Black Jewels: Chapter One, Part One
Aug. 22nd, 2015 06:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beroliYes, the chapters are subdivided into numbered parts.
Part One:
Still in Terreille, seven hundred years after the prologue; Lucivar is the viewpoint character. Bishop has a lot of background to establish yet. For one thing, she needs to show, rather than tell, just how vile Dorothea's influence is--and that's very bad news for the never-named character who starts the chapter about to be punished for leading a slave revolt. (All the slaves in the area have been flogged as punishment for the revolt, including Lucivar.) While Lucivar watches the guards torture the man (in a way Bishop describes extremely graphically, but I'm not going to), the narrative voice states that he feels no sympathy because "in the Territory of Pruul, sympathy was a luxury no slave could afford." Yet the way Lucivar acts toward the slave is sympathetic--by my definition anyway. Either Lucivar's self-image paints him as colder than he actually is or Bishop uses the word "sympathy" fundamentally differently from me.
After mercy-killing the other slave, Lucivar reflects that he could have told the other slaves that their rebellion was doomed on either ideological grounds (he doesn't think the slaves who revolted were brutal enough to succeed in a revolt) or on practical ones (he knew that the Ring of Obedience each slave wears on his penis would alert the overseers as soon as they started to move). Bishop apparently wants him to seem badass and detached, but particularly that last omission (that there's a provable mechanical reason the rebellion was doomed to fail and result in the brutal crackdown currently taking place) makes him seem genuinely callous in a way the mercy-killing scene suggests she wasn't going for.
Oh, important background detail here. Terreilleian courts fit male slaves with a Ring of Obedience around the penis. Anyone holding that Ring's controlling ring can make the slave feel like he's being bombarded with Force Lightning aimed at his crotch. Not even the most ridiculously over-the-top badass (you've met him, he's named Daemon) can stand it.
Having reflected dispassionately on how he let the doomed revolt go on because he was too cool to explain why it would fail, Lucivar reflects on his centuries of escaping and getting recaptured.
Among the Blood, males were meant to serve, not to rule. He had never challenged that, despite the number of witches he'd killed over the centuries. He had killed them because it was an insult to serve them, because he was an Eyrien Warlord Prince who wore Ebon-gray Jewels and refused to believe that serving and groveling meant the same thing. Because he was a half-breed bastard, he had no hope of attaining a position of authority within a Court, despite the rank of his Jewels. Because he was a trained Eyrien warrior and had a temper that was explosive even for a Warlord Prince, he had even less hope of being allowed to live outside the social chains of a court.
And he was caught, as all Blood males were caught. There was something bred into them that made them crave service, that compelled them to bond in some way with a Blood-Jeweled female.
Then Lucivar touches one of his new lash wounds and thinks of an "old saying" A wish, offered with blood, is a prayer to the Darkness. So he sends out a random psychic message addressed to Occupant, as long as Occupant wears Ebon-gray or darker Jewels, that Just once, I'd like to serve a Queen I could respect, someone I could truly believe in. A strong Queen who wouldn't fear my strength. A Queen I could also call a friend.
A few seconds later, he gets a reply of *Hello?* and Bishop pauses for a brief infodump on psychic communication: It can be aimed at a specific individual, at everyone in an area, at everyone of one sex in an area, or at everyone at a specific Jewel rank or darker in an area. Then Jaenelle appears: a blonde seven-year-old girl from Chaillot, who can travel to anywhere along the Winds, and Bishop slips in an infodump on how the Winds the Blood use to travel work by having Lucivar explain them to Jaenelle:
"[...] The Winds are like a spider web. You can travel on the tether or radial lines, changing direction where they intersect. There's a Web for each rank of the Blood Jewels. The darker the Web, the more tether and radial lines there are and the faster the Wind is. You can ride a Web that's your rank or lighter. You can't ride a Web darker than your Jewel rank unless you're inside a Coach being driven by someone strong enough to ride that Web or you're being shielded by someone who can ride that Web. If you try, you probably won't survive."
Lucivar quickly realizes that she's Witch, and oddly, though later scenes will make it clear everyone else who recognizes Jaenelle as Witch expects her to be wearing Birthright Red with the potential to wear the Black as her Jewel of rank, not wearing a darker color than has ever been a Birthright Jewel before, Lucivar doesn't seem at all phased that a seven-year-old girl could hear him on an Eboy-gray thread. Then Lucivar extracts a promise that Jaenelle won't go wandering until she's seventeeh because Terreille is dangerous to children. Jaenelle says "I promise not to go wandering in Terreille," and Lucivar doesn't catch the implication.
