I admit it, doing this and NaNoWriMo is proving taxing, and guess which task is more readily sidelined?  However, we have something of a pivotal chapter here, and I guess it deserves some space to give it some analysis.

So, we’re back to “Corvus”, and he’s off to see the Pope, since there was that business of the Church laying siege to the elvish embassy, which problem Corvus resolved in his usual diplomatic manner, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland.  Apologizing or finding excuses for his latest decapitation, though, is not on Corvus’s mind; he intends to have it out with the Watcher he suspects is lurking at the corrupted heart of the papal court.

And, when he gets there, he is greeted by a smiling figure in white archepiscopal robes, none other than – Laris Sebastius!  Yes, he finally makes his appearance!  He is all friendliness and affability, but we remember the prologue, we know it’s all a false front.  Surely, now, an exciting game of cat and mouse will ensue, and Corvus, who suspects the Pope of being the sinister Watcher, will be astounded when it is finally revealed that the Pope is but a puppet in the hands of Sebastius –

This final revelation comes in about three minutes flat, as Corvus finds the Pope drooling and gibbering on his Sedes Ossus, having been punished by Sebastius for even daring to drop the odd cryptic hint in their first meeting.  I suppose Beale was worried about the effects the tension and slowly rising suspense might have on his readers’ blood pressure.  Kind of him to be concerned, though quite frankly, by this stage I’m just grateful to have a pulse at all.

So Laris Sebastius stands revealed as the Watcher, and he has a proposition for Corvus; he will aid Corvus in the defence of Amorr if Corvus will help him, in his plan to get control of the “shadow door” and go back to his own people’s world.  Hmm.  This actually sounds like not a bad deal, doesn’t it?  Silvertree did tell Corvus that the Watcher was a possible ally… and there’s no reason to suppose Sebastius is lying about his ultimate goal… and there is nothing intrinsically objectionable about that goal… and, basically, both Corvus and Sebastius will get what they want out of the arrangement; Corvus gets to protect Amorr and crush the rebellious provinces, and Sebastius gets to go home. Sounds like Corvus has nothing to lose and a lot to gain by agreeing to work with Sebastius.

So naturally Corvus stabs him.

I think Corvus’s rigid Amorran moral rectitude – so pliable when the subject of murdering his political rival came up – has gone all stiff again.  Certainly, Corvus must infer (as I do myself) that Sebastius is responsible for the demon-summoning multiple-bishop-murdering only-sympathetic-character-in-the-book-killing incident, and is therefore a bad lot.  (Mind you, actual evidence for this is hard to come by – if Sebastius were to say “nope, must have been some other Watcher out to discredit me, you know they’re out there,” Corvus and I would have a hard job proving otherwise.)  However, even assuming this to be true, there might be better answers than stabbity-stab-stab.  Play for time, pretend to cooperate, while looking for Sebastius’s weak point.  Or just run straight for the door and grab some of the Michaeline Men – if they can shut down a high elf’s magic, they might at least stand a chance against a Watcher.  But no, it’s stabby time.

Of course, it doesn’t work.  (And Corvus really has no excuse for not knowing it wouldn’t work.)  Sebastius lets his mask slip, threatening Corvus with all sorts of horrible things… this is one thing Beale has in common with his buddy John C. Wright: neither of them can do proper temptation scenes.  Sebastius is supposedly a master manipulator, with centuries of experience; getting a dumb-bell like Corvus wrapped around his little finger should be child’s play to him, but as soon as he’s thwarted, it’s out with the “I will rape your wife and eat your family” threats so there’s no hope of talking the guy around.  Insidious supernatural evil needs to be a bit more plausible, if it’s going to come across as insidious and not just dim.

The Pope rallies long enough to throw an ineffectual exorcism at Sebastius…. You know, there must have been quite a story here, somewhere along the way.  When we first met Valens, he was just being charged by the old Pope with a discreet investigation into Sebastius – now, here he is, puppet Pope for the man he was supposed to be investigating.  What twists and turns of fate, what revelations and deceptions and reversals of fortune, led him to this place?  Well, I don’t know, do I?  I was watching Theuderic and Fjotra arsing around instead, and a lost dwarf carrying a hubcap – all of which was more important.  Apparently.

A miffed Sebastius blasts the Pope with magic fire.  Corvus takes the opportunity to do some more stabbing, literally cutting Sebastius into several pieces.  Not only does this not kill Sebastius, it doesn’t even slow him down.  Sebastius zaps Corvus as well, but somewhere along the line the Pope dropped a burning torch, and Corvus uses this to set fire to the building.  Sebastius will, at least, be burned to ashes and have to reconstruct himself.  Corvus, however, dies.

