Princes' Game Series Guide: In Extremis

This is the last one! Not because it's the last in the series, but because I haven't written the final novel so I can't write a summary for it yet. And this one is... well, it's complicated. (Have any of them not been complicated, I guess.)

Having finally written the entire thing, though, I am going to now tidy it up and prep it for delivery to you all. The formal version won't go out until the series is done and I can add Book 6. But you I'll give you all an e-edition of what exists so far, along with artwork, maps, etc. Those of you reading the series can use it to refresh your memory going into the final novel. :)

Anyway, here it is. SO MANY SPOILERS. Like, not just spoilers for this series, but for the entire Peltedverse. Enter at your own risk!

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Book 5: In Extremis

Rating: R. Rape. Violence. Torture. Slavery. Horrible situations.

“It’s like Wingless, but for Sediryl.”

In Book 5, things start happening. Lots of them. At once. I apologize in advance for the sprawl of this summary, because it’s a big book. Let me start by saying there are three major threads in In Extremis:

1. Sediryl and what happens with the pirates. This thread involves the Chatcaavan Queen and Vasiht’h.

2. Jahir and what happens with the Usurper on the throneworld. This thread involves the Surgeon and Oviin, as well as various Chatcaavan movers-and-shakers, like Second and the Lord of the Twelveworld.

3. The Chatcaavan Emperor and Lisinthir, summoning the loyalists. This thread involves the Fleet Intelligence folks, Uuvek and the Knife, Laniis, and the slaves rescued from the Worldlord (notably, Andrea).

We begin the novel with Sediryl and Maia, who are sneaking into the pirate system in order to make observations. While there, they make accidental contact with a survivor of a pirate attack: Daize, a Faulfenzair whose entire crew was swept up by the pirates. Sediryl, Maia, and this Faulfenzair are in the process of making plans when the pirates find them, and Sediryl, working on instinct, demands to speak with the pirate king, claiming to be Baniel’s successor. (If you have not read Her Instruments, Baniel was the Chatcaavan contact for arranging the trafficking of Eldritch slaves.) The pirates hand her over to the pirate leader, who is no king but a queen: a disaffected ex-Fleet officer named Kamaney, who has delusions of sociopathic grandeur and the throne of Pelted furs to prove it. She also has a fleet of over three hundred warships she’s currently trying to decide whether to fling at the Alliance (as her Chatcaavan allies want her to) or at the Chatcaava (in order to take advantage of their distraction). Kamaney wants a nation of her own; she doesn’t care who she takes the real estate from, as long as she succeeds.

We learn more about this pirate from the Chatcaavan Queen and Vasiht’h, who were delivered to her (recall that in Book 4, they were sent by the Twelveworld Lord as “gifts” to the pirates to continue securing their loyalty). The pirate keeps a cargo bay filled with thousands of slaves to sell to fund her dreams of empire-building, and Vasiht’h is separated from the Queen to be processed for sale (he is not tortured/abused the way other characters have been at any point in this book… but the preparations do involve him being declawed. He is not conscious to suffer through the procedure). The Queen is delivered to the pirate, who is desperate to make a friend—sycophant?—ally? out of her, something she does by attempting to woo the Queen with presents. But the Queen disappoints Kamaney by not being interested in her attentions, so when Sediryl arrives, Kamaney is ecstatic. Here perhaps is a woman worthy of her, and willing to accept her gifts.

Sediryl, evaluating her very meager options, decides her best bet is to seduce Kamaney into thinking they are the very best of friends, so that she can not only stay alive but influence her to send the pirate fleet after the Chatcaava, not the Alliance.

Jahir, meanwhile, is being hung daily in the Usurper’s study where he can see all the Chatcaavan fleet movements projected on the map behind the Usurper’s desk. Second insists that Jahir be gagged, blindfolded, and deafened during any of the Usurper’s conferences because he is a suspicious sort (recall that Jahir is still impersonating Lisinthir, who is known to be a dangerous ally of the Emperor Second just deposed). The Usurper, who has put Jahir firmly in the ‘can no longer make mischief’ box, only bothers with this when Second is around.

