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