Yes, you read that right.  Corvus has nobly sacrificed his own life to kill Laris Sebastius.  Well, OK, not kill him, he will just reanimate after a while.  But Corvus has foiled his evil plans.  Well, OK, maybe foiled them.  Definitely made him miss his next deadline, though.  Probably.  Sebastius will get dinged for that at his next Evil Performance Review, I’m quite sure.  Fairly sure.

“So,” you say, “not exactly the end of Amorr’s greatest villain, then, is it?”

To which I reply: huh?  Did you think I meant Sebastius?  The only villainous thing he’s done is murder a bunch of bishops and one poor innocent goblin.  Evil, I grant you, but with a body count not even in double figures, Sebastius isn’t even in the running for Amorr’s greatest villain.  No, Amorr’s greatest villain is the one who found that a political rival was planning to guarantee the state’s safety with concessions to the provincials, and straight-up had him murdered at his daughter’s engagement party for having the effrontery to try it.  The one who thereby precipitated a full-on war with the provinces, which Amorr is ill-equipped to fight.  The one who, in addition, drove even members of his own family to defect to the rebels – and who then further fostered ill-will against Amorr by exiling the loyal provincials, sending them out to die in the winter snows as penniless refugees.  The one who’s just capped it all by engaging (as far as anyone else can see) in some bizarre murder-suicide with the new Pope.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Amorr’s greatest villain, who will probably be recorded as such if any Amorrans are left to write future histories: Sextus Valerius Corvus. The fact that he did all this while firmly and absolutely convinced of his own infallible righteousness is just the icing on the cake.

Goodbye, Corvus.  You died as you lived: doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.

“Corvus” is being Corvus.  He has a brilliant idea for how to cope with the current crisis – deport all non-Amorrans from Amorr!  Nothing says “proportionate response” like ethnic cleansing, after all.  This is, presumably, where those dead refugees by the roadside that Aulan noticed, a few chapters back, came from.  Which suggests that we’ve slipped back in the timeline a bit from then.  I thought that chapter felt as if it was written from a later perspective….

I can’t imagine what Corvus is thinking, here.  If there is massive disaffection spreading through the provinces, throwing the provincials’ friends and relations out of Amorr to starve to death in the snow probably isn’t going to help.  Not to mention the economic disruption which it causes to the city – which Corvus is aware of.  He also spends some time calculating which legions are likely to remain loyal, and which have too high a percentage of provincials to be trusted.  Again, the loyalty of the provincial recruits is going to be severely tested when they find their communities in Amorr have been ruthlessly extirpated.  Nonetheless, Corvus, as ever, is convinced that his way is the right way and the only way.  (We seem to be back in a situation, here, where pure-blooded Amorrans are a dominant group – although this might be all in Corvus’s head, who knows?)

He is interrupted in his latest brilliant plan (conscript new legions out of armed slaves) by news that the elvish embassy is under siege.  So he goes to take charge of that situation, in his own inimitable style.  Silvertree, Theuderic and Lithriel are just about to be taken into custody when Corvus turns up with his fascitors in tow, says he can’t allow the Pope’s troops to interfere with an ambassador, and, when the leader of the Church troops refuses his orders, has the guy beheaded on the spot.  I’m sure this will go down just famously with the Pope.  Silvertree tells Corvus about his plan to escape with the aid of Caitlys, and adds some pointed hints about the unknown sorcerous power (the Watcher, though Silvertree is not explicit on this point) maybe being a potential ally for Corvus.  An alliance with an immortal sorcerer of questionable morality and unknown intentions?  Yes, I think Corvus will decide this is a good idea.  Especially as he has now received news that the northern provinces – including some he’d believed would stay loyal – have formed themselves into a defensive alliance against Amorr.  I thought we already knew this, but obviously I’m wrong.  Maybe Corvus will decide that now’s the time to start trusting Watchers.

We won’t find out straight away – if we find out at all, since this thing is finally limping towards its conclusion – because we’re off to see “Fjotra”, who is getting in deeper with Roheis and the Comte de Saint-Agliè.  Fjotra gets news that her homeland has finally fallen to the rubbish werewolves, and her parents didn’t make it to the last chopper out.  Brynjolf has completely gone native in Savondir, he has accepted a feudal holding from the Duc de Chenevin, and is now correcting Fjotra on her Savonerderneraiseesedese.   And Roheis and the Comte unveil the king’s devious master plan, to split the Dalarn refugees into a whole lot of small communities, scattering them across the country so that their culture will be absorbed, assimilated and lost.  They have their own devious master plan, which they now reveal – they want the Dalarns in one piece, as the backbone of their armed forces when they raise a rebellion against the king.  Didn’t I say that an ambitious woman could find a use for a small army of loyal Viking refugees?

