6.7 KiB
[RT][HF] A Practical Guide to Evil Book 3: Chapter 48: Interrogation
-
Author: u/Yes_This_Is_God *
-
URL: https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/2017/11/29/chapter-48-interrogation/
-
Score: 51
-
Created: 2017-11-29T05:03:01
Post:
Comments:
u/MultipartiteMind [+22] (4 hours later)
Reader: "Oh no! She's put a giant explosive in the whole region's main breadbasket! (Praesi and Callow together.) Is she going to hold both regions hostage by threatening to ignite it!?"
Catherine: "Good. We can kill her by blowing it up early."
u/Kiroto [+13] (23 minutes later)
Did Cat just imply she's willing to light the fuse, then attempt to contain the boom on a bomb that would turn 1/3 of Callow, including a minimum of the 3 cities named, into a
fucked to deathdeathed to fuck pile of haunted glass?That's probably still smaller stakes than gambling a country's souls with the Fae courts, but geeze.
u/None [+13] (12 hours later)
I'm guessing it's a bluff that Akua needs to be willing to take at face value for her actual gambit to work.
1.) She's spent a considerable amount of time convincing everyone she's ruthless and willing to risk anything. It's softened to us because we see the interior conflict, but there isn't a hint of it on the outside for a while now.
2.) That ruthlessness was recently reinforced specifically to Akua such that she noted it out loud. Additionally Cat was carefully picking up on the messages Akua sent Cat and vice-versa.
3.) While she often uses directness to achieve smaller goals, she ends conflicts much more subtly. All of her recent endgames are story-savvy deconstructions.“When historians try to pin down Foundling’s methods they point to the Battle of the Camps or the Princes’ Graveyard, but those came later. After she’d learned her trade. If you want to understand how she operated, look to the Battle of Four Armies and One – from the beginning to the end, she was playing an entirely different game from every other commander on the field.” – Extract from “A Commentary on the Uncivil Wars”, by Juniper of the Red Shields
u/cyberdsaiyan [+3] (35 minutes later)
I think she's planning to light it before the city lands.
u/gridpoint [+7] (4 hours later)
If it's anything like a nuke going off at altitude, it will spread the damage much further than when on the ground.
u/AurelianoTampa [+9] (9 hours later)
Sometimes I feel the author is reading my mind... several of my concerns from Monday's post about Cat's options have been addressed now.
Cat's army is getting dangerously low on man-power? Well check it out, Akua situated herself between three relatively untouched cities, with another Legion nearby.
How do you assault a flying city? By needing it to land in order for some rituals to take place. Solves the problem of getting to an airborne target.
How do you combat an undead horde? Well, what do you think millions of souls would do?
So all of a sudden the field seems quite a bit more leveled. I also like that we had some logistical updates (such as the state of Akua's forces and Daoine's). It still looks like it'll be tense and mistakes on Cat's fault could be catastrophic, but it doesn't seem hopeless now at least.
I'm wondering how the gestalt works - do all Deoraithe people automatically get their souls taken after death? Is it just if they live in Daoine, or anyone with the blood of the people? Because Cat's descended from them too... and her soul is held in only by "scaffolding." I could imagine a climatic confrontation where Akua Calls up the gestalt, Binds Catherine's soul to it, and Claims it all for herself... just to have Catherine in soul form Break Akua's control and Take the gestalt for herself.
And the make the flying city Fall, because c'mon, it still has to happen.
u/narfanator [+7] (14 hours later)
While that would be amazeballs, it's the Winter power that's held in by scaffolding, not her soul, I think.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (21 hours later)
There was that comment from Masego about cascading failure. . .
u/nick012000 [+1] (5 days later)
Well, there was that one time she died and had her soul held in an amulet she was wearing while her corpse was animated by necromancy.
So, arguably, her soul already belongs to the gestalt, and given her power level from being on the level of a Princess of Winter, she might well be nearly as powerful as a good chunk of the gestalt.
u/sparkc [+4] (22 minutes later)
If a Named can compel an answer I’m unsure how Black or Warlock would have failed to learn the nature of the Watch previously.
u/cyberdsaiyan [+15] (36 minutes later)
Only the monarch lines would know, and most likely the increasing costs on both sides had caused the current treaty to be formed before warlock got any answers.
u/Oaden [+1] (a day later)
That requires the watch itself to know what it is.
Which they presumably don't given that warlock couldn't torture it out of them.
u/Iconochasm [+2] (an hour later)
So, is it just me, or is the the only post on this sub that's less than 6 days old? There's also no stickies. Did automoderator attain sapience and decide to hate us, or something?
u/LunarTulip [+5] (an hour later)
I think the problem is on your end; when I open up the sub, the first 19 things on the front page (not counting the two stickies) are all from under 6 days ago.
u/MultipartiteMind [+2] (4 hours later)
At www.reddit.com/r/rational/new/ , at least, I see several things from 2 days ago.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (21 hours later)
You might want to check if you are browsing "top" instead of "hot" or "new"
u/None [+2] (9 hours later)
Why is everyone in the comment thread for this chapter assuming Cat is half Deoraithe? I only remember the one offhand comment by Kegan that her ruthless practicality is like the Deoraithe.
It seems likely she going to try to make a claim for the Deoraithe throne, thus assuming the obligation of retaking the Summer Bloom. Kegan is not long for this world.
u/melmonella [+16] Tremble, o ye mighty, for a new age is upon you (10 hours later)
Chapter 1, The Knife:
Booker’s skin and hair were as dark as mine: we both had Deoraithe blood running through our veins.