Thinking about Dragaera: Taltos

But there was still somewhere the sense of triumph for having done something no witch had ever done before, and a certain serene pleasure in having succeeded.  I decided I\’d feel pretty good if it didn\’t kill me.

Dying, I\’ve found, always puts a crimp in my enjoyment of an event.

Taltos was the fourth Vlad Taltos book published, in 1988.  It is the earliest book in Vlad\’s chronology (with the brief exception of the prologue to Jhereg, which takes place after Taltos\’ flashback scenes but before the main plot).

Taltos is one of the only two books in the Vlad series not named after a Dragaeran House.  (The other, The Final Contract, is planned to be the last book in the series.)  So this post might be a little different from the preceding ones – but we\’ll see if I can stick to the format.  Let\’s give it a try!

(Also, a brief programming note: my wife is pregnant and due in a week.  Posts may continue to be intermittent for a while.)

About táltos

In the mythology of Hungary (the country of Brust\’s descent), a táltos is someone given supernatural powers at birth.  How exactly this happens isn\’t clear; some sources say that it is due to prenatal contact with God, but others connect the táltos with pagan religion (which raises the question of which god is involved).  The powers of a táltos generally include the power to cure as well as a meditative trance ability that somewhat resembles Vlad\’s witchcraft meditation.  A táltos usually has extra bones (e.g. extra fingers) – this may or may not be connected to the extra joints Vlad notices in the goddess Verra\’s fingers, as worship of Verra seems to be at least loosely connected with Eastern witchcraft.  There are other aspects of the táltos, many of which vary by who\’s telling the legends((Most of those additional aspects have not yet, as far as I know, made a significant appearance in the Vlad\’s story.  On the other hand, the táltos is almost always connected to a magical horse, one of which appears in Brokedown Palace (which takes place in Vlad\’s ancestral homeland of Fenario).  Additionally, St. Stephen of Hungary was, in some legends, believed to be a táltos; I don\’t know whether our author was specifically named after the saint, but the connection is interesting nevertheless.)).

About Taltos

The only members of the Taltos family about whom I have any details are Vlad, his father, and his grandfather.  Neither Vlad\’s father nor his grandfather have been given a first name so far in the books (though Vlad calls his grandfather \”Noish-pa\”).  Vlad\’s father and grandfather moved to Adrilankha before Vlad was born.  (Vlad\’s mother died when Vlad was young; that\’s about all we know of her at the moment.)

His father worked for decades as a restaurateur; Easterners apparently brought the concept of restaurants (as separate from an inn that provides food along with the lodgings) to Dragaera, and they still run most of the best restaurants in Adrilankha.  He then spent his life\’s savings to buy a baronetcy in the House of the Jhereg and unsuccessfully attempted to assimilate into Dragaeran culture before dying shortly thereafter.  Even years later, Vlad sees this as a vast waste of money, despite how lucrative his own career in the Jhereg has become, and he holds a lot of resentment for his father\’s desire to become Dragaeran.

Vlad\’s grandfather taught Vlad fencing and Eastern witchcraft (despite his father\’s protestations that Vlad should instead learn Dragaeran sorcery).  He was also involved somehow in the Easterner revolt sometime around when Vlad was born, which is an occasional topic of discussion in Teckla.  Noish-pa often acts as Vlad\’s moral compass; Vlad goes to him whenever he\’s having trouble figuring out how to move forward with the bigger questions of life, and Noish-pa gently but reliably points Vlad in the right direction.

Summarizing Vlad Taltos himself is difficult, for reasons I\’ll discuss in more detail shortly…

About Taltos

Taltos tells a couple of stories, interspersed.  The main plot starts with Vlad as a new Jhereg boss, low on the totem pole but controlling his own area, learning that one of his \”button-men\” (basically, \”henchman\”) stole the money that he was supposed to be collecting for Vlad and ran away with it.  The flashback plot is Vlad\’s youth and initial entry into the Jhereg Organization as an enforcer, giving more detail on the background story we already knew((Specifically, Vlad being bullied by Dragaerans, learning fencing from his grandfather, starting fights with young Orcas, and learning to hate the people among whom he and his family were living.  There\’s nothing significantly new here, but a lot of additional information that fleshes out the bits and pieces we had before.  Also, meeting his first boss Nielar and first partner Kragar, as well as Kiera…)).  There is also a third narrative, split among the seventeen chapter headings, of Vlad casting some kind of extremely difficult witchcraft; we find out what exactly it is towards the end of the story.

In the main plot, Vlad soon learns his button-man, Quion, has fled to Dzur Mountain, home of the extremely powerful (and also undead) sorceress, Sethra Lavode.  (The name is of course familiar to us readers, but this is the first time Vlad has had anything to do with her.)  Quion apparently had also met Morrolan (another name more familiar to the reader than to Vlad at this point) before the theft, so Vlad goes to ask Morrolan about it, and Morrolan teleports himself and Vlad straight to Dzur Mountain – where they find Sethra Lavode and Quion\’s corpse.  It turns out that the whole thing was a set up to get Vlad to visit Dzur Mountain in order for Sethra and Morrolan to make Vlad a lucrative and dangerous proposition: breaking into an Athyra wizard\’s keep to recover a staff containing the soul of Aliera e\’Kieron.  (In case it wasn\’t obvious by now, Taltos is the book in which Vlad meets nearly all of his powerful allies.)