The Usurper does send for the Surgeon when Second observes that Jahir looks sickly, though, which allows Jahir to make an ally out of the Surgeon by revealing his true identity and purpose via the mind-talents. Jahir is also assigned an attendant to feed and bathe him, and to make daily reports of his health for the Surgeon: this is Oviin, the castrate who smuggled the Chatcaavan Queen’s messages out of the palace before she was sent to the pirates. Jahir is unfortunately in need of the coddling, because either the roquelaure isn’t working correctly, or Jahir simply isn’t capable of meeting its demands, because he never seems to be able to eat enough, and his exhaustion is overwhelming. He allows Oviin to help him, and Oviin comes to care about him… Jahir being Jahir, and unable to treat him as an object.

The Chatcaavan Emperor, meanwhile, having learned that quotes from the religious tracts of the Living Air are the means by which the loyalists identify themselves to one another, decides that they should summon these loyalists to the abandoned Chatcaavan homeworld, where the temple of the Living Air is sited. He asks the Knife and Uuvek to send word that all who would follow him should meet him there.

Things do not look good for the Alliance. The Empire is large enough to eat it for lunch. The Pelted’s only hope is if the Emperor can split off enough of the Empire’s forces to give Fleet a fighting chance at winning against what remains of the attackers: in effect, the Emperor is going to start a civil war to give the Alliance a chance of winning. Needless to say, this plan does not make the Fleet personnel very comfortable, relying entirely as it does on the Emperor’s trustworthiness and ability to lead—not heartening, given that he was recently deposed. It doesn’t make the Emperor’s Chatcaavan partisans very happy either, since it involves inviting their enemies to cut their throats.

There is a great deal going on with the Emperor, who is dealing with the aftermath of his abuse and his persistent feelings of unworthiness. The people on the ship all react to him in various ways. Some are skeptical (not just among the Fleet personnel, but among his rescued Chatcaavan Naval officers as well). Some want to help him. Some can’t figure out what they feel about him. His major interactions are not, interestingly, with Lisinthir, whose support remains consistent, but with Andrea, the human woman who helped him in the Worldlord’s harem—and Laniis. Laniis, discovering the Emperor can become an Eldritch, insists he become one and use the Eldritch ability to sense thoughts/feelings to experience her memories of living in his harem. She insists this is justice. No one is sure if she’s right, including Laniis.

Meanwhile, Uuvek is attempting to discover what became of Sediryl—Maia is no longer responding to Uuvek’s requests for information. They remember that the Chatcaavan Queen used someone to contact them from the palace, and decide to send a message to see if that contact is still able to respond, and if he can find Jahir. If the contact responds, they might have a line into the palace, and possibly the Usurper’s plans.

Elsewhere, Sediryl’s efforts with the pirate are paying off. More or less. She succeeds in convincing Kamaney to give her Vasiht’h as a gift, plus a Faulfenzair—though not the Faulfenzair she wanted (Daize, the one she was captured with). She ends up instead with an eccentric priest named Qora. Qora is very interested in Sediryl, who is an Eldritch who not only lacks mind-gifts, but one who can’t be reached by other people with those mind-gifts, like Vasiht’h who tries in the hopes of providing them with a secure line of communication. Qora finds this persistent inability suggestive, but of what he declines to share (much to Vasiht’h’s irritation).

In the process of earning the pirate’s trust, Sediryl discovers something deeply disturbing about Kamaney: she’s being protected by a D-per of her own, a Fleet officer Maia informs her was prosecuted for the suicide of his commanding officer, who killed himself in order to “join” the D-per in the network. (This is not possible, so needless to say, he failed.) Maia speculates that Crispin, this D-per, is being controlled by one of the few protocols that can limit a D-per’s abilities, probably encoded into a data wand… and while a former Fleet officer might not want to obey a rapacious criminal, he would have no choice if she had the command protocols.

Kamaney’s possession of a D-per makes Maia’s continued use of the pirate network very dangerous. She does everything she can to keep her profile too low to be noticed.

Oviin, meanwhile, has received Uuvek’s probe. He brings the request for communication to Jahir’s attention and asks what he should do, and Jahir, being Jahir, tells him he has to make his own choice—Jahir refuses to compel him. Oviin decides, at length, to act again as relay, this time for Jahir: he did not love the previous Emperor, but he finds the Usurper disturbing because the Usurper will use any means to achieve his ends. At least the prior Emperor acted according to the honor rules that throttled the most violent male behavior.

