness, but they all have reflection. While normal men are thinking ahead without thinking about what comes before, they reflect on what has and trace it back. Kelmomas senses something is going to happen but when?

Inrilatas says they all deceive while Maithanet counters that the children make their choices. Inrilatas chides Maithanet to speak like he’s with Kellhus because Inrilatas sees his lies. He says there is no freedom here. No ability to make choices. Maithanet is tired of Inrilatas philosophy and finds him abhorrent. This entire farce only proves Esmenet’s “failing reason.”

“Mother?” his older brother exclaimed. “You think Mother arranged this?”

A heartbeat of hesitation, the smallest crack in Maithanet’s false demeanor.

Something is wrong, the voice whispered.

Maithanet asks who. Inrilatas glances at Kelmomas. Maithanet reacts not in surprise but in the emotionless manner of the Dûnyain. “Inrilatas gazed at the young Prince-Imperial as if he were a puppy about to be thrown into a river…”

“A thousand words and insinuations batter them day in and day out,” the youth said. “But because they lack the memory to enumerate them, they forget, and find themselves stranded with hopes and suspicions not of their making. Mother as always loved you, Uncle, has always seen you as a more human version of Father—an illusion you have laboured long and hard to cultivate. Now, suddenly, when she most desperately needs your counsel, she fears and hates you.”

“And this is Kelmomas’s work?”

“He isn’t what he seems, Uncle.”

Kelmomas isn’t sure what’s worse: his brother’s betrayal or Maithanet’s inscrutable face. Maithanet admits he’s suspected this. The voice urges Kelmomas to say something, but he can’t. Inrilatas says he’s as mad as the rest and he’s the worst, inflicting the most pain on Esmenet. He killed Samarmas. This is another crack in Maithanet’s armor.

Kelmomas is exposed. If Maithanet realized he could kill Samarmas and Sharacinth, he would see the guilt in the young Dûnyain. All that’s protected Kelmomas from Maithanet is that ignorance is as much a problem for the Dûnyain as the world-born. Kelmomas feels terror for the first time. As much as he feels like he’s about to be washed away, he’s curious about this feeling and curious about being curious about it.

Maithanet says Samarmas died being foolish. He was there. Inrilatas points out so was Kelmomas, and he could have Dûnyain cunning. Maithanet said he could in time. Inrilatas says Kelmomas was born like himself, able to use the gifts.

Kelmomas could hear all three of their hearts, his beating with rabbit quickness, his uncle’s pounding as slow as a bull’s—his brother’s dancing through the erratic in-between.

Inrilatas reveals he hasn’t just murdered his brother but others. Kelmomas can’t believe how everything has gone so wrong so fast. Inrilatas extorts Maithanet to talk to Dûnyain and focus his full scrutiny on the boy. Kelmomas can’t believe his mad brother is trying to destroy him and not Maithanet. That was the point of this.

The Shriah of the Thousand Temples turned to the boy, not as a human might, frowning, questioning, but with the glint of void in his eyes. As a Dûnyain.

“The sum of sins,” Inrilatas continued. “There is nothing more godly than murder. Nothing more absolute.”

And for the first time Kelmomas found himself trapped within the dread circuit of his Uncle’s scrutiny.

The voice begs Kelmomas to hide while his brother is cackling how Kelmomas should be chained up instead. Kelmomas shrieks lies as the Shriah orders the boy to look at him. In that moment, Inrilatas strikes, his chains clinking as the links snapped, weakened by a file. He swings both chains at Maithanet. Both hit him around the neck.

Kelmomas can’t look away as Inrilatas yanks Maithanet off his feet. Inrilatas is strangling Maithanet. But Maithanet pulled out a blade from beneath his vambrace. He stabs Inrilatas in the eye which pops and than the chest. That gives Maithanet just enough to break free and attack Inrilatas again. He punches Inrilatas in the left brow and collapses his eyes socket, killing him.

“Soft…” Maithanet said, as if noting a natural curiosity. He turned to the dumbstruck boy, his right sleeve crimson with blood. “And you?” he asked without a whisper of passion.

“Do you have your mother’s bones?”

The door burst open and the guards charge in. Kelmomas cries for his mother and says Maithanet killed Inrilatas to keep her from knowing Maithanet is plotting against her. Esmenet sees her dead son. Maithanet tries to explain, but she doesn’t care as she moves to her dead son. Then he asks if she wanted this to happen. That angers her, but she’s so calm she sounds crazed as she denies that she would want him to kill her son.

“Esmi…” he began.

