Official HFQ Snippet #25

I hope we are in store for 2 months of Green Valley of the Frozen Tundra. Two months of snippets or 4 in a row.

Thanks for the snippet RFC! even if it ends in telling us that we REALLY need to see the next snippet or two to get into the part we have awaited since we first read LAMA.

Thank you David for a very pleasant surprise. The snippet arrived early. And what a snippet it was... For me the snippets with the scenes in the cave have been the most interesting part of the book.

I'm gonna read it again before I comment...

Don

First and foremost, I'm glad to hear that you are well enough to travel. Thank you for the snippet. At least you haven't reverted to the practice of inserting two or three line snips from who knows where in the book as you have sometimes done in the past.

Dear Mr. Weber;

Please be careful of your health. Heart problems and irregular heartbeats are nothing to play around with. It's not just that we would miss your writing but that your family and friends and the many readers who have met you and appreciate your sense of humor and personality would miss you.

SPOILERS BEGIN (As if you didn't know that from this being a Snippet post)

As to your snippet, my haven't you opened up a can of worms or two, and no mistaking it. If I'm not missing anything you have opened a door for how the Church of Charis and others can drive a wedge into the Gang of Four and the conventional Church. Making Chihiro and Schueler into the bad guys who perverted Langhorne's plan, Oh my the propaganda initiatives possible in that. Yes indeed. And jolly Prince Nahrmahn seems just the guy to know how to stick it to them too. Tricky, tricky author.

And the endless speculation we're going to have about what other resources might be hidden, how many odds and ends of organizations, etc might still be around, what other manufacturing facilities might still be in existence, and the biggy; If Chihiro hung on to the Hamilcar, might it still be in orbit? Maybe a cometary orbit around the primary, instead of around the planet. Is that bootstrap still there. Seems to me it certainly accelerates the taking the fight back to the Gbaba when you get to that stage, if it's still out there somewhere. After all I don't suppose you really meant to make the series go 300 books or so (you do, after all, have other series you probably want to advance the plots of now and then.)

OF course you left it at a bit of a cliff hanger in terms of getting back to the war, but the threads you started with this snippet... Yes, well done you fiendish man.

Larry

P.S. And let the fun begin in trying to think who's coming out from the temple for the re-visitation. OR are they coming out from he Temple. Maybe the time period is because they put themselves into cryo on a long period orbit aboard Hamilcar? We thought the darn thing was chucked into the primary, but if Chihiro hung onto it for a power base and the military and command crew went over to the Kau-yung side, they might have had control problems. And somebody with command authorization still had to be around long enough after to order the kinetic strike that took out the original Sisters home....
Hmmm... Yep lots of snakes in this one.

Well, this doesn't settle everything by any means. But there is enough here for me to crawl out on a limb with two speculations.

First, Sandaria becomes part of the inner circle, if not right away, then a bit further down the road. The basis for that is that she is engaging positively and is open to new info that could conceivably change her perspective.

On that cheerful note here comes my second speculation. At least one of those industrial modules will be found. It won't be in the Mountains of Desolation, but somewhere.

Somebody should be feeling vindicated. The fallen were military personnel who served under Kau-yung... Interesting.

The big question for the inner circle is where is Hamlicar? Is it still out there and could it be recalled? If so, is there anything at all that could be done about it? Does the amswer to these questions lie under the Temple?

The plot thickens...

Don

Here's a sketch of what may have been Schueler's situation. Let me know if it fails to track anything we know so far.

Schueler was one of the most prominent successor angels and one of Chihiro's most senior allies/associates. Unlike Chihiro, Schueler wasn't out for power and wasn't looking to revise Langhorne's plan as bet he understood it - he just figured the boss had things right or right enough, the Fallen had made a wrong choice with perilous consequences, and Safehold needed saving from them with Chihiro calling the plays.

Along the way, he got a family and seeing Schueler about his doubts got Kohdy killed. I don't think we've got evidence of the timeframe on those, but here are two possibilities:

1 - Schueler had a forbidden family, Chihiro knew about it, and held it over him. That got Kohdy killed, and that may have led to Schuler preparing his family, with tradition, the message, the Key and the Stone, to minimize the damage Chihiro's Church would do. It was all he could do, and the least he could do.

or 2 - Schueler betrayed Kohdy, out of true belief or by accident, but it's still a sort of last straw and the spiritual "taint" got passed on to him. Secretly, he wasn't Chihiro's follower anymore but the War was lost. All that was left for him to do by way of trying to redeem himself was to pass the mission on to a family and give them the tools and the sense of purpose to do it.

Either way, Schueler never publicly parts ways with Chihiro, he's one of the "heroes" of the War, and he gets his name plastered on the sacred guide for changing minds with torture and the example thereof. But meanwhile, he's picked up the torch and passed it on to his family (who else could he trust?) so that the worst excesses Chihiro's Church will invite are opposed.

JeffEngel wrote:Here's a sketch of what may have been Schueler's situation. Let me know if it fails to track anything we know so far.

Schueler was one of the most prominent successor angels and one of Chihiro's most senior allies/associates. Unlike Chihiro, Schueler wasn't out for power and wasn't looking to revise Langhorne's plan as bet he understood it - he just figured the boss had things right or right enough, the Fallen had made a wrong choice with perilous consequences, and Safehold needed saving from them with Chihiro calling the plays.

Along the way, he got a family and seeing Schueler about his doubts got Kohdy killed. I don't think we've got evidence of the timeframe on those, but here are two possibilities:

1 - Schueler had a forbidden family, Chihiro knew about it, and held it over him. That got Kohdy killed, and that may have led to Schuler preparing his family, with tradition, the message, the Key and the Stone, to minimize the damage Chihiro's Church would do. It was all he could do, and the least he could do.

or 2 - Schueler betrayed Kohdy, out of true belief or by accident, but it's still a sort of last straw and the spiritual "taint" got passed on to him. Secretly, he wasn't Chihiro's follower anymore but the War was lost. All that was left for him to do by way of trying to redeem himself was to pass the mission on to a family and give them the tools and the sense of purpose to do it.

Either way, Schueler never publicly parts ways with Chihiro, he's one of the "heroes" of the War, and he gets his name plastered on the sacred guide for changing minds with torture and the example thereof. But meanwhile, he's picked up the torch and passed it on to his family (who else could he trust?) so that the worst excesses Chihiro's Church will invite are opposed.

An interesting perspective on how things played out... The question which occurs to me is why would Schuelers family have been forbidden? I'm not aware of any teaching on Safehold that would make a principle of abstainence...

Who do you think wrote the Book of Schueler?

Don

n7axw wrote:
An interesting perspective on how things played out... The question which occurs to me is why would Schuelers family have been forbidden? I'm not aware of any teaching on Safehold that would make a principle of abstainence...

Who do you think wrote the Book of Schueler?

Don

Ummm, Schueler was supposed to be an Archangel, a heavenly being. NOT flesh and blood, not mortal.

On the Commodore's actions (ie gun vs nuclear device).

Quote from OAR (the Commodore's message to Nimue)

I don't know if it will do any good, but Langhorne, Bédard, and their toadies are about to discover that they aren't the only people with a little undisclosed military hardware in reserve. There won't be any survivors.

End Quote

This reads to me like some sort of nuclear device rather than a gun.

No matter how good he was with a gun, there's no way that he'd assume ahead of time that he'd get all of them with a gun.