Part One:
Still in Terreille, seven hundred years after the prologue; Lucivar is the viewpoint character. Bishop has a lot of background to establish yet. For one thing, she needs to show, rather than tell, just how vile Dorothea's influence is--and that's very bad news for the never-named character who starts the chapter about to be punished for leading a slave revolt. (All the slaves in the area have been flogged as punishment for the revolt, including Lucivar.) While Lucivar watches the guards torture the man (in a way Bishop describes extremely graphically, but I'm not going to), the narrative voice states that he feels no sympathy because "in the Territory of Pruul, sympathy was a luxury no slave could afford." Yet the way Lucivar acts toward the slave is sympathetic--by my definition anyway. Either Lucivar's self-image paints him as colder than he actually is or Bishop uses the word "sympathy" fundamentally differently from me.
After mercy-killing the other slave, Lucivar reflects that he could have told the other slaves that their rebellion was doomed on either ideological grounds (he doesn't think the slaves who revolted were brutal enough to succeed in a revolt) or on practical ones (he knew that the Ring of Obedience each slave wears on his penis would alert the overseers as soon as they started to move). Bishop apparently wants him to seem badass and detached, but particularly that last omission (that there's a provable mechanical reason the rebellion was doomed to fail and result in the brutal crackdown currently taking place) makes him seem genuinely callous in a way the mercy-killing scene suggests she wasn't going for.
Oh, important background detail here. Terreilleian courts fit male slaves with a Ring of Obedience around the penis. Anyone holding that Ring's controlling ring can make the slave feel like he's being bombarded with Force Lightning aimed at his crotch. Not even the most ridiculously over-the-top badass (you've met him, he's named Daemon) can stand it.
Having reflected dispassionately on how he let the doomed revolt go on because he was too cool to explain why it would fail, Lucivar reflects on his centuries of escaping and getting recaptured.
Among the Blood, males were meant to serve, not to rule. He had never challenged that, despite the number of witches he'd killed over the centuries. He had killed them because it was an insult to serve them, because he was an Eyrien Warlord Prince who wore Ebon-gray Jewels and refused to believe that serving and groveling meant the same thing. Because he was a half-breed bastard, he had no hope of attaining a position of authority within a Court, despite the rank of his Jewels. Because he was a trained Eyrien warrior and had a temper that was explosive even for a Warlord Prince, he had even less hope of being allowed to live outside the social chains of a court.
And he was caught, as all Blood males were caught. There was something bred into them that made them crave service, that compelled them to bond in some way with a Blood-Jeweled female.
Then Lucivar touches one of his new lash wounds and thinks of an "old saying" A wish, offered with blood, is a prayer to the Darkness. So he sends out a random psychic message addressed to Occupant, as long as Occupant wears Ebon-gray or darker Jewels, that Just once, I'd like to serve a Queen I could respect, someone I could truly believe in. A strong Queen who wouldn't fear my strength. A Queen I could also call a friend.
A few seconds later, he gets a reply of *Hello?* and Bishop pauses for a brief infodump on psychic communication: It can be aimed at a specific individual, at everyone in an area, at everyone of one sex in an area, or at everyone at a specific Jewel rank or darker in an area. Then Jaenelle appears: a blonde seven-year-old girl from Chaillot, who can travel to anywhere along the Winds, and Bishop slips in an infodump on how the Winds the Blood use to travel work by having Lucivar explain them to Jaenelle:
"[...] The Winds are like a spider web. You can travel on the tether or radial lines, changing direction where they intersect. There's a Web for each rank of the Blood Jewels. The darker the Web, the more tether and radial lines there are and the faster the Wind is. You can ride a Web that's your rank or lighter. You can't ride a Web darker than your Jewel rank unless you're inside a Coach being driven by someone strong enough to ride that Web or you're being shielded by someone who can ride that Web. If you try, you probably won't survive."
Lucivar quickly realizes that she's Witch, and oddly, though later scenes will make it clear everyone else who recognizes Jaenelle as Witch expects her to be wearing Birthright Red with the potential to wear the Black as her Jewel of rank, not wearing a darker color than has ever been a Birthright Jewel before, Lucivar doesn't seem at all phased that a seven-year-old girl could hear him on an Eboy-gray thread. Then Lucivar extracts a promise that Jaenelle won't go wandering until she's seventeeh because Terreille is dangerous to children. Jaenelle says "I promise not to go wandering in Terreille," and Lucivar doesn't catch the implication.
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Date: 2015-08-23 01:50 am (UTC)BWAHAHAHAH
Uh. Sorry. I just... people talk about this series as if it's supposed to be taken seriously as a dark fantasy series. But when you're putting slave rings on penii, you're writing porn. Period.