[Dragaera] Brust-the-translator theory - Tiassa spoilers

[Alexx Kay]

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I've been theorizing for years now about how Brust-the-translator got in
touch with Vlad in the first place.  _Tiassa_ finally gives us a bit more
data as to *when* it happens.  And the fact that Sethra Lavode introduced
them was something I had long believed must be the case.

But I think she was, if not strictly lying, at least being misleading
about how this information exchange got started.  It seems likely to be
true that the Necromancer is the one who brought Brust-the-translator over
-- but I think it was at Sethra's request.  While there obviously must be
some differences between Brust-the-translator and the Steven Brust of our
world, I doubt those differences would be extreme enough that
Brust-the-translator could easily afford to be paying Vlad in gold
bullion.  I think Sethra is funding this interchange.

And why would she do that?  For the simplest of reasons - she needs that
information herself.  One of her roles (whether official or
self-appointed) seems to be "Manager of Great Weapon Bearers".  I think
she knew (or strongly suspected) that Vlad would be such a one from before
the first time she (or Kiera) met him.  Yet despite Kiera being a close
friend of Vlad's for years, when it came time for Sethra to start a formal
relationship with him in _Taltos_, she flubbed it *badly*.  Fatal duels
were barely averted, and it was damn lucky that Vlad agreed to even keep
speaking to her, much less work with her.  After that experience, I
believe that Sethra decided that she needed to know Vlad much better than
Kiera did, that she needed to know not just *what* he did, but *why*, what
he was thinking at the time.  And she decided that the best way to know
that information was to ask him, in a way that seemed both safe and in his
self-interest.

All this is largely consistent with what Sethra says in _Tiassa_.  The one
possible exception would be "I tell you, on my honor, that nothing you say
will ever be heard by anyone who can do anything to you."  If my theory is
correct, then either A) Sethra thinks knowing about Vlad is more important
than her honor, or B) Sethra believes herself to not be able to "do
anything to" Vlad.  B is clearly false on a literal level, but if her
reason fro doing all this in the first place was a commitment to keeping
Vlad alive (and therefore useful), then she might well be able to claim it
was true on a metaphorical level.

So that's my theory of the month.  Thoughts?

Alexx

"To return, startlingly at this juncture, I'm sure, to _From Hell_ for a
 moment, what we have in the Whitechapel murders is a real cluster of
 events that really happened in our real human world.  The events are
 fixed and immutable; they cannot be changed any more than the words in
 the Bible could be changed.  However, just as with the Bible, those
 events can be read in an almost infinite variety of ways."
    -- Alan Moore, in correspondence with Dave Sim about _From Hell_