Chapter Fifty-Seven

As I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t want Hrathen’s affection for Sarene to ever be overt in the book. He’s not a man of passions, and I think he would be very good at keeping his interest unacknowledged, even in his own thoughts. He has ‘learned to ignore’ the passions of the flesh. We only get a few small clues as to his attraction to Sarene, and this chapter is probably has the most of those.

Still, hidden though they are, I wanted it to be obvious that Hrathen is a man, and does have masculine desires. He’s found a woman whom he considers his equal–the fact that she is of a heretic religion would only make her more appealing, I think. Hrathen is attracted to challenges, and Sarene is nothing if not challenging.

I use this chapter as a strict triad chapter–it covers the same space of time as the other two chapters. With Sarene and Raoden running around together now, the triad system has been easy to forget. While I still start each chapter with the correct character, I often let the viewpoints intermix after that.

Again, this is intentional. After this last Hrathen chapter, I have the triad system break down completely. It’s supposed to be a subtle indication of the chaos of these last few chapters. I’ll even start throwing in viewpoints that aren’t of the core three, which I hope with give the reader a sensation that something different is happening. The world, even the narrative structure of the book, is breaking apart. None of the old rules hold any more.

Ah, and Hrathen’s three month timebomb. It’s always nice when you can have a timebomb go off early. Hrathen thinks in this very chapter about how he’s got a month left on his deadline. However, I suspect that readers will look at the book and realize that there’s less than a hundred pages left. Hopefully, with these chapters–Raoden crowned king, Hrathen apparently beaten–I invoke a sense of confusion in the reader. They’ll be expecting something big, something they weren’t looking for.

The arrival of the Dakhor monks is it. You’ll get some more explanation of this later, of course. Anyway, now you know why I kept mentioning the Arelene market and how unprofitable it seemed. The merchants there weren’t even really merchants.

In the first draft, I had the monks hiding on the merchants’ ships. In a later rewrite, however, I realized that this wasn’t as powerful as if I had them actually playing the part of the merchants. If I had them on the ships, I had to have Hrathen follow Dilaf all the way to the docks. In addition, those monks would have had to spend weeks cooped up in the holds of a bunch of merchant ships. So, I changed it so that the monks were impersonating the merchants themselves–a better plan, I think, on their part. This lets them infiltrate the city, move around and scout the area, and essentially hide in plain sight.

Anyway, I warned you about the avalanche earlier. Well, things are about to get even crazier. . . .