Fjotra, however, only pretends to play along with them.  She is not having any of this.  Apparently, the fact that the Comte is a devious plotter and possibly not human… is reason enough for Fjotra to distrust him.  Well, it’s nice to see that one of Beale’s characters has enough sense to come in out of the rain.   We close with her secretly planning to warn the king.  This will, of course, result in her having to cosy up to the Duc de Chenevin, who tried to kidnap and rape her in her last chapter, but Fjotra is surprisingly OK with that – she thinks the Duc is genuinely attracted to her.  He doesn’t want her just for her werewolf-infested islands and dispossessed Viking army, he values her as a nice piece of ass besides.  Ladies and gentlemen – Romance, Beale style.

This chapter begins in the run-up to the festival of Hivernalia, which I thought we’d already had, dammit – it was the festival where Severa got betrothed and her father got stabbed.  Although that might also have been called Invernalia.  Anyway, although Fjotra spends a somewhat indeterminate time travelling, I can’t help feeling the timeline of this at  has come a bit unglued from the main action.

Back to “Theuderic”, and he’s still escaping from Amorr, so at least we can be sure this follows directly on from that last chapter with Corvus.  Caitlys Shadowsong shows up with her elven warhawk.  I really was wondering if we were ever going to meet her.  We don’t get much in the way of description – she’s an elf; when we first see her, she’s got a runny nose – and her characterization is, well, virtually indistinguishable from every other walk-on part we’ve seen.  She seems slightly more iffy about Theuderic and Lithriel’s relationship than Silvertree was, but she still lets them both onto her warhawk, and away they soar.  We get a fairly lame description of Amorr as seen from the air.  Still looks much like Rome, surprise surprise.

Their plan now is to meet up with Marcus, which, since they don’t strictly know where he is, is going to be something of a problem.  They fly out over Amorr and the nearer provinces, and spot something Caitlys thinks is an Amorran legionary camp – but it isn’t, it’s a fortified town, and it greets them with anti-aircraft fire from ballistae.  Theuderic responds by hurling lightning bolts – ah.  I remember someone commenting, earlier, about Marcus supposedly having thrown some elvish magic around; this may possibly be that very incident.  Anyway, this done, they fly off once more to look for Marcus.

The timeline is really all over the place, now.  I think it always was – I remember complaining about it, earlier – but it’s becoming more obvious now that we are nearer the end of the book and things have finally started to happen.  Now that there actually are events, it’s easier to see where they’re getting jumbled up.  Of course, it’s hard to keep these sorts of things straight, when you’re coordinating multiple characters in different locales.  Why, in my current NaNoWriMo project, I just recently noticed that I had one character who was out of sync with the others, so that weeks could pass for some while he was just walking from one room to another… oh, wait, I wrote some extra stuff to fix that, didn’t I?  In my first draft that I am speed-writing over the course of a single month, I managed to spot the problem and sort it out.  That’s the difference between me and a professional writer and editor like Beale, you know.

(My NaNoWriMo effort currently stands at 16,031 words – given it’s fantasy, and fantasy always skews long, I might be 12% of the way through it.  And I’d just like to point out that I’ve introduced the main characters and the setting, and – while there are still things I haven’t revealed – it is pretty clear where the main conflict lies and what the stakes are.  A reader would have a good idea, in short, who is in conflict with what, over whom.  I know there’s a lot wrong with what I’ve written so far, but that’s what editing is for.  Later.  Got to add more word count.)

Meanwhile, let’s get back to work on this thing.  “Fjotra”, back in Savondir, has gone to full-on melodrama mode, being menaced by the Duc de Chenevin, the Red Prince’s younger brother.  He is saturnine and handsome and speechifies a lot, like a proper villain should, though he needs to grow a moustache for twirling purposes.  The embargo on information, lifted in Amorr after Severus’s death, still seems to be in place in Savondir – the Duc doesn’t know the Red Prince is dead, although you’d figure he’d be fairly high up the list of people to be told.  He is villainously happy to learn of his brother’s death, but still plans (villainously) to marry Fjotra by force and thus gain a claim to the Wolf Islands.  I’m not sure why anybody would want them – they didn’t seem to want those islands even back when they weren’t infested with rubbish werewolves – but never mind.  Maybe it’s a prestige thing.

