#malazan

Malazan Book 9: Dust of Dreams Cover Art by Binding Broken

I noticed while reading that there seems to be a discrepancy between the framing of the stakes of the last two books’ conflict and what appears to be happening; the Forkrul Assail are presenting an immediate threat to all of humanity but the characters’ justification in fighting them barely touches on this and is much more focused on saving the Crippled God and bringing him home. On top of the line where Fiddler (I believe) thinks when he realizes what Tavore is doing that it’s no wonder she wants to be unwitnessed, because if her actions were known she would be seen as a horrible villain. Which doesn’t make sense if her actions are clearly saving humanity, unless we are talking about from the POV of other races who thinks letting humanity live is evil. And then we add to this that several characters talk about the gods’ plan to defeat the Crippled God once and for all, some saying he will suffer much more pain as a result (for which purpose one would imagine they would also have to get the heart from the Forkrul Assail), Tavore talks about defying all those gods, but no gods ever show up in the final confrontation to challenge the parties – though at the end Shadowthrone and Cotilion allude to having gotten all the gods angry, those that they didn’t kill, implying that they had dealt with any gods that wanted the Crippled God for themselves off-screen.

So what I think explains this is that it was known to Tavore, Shadowthrone and Cotilion that should the gods be allowed to make their last move on the Crippled God, they would easily defeat the Forkrul Assail. The Forkrul Assail being a credible threat to the world is then entirely a creation of Shadowthrone and Cotilion for taking the other gods out of the picture, and Tavore’s role in the conspiracy is to deal with that created threat in a much more horribly risky way. And this puts into different context Tavore’s extreme secretiveness about her motives, and the way she’s described as hiding guilt like a child hiding a secret; her horrible secret is that she is not really saving the world like others think but is an accessory to the threat existing in the first place, and she is doing it for a reason that would be incomprehensible and laughed off to the average person’s (focused morally more on self and nearby community) moral sensibilities; to save a stranger from near-eternal and horrible suffering and redeem the worshippers on his home world. 

Now this is very much stepping into the realm of conjecture and seems like a tangent, but I think that Korabas (who we do get the POV for) provides an interesting mirror to her for how she externalizes everything Tavore internalizes, and in doing so provides a hint to what Tavore’s thoughts might be. Korabas is the “wrong child”, the being of pure absence and negation that devours life in a family of life and magic. Likewise Tavore is shown in childhood to follow all the tropes of the “creepy child”; unearthly in calculated nature and maturity, playing with models of war at five years old, and ultimately the metaphorical “cuckoo child” responsible in part for the destruction of her family. And she is also metaphorically associated with otataral/negation/the void, both in her sword and being the only one in the party in book 9 to get no card in the Deck of Dragons, while her brother is “full of life”, standing as master of the whole deck. 

And unlike A Song of Ice and Fire, the series was actually finished