On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, Philip Hart wrote: > >I don't see "sometime in the last 250 years" as any sort of evidence >for the Skinter (what's below hypothesis?) Suggestion? Notion? Idea? Pulled-from-out-of-arse wild speculation? > Finally note that K has plenty of dealings with Dragons in the >Vladiad, and there's a significant lack of him getting hacked to >death on sight. But why would anyone hack him to death? Whatever he did may have been contemptible, and un-Dragon-like, but that doesn't mean that it would be worth killing him for... (Tangent: I was pondering some possible un-Dragon-like things that Kragar might have done, and one of them was that he might have done what Vlad ended up doing - he might have gone to the Empire & embarrassed some high-level Dragon for something that makes the whole House look bad in the Empire's eyes. Dragons wouldn't kill him if he was in fact in the *right*, but they wouldn't want him in the House.) >In fact, I'd have to say that when Vlad meet K he's rather a nobody, >despite his extraordinary abilities - K seems rather more a recent >Jhereg than a 250-year veteran. That's a good point. He might have been just sulking and slacking for the past couple hundred years or so, but that doesn't seem very likely. I just re-read in LoCB (chap. 53, pg 237) where Aerich is explaining means & ends, and states that what Skinter is doing - attacking the Empire - is the most terrible moral crime there is, which supports whoever suggested that upthread. Which strongly implies that Skinter will be executed when this is all over. However, I note while reading it that the phrase "grave moral crime" could just as easily apply to Adron e'Kieron's hissy-cow. And again, this is a /Lyorn's/ POV; if Dragons cared about moral justification, well, they would fight a great deal less, I nearly think.