>My other question pertains to a contradiction between >Taltos and Paths of the Dead (not about the actual >Paths, of course! I understand those change :) so I >will add the spoiler space in here: > >D >E >A >T >H >(S?) >G >A >T >E > >F >A >L >L >S > >I was inspired to reread the Vlad books to compare >portrayals of Morrolan. (I was surprised to find that, >even though Dean Pamlar :) says in the preface to Five >Hundred Years after, "The mode of speech ... does not >represent, so far as can be determined, any actual >mode of speech, past or present. It is taken from a >popular anonymous play of the period, Redwreath and >Goldstar Have Traveled to Deathsgate*," yes, to some >extent, Morrolan really does talk that way.) Perhaps you may have had the honor to note that certain persons, when they have been reading certain works, occasinally will allow the style and vocabulary of that work to affect (we might even go so far as to say "infect") their day-to-day speech or writing. Morrolan might well be one of those persons, and when he says things like "This mislikes me", it simply indicates that he has been reading texts from an earlier and more formal era, and uses phrases which are usually found in such works. >In rereading Taltos, I came across an interesting >glitch in Morrolan's history. On page 98 of the >paperback, he tells Vlad, "As you approach Greymist >Valley, sorcery becomes difficult. From the time you >reach Deathgate, it is impossible.... I was at the top >of the falls with Zerika, holding off some local >brigands while she made her descent. If I could have >used sorcery, I would have." > >Which doesn't jibe with Paarfi's telling in Paths of >the Dead at all. >In the second place, Morrolan wasn't there. [...] My latest pararectal hypotheses involve HUGE, SOUL-DESTROYING SPOILERS for /Sethra Lavode/ and /Issola/, so read no furthur if you haven't gotten that far. An obvious idea is that Vlad is misremembering what Morrolan told him, because, after all, memory is like a whatchamacallit. Morrolan had ample opportunity to hear the story of Zerika's descent into the Paths as told by nearly all of the principles, including Zerika herself. So he relays that to Vlad, and Vlad garbles it in retelling it to SKZB. This, however, is unsatisfying. So let us take another tack: An idea that was being kicked around here after /Paths/ came out, but before /Sethra/ was published, was that since since Morrolan bears Blackwand, and Blackwand has some control over the souls that it takes in, that Blackwand might have, for some reason, taken the soul of one of those who guarded Zerika's descent, and when Morrolan spoke of it, he was confusing a memory of that soul with his own. The one that seemed most likely was Tazendra, because Vlad senses that Blackwand projects the sense of being on the one hand female, yet on the other hand very aggressive - which certainly sounds like Tazendra. Yet as we see in /SL/, while Tazendra Lavode was certainly invited to Castle Black (where she might well have told the story), there was no conflict with Morrolan, and as we see, she is killed nowhere near Blackwand. So too, for that matter, is Kytraan e'Lanya, and Piro, according to Paarfi, is still alive some hundreds of years afterwards. That appears to negate the "other soul" hypothesis, but I thought of Yet Another way that it might still work: Tazendra Lavode is, as we see, a wizard, trained in the advanced arts of sorcery, and she bears a staff. What is it that is said about wizards and staffs? Why, that their souls - or at least, a portion of their souls - is bound into it. Perhaps, for that matter, when the common knowledge says "soul", what is really meant is "memories"? At any rate, Tazendra had a staff, and said staff was not with her when she died. We also see in /Issola/ that Morrolan is also a wizard, and also has a staff, which he usually keeps hidden (Vlad notes that a ring that Morrolan usually wears is not there when he holds the staff, which suggests that a transformation was involved). What if these two staffs are the same; Morrolan having been given Tazendra's staff by Sethra? Vlad might even have confused the emanations from Blackwand with the emanations from the staff. And so Morrolan occasionally confuses memories he gets from Tazendra's staff with his own memories. Paarfi, of course, might not know this, and unless Morrolan or Sethra wished to explain it to him (which I think unlikely), he would therefore be bound to conclude that Morrolan is a complete and utter liar with his pants on fire, and put in that scene of Morrlan's party just barely seeing Zerika's party on the road in order to highlight this, because Paarfi can be one snarky sonofabitch when he wants to be. This might also tie in with Sethra's comment about the Lavode who isn't ready yet. Morrolan might be her current Lavode-in-training, who has been given the staff of a previous Lavode, but has not yet learned all of her skills. This might also more tentatively tie in to Paarfi's statements about the way Morrolan is "portrayed" in paintings. Since by this time, Morrolan might well have completed his training as a Lavode, and might also no longer be in the public eye quite so much, and when he is, he would no doubt dress in the very plain blacks of the Lavodes. So those painters who wish to portray Morrolan as he was before he became a Lavode would tend to use a certain standard costume that he was known to wear at that earlier time. There. That is a tolerably clever piece of ideation, I nearly think.