But some sights commanded silence—even from a Dûnyain. For several giddy, horrifying moments, Kelmomas did not so much see his mother slump to her knees as he saw the Empress of the Three Seas collapse. A stranger. He told himself it was the mask, but when she pulled it from her face, the profile of cheek and brow did not seem familiar to him.

Holding the thing in ginger fingers, she set it upon Inrilatas’s shattered brow.

She starts saying how she knew she could defeat him. He asks how, and she tells about a story Kellhus told her about a god and a hero who made a wager and she realized it was a warning to her against all the Dûnyain. Kellhus, her children, and Maithanet. The story revealed the Dûnyain’s weakness. To beat them, you just have to be willing to sacrifice yourself to do it. She was willing to let the empire burn if he didn’t cooperate which is why he agreed to the meeting. He begs her to see sense. But she won’t have it. He killed her son and orders Imhailas to seize Maithanet.

But Imhailas is standing in shock that almost caused Kelmomas to giggle. Imhailas questions Esmenet. Maithanet will not be taken. He starts to walk off, everyone stunned into silence. But Esmenet screeches to seize him before she starts sobbing over her dead son. She’s lost another one.

Not another one, the secret voice whispered, laughing.

Later, Kelmomas is lying in his mother’s bed in the dark. He likes this new and different world. It’s better. Part of Kelmomas is counting his heartbeats to “know the measure of his bliss.” He’s up to 3427 before Sankas enters and reports Maithanet just walked out of the palace. No one would stop him. Esmenet stiffens but says nothing. She asks if Imhailas did try but his men didn’t help him. Kelmomas hopes Imhailas is dead while his mother is afraid for her lover. She asks if he’s okay.

Only his pride was injured and Sankas suggests reliving him of command, but she disagrees. He protests because his men mutinied. His command is now broken, and she refuses. They all were broken tonight. Sankas agrees.

Esmenet starts to shake with her grief as if something else was controlling her body. Finally, she relaxes and she has made a “fatal resolution.” She says that since Sankas is from a proud house, he should have resources independent of her palace to get what she needs. He’ll give her anything.

She wants a man who can kill, but not just any men. One with miraculous skills. This frightens Sankas but he agrees. He’s from an older generation and this went against his sensibilities, different ways of behaving that were different from how Kellhus had shaped the court. Like sitting on the edge of Esmenet’s bed as he agrees to hire a Narindar.

The Narindar used to be the most feared assassins who served the Cults. That was until the skin-spies were unmasked. This excites Kelmomas. Sankas promises to arrange everything, but she just wants him to arrange the meeting. “The damnation must be mine alone.”

Kelmomas is surprised his mother thinks she’ll be damned but the voice reassures him she knows Maithanet isn’t holy because he’s Dûnyain. They’re all frauds. Sankas admires the Empress’s resolve to take this burden.

And the boy craned his head up to see the tears at last overwhelm her eyes. It was becoming ever more difficult, finding ways to make her cry…

She clutched her boy tight as if he were her only limb remaining.

The gaunt Patridomos bowed precisely as low as jnan demanded of him, then withdrew to afford his Empress the privacy that all anguish required.

My Thoughts

Well, there’s that notch in the sword. Such an important notch. Or is it. I’m pretty sure that when this happens in the Great Ordeal, it does not happen at all the way we’re shown in this book. There’s this random Chorae that pops out of the ceiling. I remember being very confused, and so I’m going to pay attention on this re-read. Figure out if I misunderstood things, or if Bakker changed what happened.

Anyways, we’re seeing how he sees it all over and over again. “He saw her sob for joy a million times.” That’s because he’s reliving every moment of his existence at once. So he is constantly seeing her because he’s constantly walking every moment of his journey. After all this is a “quest that had already ended in the death of the False Prophet.”

Did the White-Luck Warrior kill the boy? Did that boy give death to him.

Kellhus could never tame Esmenet’s heart. We saw that in the last series. He had her completely entwined around him, and yet only her pregnancy with Kayûtas kept her from leaving with Achamian. She didn’t stay with Kellhus out of the love she once thought she had. She stayed for the love of the child in her belly and for the promise of finding the child she lost.

She stayed as a mother not a wife.

Kellhus had to know that by teaching Esmenet how to handle Inrilatas, he would be teaching her how to handle himself. But he also knows that he has her bound so tight to his purpose, that she will keep faith with him out of necessity. She loves her children, so she has to keep the New Empire alive. Even if she know hates Kellhus, even if she takes lovers and cuckolds him, she won’t betray his purpose. So though she can be wary of him, she’ll still do what he needs her to do.