The Emperor, too, is puzzling out his course of action. Neither the Usurper nor Second are acting the way he anticipates. In particular, he doesn’t understand why Second isn’t on the throne instead of the Usurper. Why did Second arrange for a puppet king if he wanted more power?

It is at this point that the Emperor, Lisinthir, and the Fleet personnel hear back from Oviin: that Jahir is alive, and that he has information—in this case, fleet movements that Jahir has observed on the maps in the Usurper’s office.

(Did I mention the story’s separate threads are intertwined? We do a lot of moving back and forth, chapter by chapter, in the novel.)

Back among the pirates, one of Sediryl’s self-appointed tasks is rehabilitating the Chatcaavan Queen in Kamaney’s eyes, because one of Kamaney’s many bad habits is disposing of things that no longer interest her. Sediryl suggests that Kamaney, who likes to think of herself as generous, has a gift that only she can give the Queen: access to all the known aliens of the world so that the Queen can learn their shapes. This delights the pirate, who instantly arranges to dole out shapes, one by one, to the Queen in order to revel in her magnanimity and power. It is while coaxing Kamaney through this process that Sediryl learns from Maia that getting messages out to the Alliance is too dangerous: the pirates are keeping close tabs on external communications. But the Chatcaava are not considered “external” to the pirate operations, since they are purportedly allied. That means Maia can send messages back to the throneworld contact she has learned about from the Chatcaavan Queen.

We now have a tenuous communication link: from Sediryl, Vasiht’h, and the Queen amid the pirates to the Chatcaavan palace, and from Jahir and Oviin in the Chatcaavan palace, back out to the Emperor, Lisinthir, and Fleet. This is the link upon which all the events that are coming will hinge… and it is entirely dependent on two individuals: Oviin on the throneworld, and Maia, among the pirates.

If you think two single points of failure are an awful thing to hang the fate of three galactic nations on, well. You’re right.

This link comes at a good time. The Lord of the Twelveworld, who is a very important system lord, very rich in influence and resources, is managing the “alliance” with Kamaney as head of the pirate fleet, and has come to report to the Usurper about the planned activities of these pirates, which the Chatcaava want on the border to draw the Alliance away from where the Chatcaava are planning to attack. The Twelveworld Lord has formed a coalition of the system lords of his sector, and now leads a large chunk of the Chatcaavan naval force, which he has sent to join the muster at Apex-East. When the Usurper asks if having all these warring factions staring one another down in the same real estate is going to cause trouble, Second says no, because he’s going to draw off a large piece of it—a Naval piece—and send it forward to start on scouting duties. To “reduce the pressure.”

Jahir observes all this and can’t help responding to it, in private, to the Usurper, as part of his bid to understand how the Usurper thinks. The Usurper explains his motivations for wanting power, which is that the universe is untidy and he wants to regularize it. Everything in its place. Everything maximized for efficiency. No more messiness. He refuses to change his mind about things he’s already placed in boxes, which is why he doesn’t see the possibility that Second might be preparing to betray him when he leaves to meet his “scouting force.” Even when Jahir suggests it to him and the Twelveworld Lord, the Usurper is dismissive of this ‘alien freak’ and his attempt to explicate Chatcaavan politics.

The Twelveworld Lord, though, is listening.

All this is in opposition to Jahir’s gentle, developing relationship with Oviin. Jahir wants to show Oviin the shapechange; Oviin is not ready for it, but consents to a mind-to-mind exchange so he can report more accurately on what Jahir has seen; unlike Jahir, he has the context to understand the conversations and maps Jahir is being exposed to.

Jahir thinks a great deal of just killing the Usurper with the mind talents, but he fears what will happen in the resulting vacuum. He resigns himself to remaining an intelligence resource. But the roquelaure that is disguising him is getting more and more erratic in its power requirements, and he wonders if it’s going to kill him before the end.

