Spoilers for _Jhereg_. --- Brad <holden at salome.uchicago.edu> wrote: > [quoting Nytemuse <nytemuse at auros.org>:] [...] >> For all Dragaeran houses except Teckla and >> Jhereg, the Dragaeran has to be born into it. >> Jhereg titles can be bought and Teckla can be >> joined if Easterners work with Teckla? [...] > To be a Phoenix, a phoenix has to fly over the child > at birth and both parents must be phoenixes. This > is something funny about Zerika I do not remember. > You can earn your way into the house of Dzur, you > just have to fight 17 champions and win. Right? I > don't remember if there was an additional genetic > qualification. There isn't. This is a key plot point in _Jhereg_ -- Mellar, a crossbreed (therefore a member of no House by birth) succeeds in joining the Dzur by defeating seventeen Dzur champions in successive duels. He then left and joined the Jhereg; part of his plan, which Vlad thwarts, is to shame the Dzur by having this story become public. Vlad doesn't know about this rule until he finds out about it in _Jhereg_. That suggests the possibility of similar rules that he and we may not know about, or that he may know about but hasn't mentioned to us. It also suggests, at least to me, that some of the Houses may be ongoing experiments in selective breeding. The story of Zerika's birth in particular is not fully disclosed. Her parents, Vernoi and another Phoenix whose name I can't recall (starts with L) perished in Adron's Disaster -- Khaavren meets her father in _Five Hundred Years After_ and advises him to flee the city, but apparently too late. Someone, I think Morrolan, says at some time, I think in _Taltos_, that Sethra was responsible for Zerika surviving the Disaster. We may learn more about this in _Paths of the Dead_, although as we will be learning it through Paarfi there will remain some room for speculation. Vlad comments in _Yendi_ that as Zerika is the last surviving Phoenix there is now no way to produce a Phoenix heir except through crossbreeding. Other possibilities that leap to mind include (1) time travel; (2) parthenogenesis or cloning (if sorcery or some other magical techniques permit). If crossbreeding is necessary, it might be combined with genetic manipulation of one sort or another, assuming again that someone such as Verra or Sethra is capable of that. It is unlikely, though I suppose not impossible, that we will see the next Cycle, so we may or may not learn whether and how the problem is solved. -- Greg __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com