“What if redemption were simply another form of damnation? What if the only true salvation lay in seeing through the trick and embracing oblivion.” This is the same thing that Kellhus’s son, the sole-surviving Dûnyain, comes with. I’m blanking on the character’s name, but this is the Thousand-Fold Thought. How to escape the “trick” of the afterlife and find annihilation. It’s a bleak solution for the bleak world of Bakker.

And it’s also the goal that Kellhus is working toward. He wants to end the game without ending life. That’s the easy way. The Shortest Path is genocide. It’s why the Mutilated embrace the Consult’s ideology. They’re seeking oblivion by annihilating life on this world and ending the Outside. Kellhus, broken by his ordeal and insane from Dûnyain perspective, has felt love. A weak and tepid form of love, he wants to “free” mankind. Destroy their religion. End it a different way. That means stopping the Consult so he can then work on demystifying himself.

Only he died.

There can be no love without trust. That is very powerful. I love my family. I trust them. My mom, my brother, my grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins. I wouldn’t be afraid around them, but Esmenet is with him. However, I think he’s wrong. You can love something and fear it. He wants to prey on her to make her hate him. That’s what I think most of Inrilatas. He hates himself, he wants to die, but his mother’s love keeps him alive. Keeps him chained. He can’t find the oblivion he wishes, overwhelmed by passion and logic. He has to break her hoping she’ll finally end him.

And if he can’t get his mother to kill him, he’ll kill her because she’s the only thing keeping him alive.

Even the most depraved acts become boring. Rote. It loses it’s titillation. But we’re seeing that it doesn’t matter who side conquers, they treat their enemies the same. And we do the same, we just don’t do it so brutal. We do it in other ways. Cancel you. Right hit pieces about you. Make up lies to destroy your reputation. Get you fired from your job.

Got to love a fanatic that can stand naked and in chains and say be conquered by their rival faith is what her Goddess wanted. Of course, she really is being guided by Yatwer who can see everyone (but Kelmomas’s) fate. So, yeah, she’s right. This is all to Yatwer’s advantage, as we’ll see. Fanayal is about to become Yatwer’s biggest simp.

Meppa’s talk about the Gods getting high off human souls tracks with Kellhus’s words that souls are just bread for the Gods. They eat them. The faithful just get eaten by whatever God they follow. That’s why Yatwer is so powerful. She’s the Goddess of the poor, so she has plenty of faithful. Plus, as it says in the bible, “It’s easier for a camel to fit through the eye of the needle than a rich man fit through the Gates of Heaven.” The poor aren’t distracted from their faith as much, though they are plenty of vices they can fall into from drugs, drink, apathy, etc. But Yatwer is a religion for the downtrodden that give them comfort in their misery.

We see Birth and War linked, Feminine and Masculine. There’s an old saying that a woman’s battlefield is the birthing bed. Through pain and blood, they bring in new life while risking their own life. This isn’t modern times where we have doctors, drugs, surgeries. Back in the day, a women died more in birth. And men die more in war. So again we see Yatwer and Gilgaöl linked like with the birth of the White-Luck Warrior or the war that Sorweel is going through. He wants to follow the Masculine but the Feminine has claimed him.

We get a nice description of the White-Luck Warrior. Meppa gives an accurate one without prejudicing it. He only realizes something there at the end, that Nannaferi believes this is all part of the White-Luck. It frightens him, but he covers it with that shrug, dismissing it to belittle it. To make it smaller.

Nannaferi is clearly hot enough for Fanayal to overlook her craziness. It’s a graph. The hotter a woman is, the more craziness a man will endure to be with her. But he’s going to pay for that decision.

The Protathis quote I butchered above about slaves becoming emperors is a great one. It comes down to those prison guard experiments where someone gets power, and they become tyrants. All that keeps us from being like that is knowing someone is looking over our shoulder, but when all those controls are lifted, we become tyrants.

The Scylvendi have withdrawn from the Empire’s borders. Our first clue that the Scylvendi are gathering to fight of the Consult as we see near the end of the series.

Werjau is “irascible.” I wonder if he ever kept investigating Esmenet like he was at the end of the last series.

Esmenet can’t tolerate losing another child, and she’s about to lose one.

I love why she realizes functionaries and bureaucrats are so necessary. They have created a special language, legalese we can call it, that keep outsiders from understanding what is going on while they understand it making themselves necessary and indispensable. It’s all about the job security. Just like today. Why do we need lawyers? Because they become politicians and write complicated laws so that other lawyers can argue technicalities. Legal disputes is just two parties arguing, but it’s been put into a foreign language that outsiders can’t understand and are forced to hire these professionals. Only a fool or someone desperate represents themselves in a modern courtroom.