On the Fleet vessel, the Emperor continues to struggle with who he is and who he’s going to choose to be, torn between Laniis’s punishing sessions and Andrea’s gentle catechism. He and Lisinthir discuss the Chatcaavan political system at length (often while sparring). It is during one of these sessions that they decide that Second must be angling for something—most likely to split the Empire apart so he can rule a piece of it. Lisinthir contacts Deputy-East and arranges for him and the Worldlord to keep them informed of what’s going on in Apex-East.

Among the pirates, Sediryl makes progress with Kamaney, inspiring the pirate to discuss her choices: either to attack the Alliance at the behest of the Chatcaava, or to attack the Chatcaava while they’re busy with the Alliance. The pirate doesn’t show any sign of letting Sediryl help her make that choice, though. 

The Chatcaavan Queen is also struggling: every new shape she learns makes her feel stranger, and she’s never heard of any problems that might afflict people who learn too many patterns, so she doesn’t know what’s happen to her. And Vasiht’h feels stuck: he’s trying to help Sediryl stay sane, which isn’t easy when she’s not much of a talker, and trying to figure out why she seems to have a mind-block but not making any progress on that either. 

Sediryl overwhelmingly feels like she’s dancing on a tripwire and the only way she’s staying on it is by brazening it out. This strategy has always worked for her because she’s confident, smart, and quick-witted… but the stakes have never been this high, either, and she’s beginning to worry that for once in her life, she might fail, and that the consequences of her failure will be catastrophic.

Over on the Fleet vessel, Uuvek receives Oviin’s news about Second leaving Apex-East. There is a tense conversation over whether this is the opportunity they’ve been waiting for but… even with the number of ships Second is removing, the remainder is too large for the Alliance to handle alone. The Twelveworld Lord’s reinforcements are too great. The Emperor still needs to muster his loyalists… if he can even find enough of them. This is when the Emperor receives a personal message from the Worldlord, who wants to know why the Emperor is worth following if he allowed himself to be collared and enslaved in the Worldlord’s harem.

The Emperor sends him an answer, and this answer will have an enormous impact. On everything.

Back on the throneworld, Oviin tells Jahir that the evacuation of Second and his forces from Apex-East is not sufficient opportunity with the Twelveworld Lord’s forces swelling the ranks, and Jahir realizes this must now be his task: he has to inspire the Twelveworld Lord to pull his forces out of the fleet, and he has to do it before the roquelaure kills him—it is definitely malfunctioning now, and he’s weakening. Oviin receives a message from Maia, who is now using the Chatcaavan channel to push information out of the pirate stronghold, and he brings that information to Jahir as well. The pirates might attack the Chatcaava! And they are closest to the Twelveworld Lord’s border. If Sediryl can arrange for the pirates to attack the Twelveworld territory, then the Twelveworld Lord will leave Apex-East to defend it, and Fleet and the Emperor’s forces will have their chance.

This is how it has to happen. Jahir feels it falling into place. If he dies—if all of them die—to make it happen, still. It has to happen. He tells Oviin to send messages to Sediryl and the Emperor: Sediryl should make sure the pirates attack the Twelveworld; the Emperor is to prepare for the opening.

Back in the pirate stronghold, Sediryl receives Jahir’s message, just as Kamaney tells her that they need to leave soon to begin their attack and seize their glorious destiny. Since they aren’t taking the enormous number of slaves with them, Kamaney has arranged for the Chatcaavan Queen to learn all the remaining shapes. At once. Doing this tumbles the Queen into what appears to be a fever, possibly a coma. Things are getting desperate. Sediryl tells Maia to send a message to their allies that she’s going to get the pirates to the right place at the right time, and that there’s something really wrong with the Queen and she needs advice from a Chatcaavan doctor. But before Maia can send the message she is discovered by Kamaney’s criminal D-per, Crispin, who boots her out of the network.

Sediryl can no longer warn her allies that the plan isn’t working, so she decides it’s going to work. No matter what she has to do to guarantee it.

Jahir’s message is received by the Emperor and the others on the Fleet vessel. They now have a deadline: they need to be ready to move when Deputy-East reports that the Twelveworld Lord’s forces have left Apex-East.