The supposition is that the Athrya wizard, Loraan, had set up his keep\’s defenses to alert him to the presence of any unexpected Dragaeran visitors, but had not accounted for the presence of Easterners, hence Sethra and Morrolan hiring Vlad for the job.  Vlad\’s objections to the job are beaten down by Sethra\’s offer of seven thousand Imperials, and he takes the case.  He breaks into Loraan\’s keep by hiding in a wine barrel, but runs into Loraan in his lab; Morrolan comes to the rescue.  They escape with not only the staff but also the golden chain that Vlad found, which the reader already knows to be Spellbreaker; Morrolan appears to have killed Loraan in the process, though their hasty teleport back to Dzur Mountain makes that difficult to confirm.

At this point, we spend a bit more time than usual in flashbacks, as Vlad describes how he first met Kiera the Thief, the only one of his usual allies that he\’d met before he started working for the Organization.  She helps him out in a couple different ways, and asks her to hold on to a vial she claims contains the blood of a goddess.  For only twenty or thirty years, \”not long,\” she says, forgetting (or pretending to forget, more likely) how much of an Easterner lifespan that is.

Back in the main action, Vlad is summoned back to Dzur Mountain, where Sethra and Morrolan ask him to enter the Paths of the Dead – essentially, an exclusive section of the Dragaeran afterlife – to reunite Aliera\’s soul with her body and bring her back to the world of the living.  They are asking him because they believe that, as an Easterner, Vlad should be able to leave the Paths when a Dragaeran is not able to.  Vlad agrees on the condition that Morrolan accompany him, and Morrolan agrees in turn despite having no reason to believe he\’ll be able to leave.  They travel to Deathgate Falls, the entry point to the Paths of the Dead, and follow Sethra\’s instructions to reach the Lords of Judgement (which is to say, the gods, as Easterners see them).  Verra, Vlad\’s occasional matron goddess, is among them, and is surprised to hear that Vlad and Morrolan are there to retrieve Aliera.  She somehow summons and revives Aliera, who in typical Dragon fashion refuses to leave Morrolan behind.

Verra explains that it is the blood that determines the fate of someone in the Paths of the Dead – hence Vlad and his Easterner blood can leave (once), but Morrolan and his Dragaeran blood must stay, and Aliera is only granted an exemption as the heir to the Imperial throne.  (Verra\’s own blood is clearly different, as she is a goddess.)  After visiting the Cycle – apparently a physical phenomenon within the Paths of the Dead, in addition to a somewhat metaphorical construct by which the succession of the Imperial throne is guided – Vlad figures out a way out.  He uses an immense and improvised witchcraft ritual – the one that he has been casting across the chapter beginnings for the entire book – as witchcraft works within the Paths while sorcery does not.  The ritual summons the vial of goddess\’ blood to himself from his home; he then injects the blood into Morrolan, overcoming the blood-borne restrictions on leaving the Paths, and enables the entire party to successfully leave.

The Taltos Synthesis

Vlad is a character of contradictions, and in many cases it\’s hard to say that one side of the contradiction is Vlad\’s \”thesis\” while another is his \”antithesis\”.  But in some cases, there are specific parts that he consciously identifies with.  Vlad sees himself as an Easterner – but, as we learned in Jhereg, he has the soul of a Dragaeran, and Teckla demonstrated that he doesn\’t identify strongly with the other Easterners in Adrilankha.  His hatred of Dragaerans as a general class is one of his major motivations – but he has surrounded himself with Dragaeran allies from a very young age, and frequently risks his life for them.  Vlad is already the synthesis of the various opposing ideas that he embodies.

The climax of the story is Vlad\’s successful use of witchcraft, an art strongly tied to his Easterner identity, while stuck in the Dragaeran afterlife, in order to save the life of a Dragaeran whom he had originally hated when they met.  It\’s a microcosm of the contradictions that make up Vlad\’s character; while the climax doesn\’t exactly resolve any of Vlad\’s internal tensions, it demonstrates that in the end his notions of self-identity are less important to him than doing his best to help and protect the people he feels responsible for((In the vocabulary of \”love languages\”, Vlad\’s most reliable way of telling you he cares about you has always been his willingness to put himself at great and often inadvisable risk for you.)).  So be it; he contains multitudes.

Other interesting notes

• Even before Vlad had met any of his powerful allies, he knew Kiera the Thief, having originally met her when he was eleven.  The things we learn about her later (and that we\’ve already learned about Vlad) suggest that she had a good idea of what lay ahead of him already, but the foresight she shows in this particular case is impressive.
• Sethra suggests in her knowing way that Vlad name the golden chain, but provides no further reasons; she is obviously already aware of the item\’s potential (which it doesn\’t show fully for at least a few more books, if I recall correctly).
• Between this book and Phoenix, we get the distinct impression that the gods in general, and Verra in particular, are far more fallible than most people consider gods to be.  This is not reassuring.
• Vlad meets multiple interesting characters in the Halls of Judgement, including Baritt (whose death was a minor plot point in Yendi), Kieron (founder of the Dragaeran Empire and his past-life brother), and Devera (Aliera\’s as-yet-unborn daughter, who also briefly appeared in Yendi when Vlad spent a few minutes dead).

Next time

When Verra closes a door, she opens a window, which happens to be a portal into another dimension, or something.  Phoenix has Vlad standing upon the threshold of his life…