Esmenet has learned from her time. She’s going to be one of those tyrannical leaders, and we can see why she heads down this path. Its the Shortest Way. She needs to save the Empire, and she can’t do that by playing nice. She has to be the tyrant to hold it together because chaos will be far worse. But how would history judge her? Would they understand the reasons she made her choices? Or would they just see the actions?

Esmenet comes so close to realizing that she’s been manipulated into not trusting Maithanet. So close to realizing the idea’s been put in her mind. Shame she didn’t. She doesn’t remember all those little things Kelmomas has said to put her on this path. She cannot see the Darkness that led to this decision.

Esmenet is so wrong about Kelmomas having her capacity to love. He has her capacity to own. To possess. The fact that he even contemplates murdering his mother shows that. He didn’t need to go that far in his thoughts.

Interesting how Nannaferi and Kelmomas are mirrors. They’re both using someone they think about killing in back to back passages. She’s very much like a Dûnyain just she’s a puppet for Yatwer, doing what her goddess wants. Kelmomas serves no one but his hungers, however Yatwer also only serves her hungers. They’re both beasts.

Beasts with too much intellect.

Interesting. Yatwer can only take if you give. And this is why she hates slave masters. Because they take what’s hers. Slave masters are men who dare to pretend to have the power of gods. To have her power over her slaves. Her food.

So Yatwer has a very Christian soteriology. You just have to believe to be saved in Christianity. There’s no about of doing good deeds, which is gambling that you’ll do enough good to outweigh your evil. Makes me wonder if Bakker was raised in some sort of Calvinist sect of Christianity given his views on religion.

Always the crazy ones have the best pussy. Fanayal is caught up in that. He’s arrogant enough to think he’s in control but he’s not. He’s out of control with his lust. His victory probably let his guard down. His self-control slipped. He’s denied himself probably for years lurking out in the desert and now… Now there’s this hottie, and he just can’t get enough. He’s addicted to her.

And like all addictions, it will destroy him.

We see that while Kelmomas has the intellect, he doesn’t see past the immediate. He doesn’t think about what will happen tomorrow. He just wants his own base needs satiated. Now he’s realizing that he should have thought things through.

Such an important point. If the Dûnyain are ignorant of fact, it can blindside them. Maithanet saw Kelmomas as a child. Nothing worth putting attention onto. Now he’s attacked by Inrilatas from the side. Inrilatas has his own plan here as we’ll see.

Poor Kelmomas. He thought he was the master of everything, and instead he’s playing his brother’s game.

To beat the Dûnyain, you have to be willing to sacrifice yourself. Kellhus knows this. I think we just hit on why he made his deal with Ajokli. It didn’t work because he got killed by Kelmomas, but I think that was the plan. He would sacrifice himself to beat them. It’s something Dûnyain would be weak to. Dying to win a contest means you don’t benefit from it. That there has to be another angle. This isn’t convincing a fantastic to kill themselves, this is someone working for their own self-interest who is willing to die to beat you and if they do die, it’s bad. She cornered Maithanet.

Then Inrilatas used this to commit suicide. He wants to die. We’ve seen that. He’s provoking people to get them to kill him. He finally did it here. He got the jump on Maithanet but didn’t manage to deliver an instantly lethal kill. Maybe he thought killing Maithanet would achieve the same result, but I really think he’s suicidal. He’s like the Survivor in the next book. There’s no point in living.

Kelmomas is one of the most evil characters I have ever read in fiction. Inrilatas is right. His greatest motivation is to make the one person he cares about cry. He wants to hurt Esmenet so she’ll spend time only with him.

Want to keep going, click here for Chapter 9!

And you have to check out my fantasy novel, Above the Storm!

Now it’s been turned into an Audiobook!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When the Stormriders attack …

…Ary’s people have little chance.

Can he find a way to defeat them?

At 19, Ary has spent ten years mourning his father’s death. The aftermath of the attack still haunts him. Now, on the eve of the draft he faces his greatest fear, being sent to become a marine.

He knows the cost of war.

All he wants is to marry Charlene, who he has loved since they were kids. Building a farm and starting a family sounds perfect. There’s just one problem, his best friend Vel adores her, too. He’d give anything for peace.

But wanting the Stormriders to stop attacking…

…isn’t going to make it happen.

For love, for his people, and especially for the life he wants, Ary makes a decision that will change everything.

The adventure begins.

You’ll love this beautifully creative dark fantasy, because James Reid knows how to create characters and worlds you’ll grow to adore.

Get it now.

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