Warbreaker (93 page)

I made Susebron get better at spelling quite quickly—this is only our second scene with him writing on his board, but already the spelling errors are gone. There is some small justification of this—he’s able to use the artisan’s script, and he’s very clever; besides, the Hallandren alphabet is phonetic. However, it still probably happens too quickly.

Having to slog through dialect is just too distracting for readers, however. I wanted to do it once to show his innocence, but I wanted to get past it quickly—as quickly as possible—so that it wouldn’t distract from the story. I don’t want Susebron to come off as too childlike; I think that would ruin the romance.

All in all, I think that these chapters are some of the most sensual ones I’ve ever written. I always think that hinting and reserving will always be better than over-the-top romance. The fact that the two of them are forbidden sex because of the danger of having a child, mixed with some of the conversations they have about beauty and their separate lives, makes a very nice tension that I’m pleased to have managed to work in.

Vivenna and Denth Visit the Corpses in the D’Denir Garden

That these deaths happened in this place is a coincidence. Yes, Vasher killed these men because he knew they were connected with Denth. However, he didn’t do it in the garden because that was where Vivenna had been the day before. That just happened. (The garden is a popular meeting place after hours for clandestine operations. All Vasher had to do was throw in Nightblood and let him do what he does. To Vasher, that’s often all the justification he needs. If the sword can make them kill each other, then they were guilty.)

It was important to have this scene here, however, to reinforce the tension between Denth and Vasher. I also wanted a good chance for Vasher to watch Vivenna. She notices him, but doesn’t point him out to Denth—she’s too afraid of Denth making a scene, and she just wants to get away from Vasher.

Spoilers

In the Siri section, she mentions the Pahn Kahl religion, but she doesn’t know what it is. This happens numerous times in the book, people getting confused about whether the Pahn Kahl are just Hallandren or being unable to describe their religion.

If you’re curious, the Pahn Kahl are nature worshippers who focus on the storms of the Inner Sea as a manifestation of their unity of five gods. They believe that all Returned are men who deny the power of the gods and are forbidden entrance into heaven, yet are otherwise just men and not sinners worthy of hell—so they’re given a chance to come back to have another try at life, to try to find belief this time.

Anyway, the purpose of having people so confused about the Pahn Kahl was to try to make readers vague about them in the same way. In this case, I want the reader to feel that the Pahn Kahl are unimportant, like the characters do, which is exactly the reason why the Pahn Kahl are so annoyed in the first place. If Hallandren didn’t take them for granted so much, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t be so inclined to rebel.

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Annotations for Chapter Chapter Thirty

Lightsong Tries Pottery

It’s been a while since one of the gods tried something like this. Lightsong isn’t the first, of course, to wonder at his old life and realize that some of his skills and abilities came with him to his new one. But he’s the first of this generation of gods who has taken any interest in it.

His father was actually a potter, if you’re interested in knowing. As for why he knows nautical terms and mathematics, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait on that. They come up eventually.

The juggling, though . . . well, that’ll just have to remain a mystery.

Lightsong and Blushweaver Visit Hopefinder

I wanted to show some Returned of different ages; I think it’s important for people to realize that you can be any age when you Return. There are children, babies, grandmothers, and people in their middle years who Return.

Hopefinder is the youngest person at court currently, though there are a couple of other gods who Returned when they were in their teens. It’s hard to tell them from the other gods now, however. (And often, when a god Returns in their middle years, their body transforms to be much more youthful. Not always; it depends on the god.)

Some of Blushweaver’s sparring here should give you a hint that she’s far from the shallow egotist she pretends to be. In a lot of ways, she and Lightsong are perfectly matched, and I imagine this being the reason they ended up spending so much time together. They both have an extreme persona that is almost a parody of the other gods, and for both of them, that persona is but a sliver of who they really are. Blushweaver is more conniving, Lightsong more noble, when you strip everything else away. But they understand each other in a way that I think few people do.

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Annotations for Chapter Thirty-One

Vivenna Visits the Idrian Slums

Vivenna probably should have expected what she would find here. She knows that the slumlords, who are Idrians, run whorehouses and illegal fighting leagues. However, she deluded herself into assuming that they employ Hallandren whores or that the fights aren’t all that bad.

I think this would be a hard thing to come to grips with. It’s happened repeatedly throughout history—a poorer segment travels to a new country and becomes part of the lower, working class. In Korea, they were always complaining about people from Burma coming in and stealing their jobs. I remember hearing the Japanese saying the same thing about Koreans. I’ve heard Americans complain about all three. Things like this have far less to do with culture or race and far more to do with relative economic standing and fluency with the language/culture.

Knowing it happens, however, wouldn’t make it any easier to find your own people in such a state, I think.

Notice that the Idrians here often wear dark clothing. This is partially to hold to their old ways of avoiding colors, though they tend to wear clothes that are black and dark instead of light. (Though there are some who follow the more traditional way.) But by wearing these dark colors, they completely defeat the original stated purpose of dull clothing—that of removing color to keep Awakeners from using their art.

Vivenna Meets with the Slumlords

When I write a scene like this, I am never quite certain how much time I want to spend distinguishing the side characters who make an appearance. (Another scene like this is the one where Lightsong plays the game with the three other gods.) Here, we’re introduced to three different slumlords. They all have distinct personalities and different ways of looking at how Vivenna can help them. However, how much time do I spend explaining them and making them have an impact? It’s a tough line to walk. I don’t want to bog the scene down and spend a lot of time on characters you’ll never see again, but I also don’t want the scene to feel ambiguous or lacking precision because you can’t imagine the slumlords.

