[Dragaera] An extraordinarily convenient disease...

[Davdi Silverrock]

On 3/2/07, Scott  wrote:
> >The recent new wiki page on Baronet Taltos has reminded me that I have
> >had vaguely paranoid notions that Vlad's father was killed
> >deliberately, almost certainly by Verra, for the purpose of isolating
> >Vlad.
>
> >I am just curious if this makes sense to anyone else, or if I am once
> >again alone in my idiosyncratic pararectal ideation.
>
> Plagues are a relatively common occurrence in the Easterner Ghetto.

Are they?  I don't recall any textev that would indicate this.  Also
consider: Vlad's father avoided the Easterner ghetto, except when
specifically visiting his father.

Although speaking of plagues, now I wonder if the Easterner population
has been kept so backwards, technologically and otherwise, for 250,000
years because whenever someone the population gets too high a plague
kills off the surplus. Or if an Easterner invents something
particularly clever, a more targeted plague kills the inventor and
everyone who knows about the invention.

Would the gods stoop to biowarfare?  I kinda think they would.


>
> He must have died rather suddenly.

Vlad says in /Taltos/ that his father was "wasting away", which sounds
slow.  However, it may have been a slowly progressing disease (perhaps
actually some form of cancer, maybe leukemia?), followed up by a very
nasty and quick secondary infection.

Hm  In /Jhereg/, Vlad specifically states that he too caught the
plague, and would have died too if his grandfather hadn't healed him.
So maybe it was something slowly but certainly deadly, like
tuberculosis?

>
> IMO, Vlad was already well on the path that would lead him
> to the Jhereg by the time his father died. I don't see Taltos, Sr.
> as an obstacle here.

Yet Vlad specifically mentions that he hates being alone, and after
his father died, he was.

Even his grandfather rejected Vlad's hints about moving in, which
makes me wonder if perhaps Noish-pa received a dream from the Demon
Goddess indicating that she would not be pleased if Vlad did so.

I think that if Vlad had been living with his grandfather, he might
well not have become an assassin.  Which I can see being the whole
point of isolating him and pointing him towards the Organization.

> In short, I don't see any neccesity for Verra to kill Sr. As long as Vlad
> had Noish-pa and Kiera, he wasn't really isolated.

His relationship with Kiera was kinda spotty.  Kiera taught him
stealth, but did not encourage closeness.

And as noted, his grandfather kept him at a certain distance.

> All that Sr.'s death
> accomplished was to put Vlad in a position of considering what he actually
> intended to do with his life if he wasn't going to be a restrauteur. I
> imagine that Verra could have found any number of ways of putting him in
> that position without killing his father in the process.

Verra is rather cheerfully murderous when she wants to be.  I can
easily see her saying to herself: "Let see, I want Dolivar's Easterner
reincarnation to be angry, bitter, and resentful enough that he's
willing to kill people for money.  Right, I'll just make sure that
he's raised by someone that he doesn't like and who dies anyway when
he's young, and that he's forced to be poor and picked-on and beaten
up by everyone, and will be on his own at the ripe old age of
fourteen."

> Here's a wild thought - Noish-pa deliberately let Sr. die as a blood
> sacrifice to Verra so that she would watch over Vlad. All that "that is not
> our way" talk was just a big cover for the one time he slipped in his
> convictions. ;-)
>

Hm.  Creepy, and interesting.  But I don't really see it.  Why would
he need Verra to watch over Vlad, especially if Vlad's father was
still alive?  That is, what dangers was Vlad facing that Noish-pa
thought that Verra's help was worth a blood sacrifice of his own son?