Welcome back to the reread of Mistress of the Empire by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts.
Mara starts doing some serious intelligence gathering with some dangerous men, before setting out on her next exciting adventure. Anything’s better than packing!
Chapter 18: Advice
SUMMARY: Mara savours a day of motherhood, with her adorable playful baby, and her devious prankster son. Life is pretty good apart from that whole absent husband business.
Oh, and she’s about to ship both children off to the Imperial household, because that’s the only place she can be sure of their safety. So that’s a downer.
Before they can even finish packing, Mara hears the chime that announces the arrival of a Great One. The children are swept out in a hurry (without Mara even getting to say goodbye to Justin), leaving her to greet her guest.
The Great One is not what she expected—not wearing black for a start, but he is wearing a beard. A BEARD, people. This is not a drill, this is actually the barbarian magician, Milamber himself.
Uh-oh. Still, Mara (literally) brought this on herself, by sending a letter to him. She didn’t expect him to actually turn up…
Mara greets him politely, and he requests that she calls him by the name from his homeland—Pug, not Milamber or even Great One.
Pug is a terrible name. I kind of feel he’s trolling her by making her use it.
Under the guise of polite conversation (yeah, right), Pug notes that it’s a shame Mara isn’t at her usual residence, the former estate of the Minwanabi, as he’s always wanted to admire the architecture—he himself also took over the estate of a fallen House, that of the Tuscai.
Mara can’t be sure if this is a subtle way of telling her he knows everything about Arakasi and his network, or not. Magicians are tricksy.
They entertain themselves with general conversation: making fun of the Minwanabi, inquiring after family health, and that sort of thing. Pug reveals that his exile was formally revoked, but that he did not accept the title of Great One the second time around.
Finally, they get down to the important topic at hand: Mara’s desperation. She tells him her life story, with particular emphasis on how this rift with the Anasati came about. She even reveals the existence of Arakasi and his recent discoveries.
When Pug finally asks her what exactly she wants from him, Mara gives him her completely honest answer: she has seen how badly Tsurani society is stagnating from its heavy cultural traditions and honour system, and she wants to change the world:
“I would see our Lords held accountable for their actions, and our slaves set free.”
Her most immediate concern is that the Assemble of Magicians will try to stop her in her attempts to support Ichindar’s reforms, because Jiro of the Anasati is plotting against Ichindar and Mara is currently forbidden from fighting him. Pug gives her hope by revealing that not all Great Ones agree on… well, just about anything. However, the ones likely to support Mara’s war against the Anasati are going to be a minority.
Desperate, she blurts out her real hope—that he can give her a way to defend herself against the Assembly if the need arises.
Pug does not give her a real answer to this—but he does put up a spell to briefly protect her house from being spied on. He pushes Mara to further examine what it is she is trying to do.
She is furious at his suggestion she merely hire an assassin to deal with Jiro, as that profession has been responsible for so many deaths of her own loved ones.
Besides, Jiro’s death would not solve the overall problem, that the Tsurani are missing something important—something that Kevin of Zun taught her.
Turns out that Pug totally knows Kevin, and can give her some gossip about how well he’s doing back home. He can’t answer Mara’s question about whether he is married, though.
Pug leaves Mara without breaking the oaths he still feels to the Assembly to which he no longer belongs. He cannot help her in any of the ways she has asked—but he gives her one meaningful piece of advice, to look for Allies beyond the Empire, because she will not find many within.
Has he been chatting to the cho-ja queen or what?
Before she heads off on her pilgrimage to Thuril, Mara drops in on the Red God’s temple in Sulan-Qu. The high priest is flattered she would visit, and thanks her for her discretion in dealing with that whole embarrassing prayer gate business when she took over the Minwanabi estate after Tasaio’s downfall.
Mara is here asking advice: in this case, on the nature of magic.
Cue the priestly spit-take!
He is suspicious at her inquiry about what the rules are for who can and cannot use magic—it’s supposed to be confined to the Assembly but some priests use it too—and refuses to help her with her war against the Anasati. But knowing she is going on a long journey (everyone knows, Mara), he gives her an informative scroll as a parting gift.
Oh and he kills a fly with magic to demonstrate that the Red God is totally not all about the dark powers. Not sure that’s the BEST way to prove that point…
COMMENTARY: Have I mentioned how nice it is that Mara’s baby is alive and well and healthy? After all she’s been through, I am really enjoying the scenes that show her getting to enjoy her daughter.
Sadly they are parting company—wahh! It’s good and important though that the story once again (as with the separation between Mara and Ayaki when she fought that desert war) acknowledges the difficulty in balancing parenthood with world-saving. Mara is a working mother and then some, and I find this writing of her very realistic and relatable.
Poor old Justin is always in another room playing swords with Keyoke. Here, he’s swept offstage in a scene that kind of implies they couldn’t get the actor to commit to this season…
But anyway. MARA GETTING ALL THE INFORMATION!