However, before things go any further, the Comte de Saint-Agliè shows up, requiring me to page back through the damn book to see if he’s ever even been mentioned before.  A friend of the Countess, it seems.  There follows a rather limp and confused fight scene, in which the Duc sets his henchmen on the Comte, but it turns out the Comte is something rather more than human – he survives what should be a mortal wound, inflicted by the Duc’s pet sorcerer, and makes an ominous-sounding speech about there being creatures far more powerful and dangerous than him in the world.  Then he takes Fjotra away, though Fjotra herself seems to be in two minds about the whole business.  It’s another one of those vaguely unconvincing non-resolution resolutions to a scene, which Beale seems to go for.  The Comte says that no one will believe the Duc if he tells them what happened… except, well, Savondir has a reasonable quantity of mages, doesn’t it?  Is “the Comte of Saint-Agliè is protected against weapons by evil magic” really so hard to swallow, especially as there are multiple witnesses to it?  Whatever.

At a guess, the Comte is not the Watcher in the north, but an agent of the Watcher – having let these Watchers into the plot, Beale seems determined to get some mileage out of them.  As with Amorr, the plot in Savondir seems to have lurched suddenly in a different direction, with major players emerging unexpectedly out of the woodwork and doing things that don’t immediately relate to the existing context.  Well, at least things seem to be happening, albeit melodramatically, and not to any immediate effect – in terms of the plot, Fjotra is pretty much where she was two chapters ago, she just took a little detour to be temporarily menaced by a saturnine villain.

Back to “Marcus” for the next one.  Marcus is still outside the rebel city of Solacte, debating with his staff, and his own conscience, as to what to do next.  Some of his people are for demanding the return of the scouting party’s bodies for proper burial, and they plan to do this by taking and threatening to execute hostages from among the civilian population outside the city walls.  Marcus is dubious about this – well, fair play to the lad, he’s never even heard of the Geneva Convention, after all – and spends ages discussing things with his staff, and a priest, and reading old books of strategy…. In the morning, he sets things up so that it looks like he’s executing civilian hostages until the Solacteans cave in, but he’s actually executing captured enemy scouts in civilian clothes.  Whom he’s allowed to execute.  So it doesn’t weigh on his conscience, which is the important thing – Marcus’s conscience must be kept squeaky-clean, for Marcus’s own sake.  Though it seems less like a moral crisis, to me, and more like an exercise in rules-lawyering so that his hands stay technically clean, and we all know that technically correct is the best kind of correct, right?  Marcus, in short, is developing a supple, flexible, easily manipulable sort of a conscience.  His father will be so proud.

This goes on for a surprisingly long time, and at the end of it Marcus hasn’t really gone anywhere either – he started off looking for somewhere safe in rebel territory to winter with his legion, and that’s the situation he’s in at the end of the chapter, too.  Shall we go over to “Theuderic”?  Because at least he moves, slightly.

In his last appearance, Theuderic was visiting the elven ambassador, Silvertree, for a hefty info-dump, when the Church troops showed up to arrest him or something.  Silvertree is quite dismissive about the Church soldiers – he faces the situation with “the smile of a wolf that finds itself cornered by rabbits“, so he does.  He is confident of keeping the soldiers out while he has Theuderic and Lithriel airlifted out to safety – literally airlifted out, by Caitlys Shadowsong and her war hawk.  Remember her?  Marcus’s elf-crush?  I was wondering if we were actually going to see her.  (Silvertree notes that Marcus doesn’t have the same sort of relationship with Caitlys that Theuderic does with Lithriel… so, evidently, he does know Theuderic and Lithriel are “futtering”, and doesn’t mind.  Oh, well.)

It’s a good plan, so far as it goes, but it fails to survive contact with the enemy.  Silvertree goes to the roof of the embassy to hector the Church troops; he engages the embassy’s impressive magical wards – and the Michaelines pray a bit at him, and the wards come down.  Oh dear.  This is the first time we’ve seen the anti-magic Michaelines in action, and they turn out to be surprisingly effective, at least when it comes to shutting down elven magic.  Makes me wonder, though, how come six senior bishops put up such a poor show against one demon-possessed goblin, earlier, though.   You’d expect the Church to sort of concentrate on anti-demon stuff… oh, never mind.  Silvertree, Theuderic and Lithriel are given an invitation they can’t refuse, and are marched off to a meeting with the Pope.

So, Theuderic is actually in motion – something has happened to him.  Which is good.  We are actually getting fairly close to the end of this thing, and I’m a bit worried, to be honest, that it still seems to be just, well, marking time.  The Watchers may have come out into the open (at least so far as we, the readers, know), but I’m still in the dark as to what their plans might actually be.  If there aren’t some decent revelations in the final chapters, I’m going to be annoyed.  Maybe the Pope will stop dropping cryptic hints and say something useful.  Hey, I can dream.