The Emperor is continuing to change. Literally—he practices the shapechange, and moves through his different shapes, using them for different purposes. And he talks with Lisinthir of the possibility of Lisinthir having a position in the Chatcaavan government-to-come. It is in this spirit that they arrive at the Chatcaavan homeworld…

…and discover an enormous force awaiting them. Not just the penny packets promised to the Emperor by the loyalists who found the Knife’s religion-encoded messages scattered in the network, but thousands of ships. The Worldlord’s son is in charge of the Naval reserves for the largest sector of the Empire, and he has brought them all.

The Emperor’s reply to the Worldlord was apparently convincing. Now they have a real chance to succeed.

The Emperor meets with his new naval commanders and puts them to work at exercises while he answers an unexpected summons from the planet from the head of the Chatcaava’s oldest religion. He takes a group down with him to this meeting, almost all aliens. And there, on top of a stone pillar, they learn the origins of the Chatcaavan race: that all Chatcaava originally could Change, male and female, but that females could pick and choose bits of the patterns they learned and make them heritable. The Chatcaavan females gave the Chatcaava wings. They gave them horns and the hard scaled backs and sides. They shaped the race. But all these traits were taken from animals, because at that time the Chatcaava had not yet discovered aliens. And they took one trait too many, and the resulting children were wild, barely sapient.

In horror, the ancient Chatcaava pulled back to confer on what to do… and decided en masse to freeze themselves in their current iteration. They made one more change to their species: stripping from females the ability to fix traits in their children. These females became the four-armed, unwinged Chatcaavan females that now dominate that sex in the species. Only the winged females retain the ability to fix traits, and they are almost all gone, and the ones who aren’t… well, most of them don’t know about this ability.

But now there are aliens. Taking a pattern doesn’t mean becoming an animal anymore. The priest wants the Emperor to revive the religion… and most importantly, to find it a true head again. Because the head of the Living Air’s followers must be a winged female who knows the Change.

Needless to say, this revelation is enormous and is going to change everything. Appropriately, because is that not what the Chatcaava are? Changed, and Changers?

Things are coming to a head elsewhere. Sediryl, knowing that her time is running out with Maia gone/discovered, is invited to a romantic dinner by Kamaney, who conveys her final decision on their target: Kamaney is going to attack the Alliance first, and then move on to the Chatcaava, and she wants Sediryl to come with her as a fellow Queen of Criminals. Sediryl allows Kamaney to seduce her in order to arrange for her vulnerability… and then, lacking any better ideas, kills Kamaney and presents herself as the new pirate Queen with a new mandate. They are now attacking the Chatcaava.

Jahir, too, is running out of time—in his case, against his failing health. But he finds himself with an opportunity to listen to another conference between the Usurper and the Twelveworld Lord, where he decides to use his mind-mage’s talents to influence people at last. He convinces the Twelveworld Lord that he should investigate whether the pirates are going to betray him, because the Usurper is weak and if the Twelveworld Lord abandons him the way Second did, perhaps the Usurper will fall… and leave an opening for the Twelveworld Lord to step into.

The Twelveworld Lord pulls his forces out of Apex-East. The Usurper, not being stupid, confronts Jahir, and as punishment for meddling, he kills Oviin… gentle Oviin, who will never now know the shapechange, or the freedom he began to hope for at Jahir’s prompting. The Usurper tells Jahir that next time he meddles, it will be the Surgeon who dies. When Jahir protests that the Surgeon is Outside and so can’t be a pawn in the power games, the Usurper confesses to not caring. The Surgeon is a way to control Jahir, and he will be controlled.

This is a mistake.

Jahir uses his mind-talents to reach the Surgeon at the bottom of the tower and warns him that the Usurper no longer considers Outside a valid protection. The Chatcaava Outside comprise an entire network of competent professionals who count on their status to protect them. Now that the Surgeon knows he no longer has that protection, he has no reason to play by the rules, or to encourage anyone he knows to do so. He starts making plans for how to bring the Usurper down.

The novel ends with the stage set:

Sediryl, now tenuously in charge of the pirates who have mostly not realized there’s been a change in their leadership, is preparing to lead an attack on Chatcaava at the Twelveworld Lord’s border. She hopes. If they don’t depose her messily. She is way, way out of her depth and knows it, and knows her plan is stupid but has no better ideas, so she’s going with it in the hopes that it’ll stay together long enough to save the Alliance.