This whole chapter has something of a stage play feel about it, made up largely of two conversations, but they’re pretty crunchy conversations. Mara is obviously on the trail of something, and she’s getting braver about who she lets into her complex web of mystery-solving. She’s like a cross between Oedipus Tyrannos and Veronica Mars.
But did you notice that discreet mention of Kevin? Actually, there have been quite a LOT of those mentions peppered through this book, almost as if the authors are very firmly trying to make sure we remember how important he is, just in case… (puts hands over mouth)
Hokanu meanwhile has discreetly disappeared into the background. Pug draws the line between the dots here for us about how he is connected to both men. So was Hokanu an active player in the original Magician novels? I rely on you all to tell me these things, as I haven’t read them since I was twelve.
We’re all set up now for this journey of hers, outside the borders of Tsuranuanni, to see what she can find about alternative societies, and the secret of the cho-ja. Safari hats on, everybody! We’re going on an adventure.
Tansy Rayner Roberts is an Australian fantasy author, blogger and podcaster. She won the 2013 Hugo for Best Fan Writer. Tansy’s latest piece of fiction is “Fake Geek Girl,” a novelette at the Australian Review of Fiction, and she also writes crime fiction under the pen-name of Livia Day. Come and find TansyRR on Twitter, sign up for her Author Newsletter, or listen to her on Galactic Suburbia!
From what I recall about a recent re-read, by this point in the story, Mara has basically left Jiro and the Anasati behind as main adversaries, and has moved on the the Assembly–the main body that is preventing progress in society. Sure Jiro & his Spy master are around to try (and succeed in) and cause problems, but it is now the Magicians that she is mainly trying to circumvent, and has been for a while. She had her spymaster spend a year of time trying to find a way of getting into and spying on the city of magicians, she sent him after all those ancient records at the imperial library, etc.
This chapter was very intense in that when the Gong rings, Mara and everyone else thinks that the jig is up and they are about to die! She makes a desperate attempt to save her children by hurriedly sending them on the road and goes to meet her fate.
And yes, Hokanu was involved with Pug in the Magician series, it was Hokanu who found Pug and his Midkimian friend in the slave swamps and brought them to his father’s estate to use them in a plot to make peace with the Midkimians.
@Tansy:
Yes, Hokanu stars in the original ‘Magician’ trilogy. He was instrumental in Pug’s rise from being a slave to, well, more than being a slave.
If I have my time line straight, that was before he even met Mara.
And now I am wondering if Pug had an off screen chat with Hokanu, before visiting Mara…
@@@@@Fiddler “If I have my time line straight, that was before he even met Mara.”
Actually no, when Mara meets Hokanu in the first chapter of Servant, he’s looking to buy Midkemian slaves for his fathers plan at the same time, he’s also going to check on his fathers holdings in the swamps. He grants the slaves to Mara as a minor gift and then departs.
Next time we see him, he’s returning to visit Mara with Pug and Lauri in tow. So Hokanu rescues Pug in the first chapters of Servant.
Though that leads to some speculation, what if Hokanu had not let Mara have the slaves and rather she had let him take them? Then Kevin would probably have been the ambassador, Pug would have died, and both worlds would have been eaten by the enemy.
Wow, it’s really a good thing Hokanu is such a gentleman.
@@@@@ Gadget.
I agree, at this point the Magicians are the enemy, Jiro and Chumunka are just pawns. I think that this was Chumunka’s greatest mistake in the series, he never realized that Mara was delegating the entirety of the Anastani animosity to her subordinates while she did something else entirely.
Hokanu: saving the world by politeness, one courteous gesture at a time.
@Megaduck: Thus proving that the Jiro/Anasati threat wasn’t nearly as important as that puffed up young man liked to think he was. Which was, I suspect, why Chumaka didn’t see it coming – he knew his House was powerful, his master was clever, and his own plots were devious. The fact that another ruler would consider them a relatively minor annoyance would never have occurred to him! (Then again, it also wouldn’t have occurred to him that anyone would set themselves against the Assembly, because who in their right mind would??)
Yep, Hokanu crops up a few times in Magician. Along with being instrumental in taking Pug out of the swamps and inadvertently introducing him to his father Fumita and thus his destiny, he is also involved in the mission that sends Laurie and his brother Kasumi to Midkemia to carry the peace offering from the Emperor to the Kingdom of the Isles. Finally he turns up in A Darkness at Sethanon, where he leads the Shinzawai forces in the battle against the Enemy. That triggers a peace settlement and prisoner exchange, which is what causes the Emperor to buy all the Midkemian slaves including Kevin, since the Tsurani have no concept of trading prisoners other than purchasing them.
The threat of the Assembly here is an Outside Context Problem for the Tsurani – Mara is operating on an entirely new level which Chumaka literally cannot conceive of. For the honor of the House makes sense. For the soul of the people? That’s a totally different story.