I’m pleased to report that Chapter Five is now online.
Chapter Six is paid for; Chapter Seven still isn’t. And I still haven’t finished Chapter Nine, but I’ve got three other time-consuming projects squared away (at least for the moment) so I’m optimistic about getting back to it soon.
And this chapter reveals a few things that some of you had already guessed.
Now that we know for certain that Tesk is a shatra, I’ll ask one question that has been confusing me after recently re-reading The Misenchanted Sword. In Lord Gor’s speech announcing the end of the war, he says that “there can be … no more shatra …” Yet here Tesk is, after the war.
Admittedly, Gor later admits that he and his advisors do not exactly know how magic has been changed, and Valder hears reports of remaining shatra later in the book. The simplest explanation is that Gor (and L. W.-E.) meant that, while already-created shatra might remain, the could be no more new shatra. Is that right?
Right — no more shatra could be created.
(And of course, General Gor might be wrong.)
I wonder if the events in this book could be related to events in the book Corinal was reading in The Vondish Ambassador.
Bill
If I was Garander, I would not be letting Ishta go back out alone.
“You can’t kill a demon!” his father corrected him. “All you can do is send it back to the Nethervoid. And that’s what the gods did – they cast all the demons out of the World, and I assume that would have included half-demons like the shatra.”
When I read this I could not help but think of the possibility that the half demon part of Tesk was sent back to the nethervoid.
I assume the Cult of Demerchan might be interested in recruiting a shatra. But only 20 years after the war, they are probably still getting organized.
Interesting thought!
However, Demerchan hadn’t yet expanded beyond the Small Kingdoms and minimal outposts in the three Ethshars as of this time. This is all at least forty leagues from their nearest operations.
Yay, new Ethshar! This is always exciting to see. I love the stories and characters that wonder this world, and it’s always fun to see more of the secrets and mysteries revealed.
In other thoughts; does anyone else see Tesk’s name looking like two names (Tezhiskar Deralt and Chitir Shess Chitir?) with some connecting text (aya Shatra Ad’n)? The middle part looks to me something like a relationship junction (the best earth examples I can think of are ibn/son of, bint/daughter of, etc).
Now, if Shatra are a merging of a human and a demon, and I’m seeing that connecting text properly, it would stand to reason that one of the names is the human and the other is the demon. As someone previously mentioned, non-ethsharitic names can frequently be interpreted as some sort of earth referent easter egg, particularly names of gods, and so also presumably with demons. Unfortunately, I’m pretty iffy at that game and not seeing anything (well, maybe cheshire cat, but that seems like a pretty big stretch for the last part.)
If you know Russian, you can probably figure out Ad’n Chitir Shess Chitir. (There’s no break between Ad’n and the first Chitir.)
To save you the trouble of trying to work it out, “Tezhiskar Deralt” doesn’t mean anything and isn’t based on anything.
Shatra are… serial numbered?
So it seems.
Oh, and this guy was the last (or very nearly), so you can see how many there were over the course of the entire Great War.