The Chatcaavan Queen is still sick, burning with all the patterns she’s learned, and is in the care of Vasiht’h and the Faulfenzair priest Qora, who are accompanying Sediryl.

The throneworld palace is now primed to explode, thanks to Jahir’s message to the Surgeon. Jahir is weakening quickly, but he has exposed the Usurper, and Jahir’s not done with this fight yet.

And the Emperor, who has embraced the Change and the message of the Living Air, is poised to lead his fleet to Apex-East, to take advantage of the fact that both Second and the Twelveworld Lord have left with their respective forces. The Chatcaavan fleet is as vulnerable as it’s going to be—this is their best chance.

It’s time to dance.

Military/Political Stuff

Our takeaway from this book: 

• The Chatcaavan Empire is too big for the Alliance to win against unless the Chatcaava either decide to quit the war or start fighting amongst themselves.
• The Emperor can’t take back his Empire from the Usurper without losing some number of factions in the process, so he can’t become Emperor again without starting a civil war.
• Starting a civil war gives the Alliance a chance not to die, particularly if the Emperor throws in with them against the Chatcaava who disagree with them about the Alliance’s sovereignty.

This is obviously not the best choice for anyone. In a perfect world, the Emperor could take back his Empire by killing the Usurper and receive it intact, the way it was before, and the Alliance could not have the Chatcaava about to attack them. They do not live in a perfect world.

Having established the lack of perfection (Perfection), this is what happens:

• Second, who wants to be in charge of something, is taking his chunk of the Navy and defecting. Somewhere. Probably. No one knows the details.
• The Twelveworld Lord, who arranged the pirate diversion, is using rumors of their betrayal to pull his forces out of the war and prepare them to attack the Usurper, if the Usurper isn’t killed off by someone else who decides that all these important people leaving means the Usurper is losing the Chatcaava’s imprimatur.
• The pirates, having lost their sociopathic leader to Sediryl’s desperate bid for the power to keep them from attacking the Alliance, are… purportedly… maybe… going to attack the Chatcaava. If they don’t decide to kill Sediryl first.
• Fleet has yet to weigh in on what they’re going to do with their naval forces, which are massing on the border as they deal with existing pirate incursions and the rumor that the Chatcaava are coming. (But they don’t know where the Chatcaava are coming, which means they’re spread out along the border.)

We leave Book Five with everything primed to explode. How it’s going to fall out, though…that’s what Book Six is for….

New Characters

• Kamaney: The sociopathic ex-Fleet officer who becomes the leader of a pirate nation. Kamaney is actually an escapee from a different (unpublished) novel, where she fled Alysha Forrest after committing her crimes. We might eventually see that novel, which is sort of her origin story.
• Crispin: The ex-Fleet D-per who protects Kamaney from harm. We will see him again soon.
• Daize: The Faulfenzair that Sediryl meets at the beginning of the book, and whom we do not see again, also becomes important, if not in the way we expect.
• Qora: The Faulfenzair priest who tags along after Sediryl and Vasiht’h, being practical at them about stuff they’d rather not face.
• The Twelveworld Lord: Briefly introduced in Book Four, this Chatcaavan becomes an important figure in politics in this book. He has a thing for aliens, which is how Jahir worms his way into his brain.

WHERE THE NAME CAME FROM

Unlike Books 1, 2, and 4, which got their titles from lines in the book, and Book 3, which got its name from the gift Lisinthir and Jahir exchange, In Extremis is named for the situation all the characters find themselves in, as they are increasingly squeezed by their pressures and dangers. From the dictionary, this adverb means: “ in extreme circumstances; especially :  at the point of death.” It’s from Latin, where it means “in the farthest reaches.”

JUST FOR FUN: READER HIGHLIGHTS

This book just came out recently, so it doesn’t have as many highlights as the others!

“..Faith requires me to be all right with uncertainty. That’s the test of life, you see? Otherwise there’s no point. For all this to work, you have to start with the understanding that you don’t know everything and never will, and you can’t fix everything, and never will. Part of faith is being all right with knowing you can’t control everything, and shouldn’t.”

“…If they’re not allowed to move on, they give up trying. Often they become worse, because they’ve seen the light, and it was denied them.”