Blood 18

Chapter 18
We return to the Big Stone Witch House, where Verna is lamenting the fact that she is now a prisoner. By this, she means that she's kept so busy with paperwork that she has no time to do anything else. Apparently it's necessary that the Popette herself personally approve every single expense at the Big Stone Witch House, and it hasn't occurred to Verna to delegate anything.
Is this how the Vatican works?
We learn that Verna has appointed two Nuns, Phoebe (who is an old friend) and Dulcinia (who is extremely knowledgeable) as her assistants. We also learn that Verna trusts none of them, and believes she can't afford to. I have to agree, based less on the fear of Bad Nuns and more on the evidence of all the Nuns being petty, backstabbing harpies.
Warren comes in, but before he and Verna can engage in banter, Verna tasks Dulcinia with finding out what happened to a pair of missing horses. After an unnecessarily long conversation in which Dulcinia is inexplicably patronizing to the Popette, Verna explains that they live on a freaking island, and furthermore, tack and saddles is missing, making it unlikely that the horses simply escaped on their own.
Verna is already a better Seeker than the Seeker.
Verna and Warren talk about how overworked Verna is, and Verna mentions numerous things she has to sign off on, including paying for an inn that some young wizards damaged, buying butter, fixing the roof, and paying gravediggers. Warren cajoles her into taking a walk and then suggests they go see Sister Simona (who, if you remember from chapter 6, is deranged and being kept locked up for her own safety). We learn that Warren has been studying, and some of the things he's read about have involved dreams. He tried to visit Simona earlier and was rebuffed by the guards.
We also learn that Warren is feeling paranoid, and believes everyone is watching him.
Verna and Warren head in to the infirmary, which is full of powerful magical shields and such designed to hold insane spellcasters. Verna pushes past the guards, citing her authority as Popette, and we randomly get a conversation about ex-Popette Ann and her ring. Specifically, Verna wonders how Ann got the ring with the “light spell” allegedly cast with the aid of God Himself onto the pedestal, if Ann was already dead. This is a damn good question. Warren speculates that she made the spell, tied it to a physical object, and had someone she trusted place spell and ring on pedestal. This still begs the question of who, though.
But enough of that; it's time to visit Crazy Simona! Simona is locked in a room, and is currently trying to break the magical shield on her door with magic.
To make a long scene short, Simona is wearing a collar, which Verna finds nauseating. Simona is also terrified of someone called “the dream walker,” who comes to her in her sleep, torments her, and “tells me I must forsake my oath.” Sometimes he's God, sometimes he's Satan.
Simona refers to the sound of drums as “his alert,” and when Verna explains that the drums herald the arrival of Emperor Jagang, Simona freaks out, insisting that Jagang is the dream walker's name. She goes berserk, and Verna has to use the collar to knock her out somehow.
Infodump time! Warren babbles at Verna about the prophecies and uses all sorts of unnecessarily complicated technical jargon, making me briefly think I'm reading a Star Trek novelization. The phrase “the degrees of progression and regression as they relate to random variables in bifurcations of a triple fork” is used without any discernible irony. I honestly can't tell if Terry Goodkind is deliberately throwing technobabble at us to make Warren and Verna appear smarter than they are, or if this is some elaborate joke. \~/
Warren tells Verna what he's learned in his studies, which involve reading books dating back “over three thousand years” “From the time of the great war.” Warren says he's found references to “dream walkers” in the books, but that “when they mention it, it's not so much a person as it is a weapon.” He goes on to say that “The context is not exactly that of an object, either, but more of an entity, though it could be a person.”
Does that make any sense? At minimum, the title “dream walker” implies the ability to walk, which implies something with legs. How is that an object, much less a weapon?
Verna speculates that “Maybe it's meant in the way that a person who is so good at something, like a blade master, that they are often described, with respect or reverence, as a weapon?” This sounds pretty silly to me, but Warren calls it “A very good way to describe it.”
Warren then says he thinks the Towers of Perdition were built to stop the dream walkers . . . which makes absolutely no sense. We've been told that the Towers were built by the Ancient Wizards (on both sides of the war, somehow) to block Europe off from America for ill-explained reasons. Now they were built to stop these living weapon dream walkers? By which side? Both? That makes no sense whatsoever. \~/
And if either or both sides was willing to invest the enormous time and effort and magic needed to construct a massive chain of towers that apparently stretches for hundreds, if not thousands of miles, each tower requiring the sacrifice of at least one powerful wizard (along with whatever other people they apparently crammed in there in order to coat the very walls with carbonized human remains!!, the dream walkers must have been INCREDIBLY dangerous. Given that, what happened? Why did the dream walkers not rule Europe uncontested (since we've seen no sign of them in America)? \~/
And yes, it will be revealed (spoiler!) that Emperor Jagang is, in fact the dream walker, to which I say: so? He clearly doesn't rule uncontested, given that he's just now assimilating the BSWH and its environs into his empire, something I think would have long since been done in 3,000+ years of dream walker rule. So the Ancient Wizards built a series of super-powerful towers for the sole purpose of stopping (somehow) a threat . . . that took 3,000 years to materialize.
\~/\~/
The Ancient Wizards sucked at their jobs. And, as the series progresses, they will continue to do so.
Anyway, Warren thinks that Simona isn't “insane in the conventional sense,” but rather, has lost the ability to discern the difference between dream and reality. This, it develops, is something that occasionally happened to people who were attacked by dream walkers. Verna says that that sounds like insanity to her, whatever the cause, but Warren counters that all spellcasters have a “barrier” in their minds that prevents them from using their Force in their sleep. Which, while nice . . . doesn't really answer Verna's point, or even have anything to do with it. \~/
As they wander out of the infirmary, Warren asks who died. Verna mentions Nathan and Ann, but Warren says that they were cremated, and he means who else died. When Verna says “No one has died in quite a while,” Warren wonders why the BSWH hired the services of gravediggers.
Which is a darn good question.
Drinks: 6
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