I suspect that most readers won’t care about telling the difference between the three, so I don’t dwell on it—but I try to give hints that will help those who want to visualize the scene exactly.

Anyway, that’s a tangent. Meeting with these men was a mistake, something that Vivenna realizes partway through the meeting. There is little she can gain from them—and that which she
could
gain she’s not prepared to ask for. She should have come with more of a plan. Instead, she did what she’s done for most of the book—that is, pretend that she is in charge and in control, while in fact she’s just floating along with whatever comes at her.

I think this is the big thing Vivenna has to realize in the book. She has never had a good plan of how to deal with things in T’Telir. Unfortunately, I don’t think she can learn until she falls a bit.

Spoilers

Some of you may be wondering whose plot led to this attack by the city guard on the meeting.

Well, it’s complicated. The city watch—worried about the upswing in crime and the political tension lately—has grown more aggressive. They know that someone snuck into the palace of Mercystar herself, threatening one of their goddesses. The watch captain is making a play for a promotion and favor, and is looking to score a major victory to look very good in front of the Returned. He got a tip that three of the most important slumlords—whom he’s been afraid to attack up until now, fearing to commit his guards to action—will be meeting together. He doesn’t even know about Vivenna.

But he did authorize his Lifeless (the city guard has a stock of about fifty that can be used at their discretion) to use deadly force. The Commands weren’t quite specific enough, unfortunately.

Beyond that, Bluefingers has managed—by sneaking through the tunnels that Vasher discovered—to get his forces to Command Break some of the Lifeless in the compound, then insert hidden Commands into them alongside their existing ones. In this case, he wanted the Idrians to see the Lifeless and the city watch cause a slaughter among their people. So he seeded some of the Lifeless with Commands to attack and kill if they were shown aggression by Idrians.

He didn’t know when the slaughter would happen; he doesn’t have enough control over events in order to do that. His little Lifeless bombs just happened to go off here, when the Idrians started to resist. Since the regular soldiers—and even the Lifeless not under Bluefingers’s Commands—overreacted once blood began to be shed, everything went crazy from there.

Denth wasn’t in on this plan, and Bluefingers never told him that he was behind it. In the end, the whole battle turned into a major embarrassment for the city guard, though they did capture one of the slumlords. He was held until after the events of the book, then eventually released.

Back to Chapter Thirty-One

Annotations for Chapter Thirty-Two

Siri Lies in Bed and Decides to Take Charge

Reading through it again, I feel like this scene needs a bit of a trim. Ah well. There are always going to be sections like that that make it through.

I felt that there needed to be a scene where Siri finally stopped looking toward the past and berating herself for not being more like Vivenna. For her to step forward and become the woman she must be, she needed to do it of her own choice, with her own motivations. She needed this chance.

Sometimes, in writing classes or in books on telling stories, they’ll mention a moment somewhere in act two where the character decides to take charge. I always dislike explanations like that, since I think it’s too easy for newer writers to look at such explanations as an item on a checklist that you have to do. I never use things like that. I don’t think, “This is act two, so the characters need to do X.” The tendency to follow a formula like that is part of what bothers me about the screenwriting profession. It seems like if you always follow the rules, there’s never any spontaneity in a book.

Still, those guidelines and suggestions are used by a lot of people who tell good stories, so I guess you use what works for you.

Hoid the Storyteller Tells Us the History of Hallandren

This whole scene came about because I wanted an interesting way to delve into the history. Siri needed to hear it, and I felt that many readers would want to know it. However, that threatened to put me into the realm of the dreaded infodump.

And so, I brought in the big guns. This cameo is so obvious (or, at least, someday it will be) that I almost didn’t use the name Hoid for the character, as I felt it would be too obvious. The first draft had him using one of his other favorite pseudonyms. However, in the end, I decided that too many people would be confused (or at least even more confused) if I didn’t use the same name. So here it is. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about . . . well, let’s just say that there’s a lot more to this random appearance than you might think.

Anyway, I love this storytelling method, and I worry that Hoid here steals the show. However, he’s very good at what he does, and I think it makes for a very engaging scene that gets us the information we need without boring us out of our skulls.

Is everything he says here true? No. There are some approximations and some guesses. However, all things considered, it’s pretty accurate. All of the large bits are true.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted a map of the world in the front of this book or not. The problem is, if I give a world map, I risk doing it wrong. It takes a very specific set of geographic requirements for a rain forest to work, and what I wanted here was a kind of rain forest valley, irregular and out of place in the world. In the abstract, that can work—but the more details I pin down in the map, the less likely it is to be believable.

Back to Chapter Thirty-Two

Annotations for Chapter Thirty-Three

Vivenna and the Mercenaries Wait in the Safe House after the Lifeless Attack on the Slumlords

Why does Jewels bother sewing up Clod? Why fix Lifeless at all? Denth’s answer is a fairly good one, but it could use some more explanation.

You see, when one makes a Lifeless, the reason the Breath stays and won’t come back is because the body of a recently deceased person is too “sticky” for Breaths. One Breath attaches to it, and because the body so clearly remembers being alive, it can use that Breath to power it. (Assuming you have the right Commands and can picture them correctly in your head when you make the Lifeless.)

However, the more the Lifeless is damaged, the less like the shape of a living person it is, and the more difficult it is for the Breath to keep that body going. Powering a body with only one Breath is hard—it requires the body to work mostly on its own. When you power a cloak or something like that, the Breaths need to provide a lot of energy, since there’s no real muscles to use or skeletal structure to rely on.