Dragaera

Unfamiliar familiars?

Mark A Mandel mam at theworld.com
Sun Feb 23 10:11:30 PST 2003

On Sun, 23 Feb 2003, S Lumley / s piotto wrote:

#> S Lumley / s piotto writes:
#>   Ok, there's Loiosh... and Rocza....
#>   And that's about it.
#>
#> Rocza's not a familiar.
#>
#
#I'm pretty sure she is. Not necessarily a full fledged familiar, but there
#does seem to be a link of some sort.

Somewhere -- at the end of _Jhereg_? -- Morrolan asks Vlad about Rocza,
saying "I always thought that the bond between witch and familiar
precluded having more than one" OWTTE. V. replies, approx., "It's not
really the same. I used a variant of the familiar-finding spell to make
initial contact with her, and from then on we simply communicated and
negotiated to our present status."

V and R don't have any direct communication, since that first spell wore
off. His link to her is always via Loiosh. We see that several times
>from his POV, and from hers in _Athyra_ at several points: R and L
communicate pretty much as jhereg do, or at least on a jhereg level of
sophistication, without the levels of language and cultural
understanding that L and V share. (OTOH, R and L may have a deep level
of instinctive communication and understanding that V does not share.)

#At any rate... we now have Ambrose, Loiosh, Blackwand.... the dude from the
#path of the dead's familiar.... in what? 12 books now based on the same
#society?

I'm not willing to accept Blackwand as a familiar in the witchcraft
sense, though there may be some or many similarities.

-- Mark A. Mandel
   http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/
   a Steven Brust Dragaera fan website