[GingerBreadMan]

I've seen several posts from members who seem to have embraced this line of thinking, that Rake was planning the end from the day he turned his back on Mother Dark, why do people believe this and are you one of them?

[Aptorian]

Rake was a Draconean Soletaken and an Andii Ascendant to boot. Among the many attributes he got from the dragons blood was some kind of almost omnipotent ability to forsee the consequences of unfolding events and act on them. Basically, when he got the sword, he knew what it was capable of and what the consequence of the design meant. That it would ultimately fail. What more, despite his cold blooded ability to do what needed to be done, like keep on feeding the sword, the nature of the sword surely chaffed on his sense of righteousness.

So, he planned. He foresaw that sword would need to be broken and he made sure that Brood would be there with the Hammer to break the Sword. He knew that to free the gate a significant sacrifice would be needed, done under specific circumstances, and being the righteous creature that he was, he knew he had to take that position (if nothing else as a final peace offering on behalf of his people to his mother and god), he knew that to pull of the ritual he would need a distraction of chaos, in the form of an army of the dead, thus he made a deal with Hood. He knew that when he died the power players would come, the good and the bad. He set things in motion to counter them. The Andii sword fighter guy to counter Kallor. Dassem Ultor to guard the sword (which ultimately proved to be a mistake), Brood to interceed between the sisters, etc. I'm not sure what the deal was with Shadow, did he ask them to help protect the sword? with the Hounds? Or were they simply to oversee the arrival of Dassem?

All this he probably for saw ages ago.

Now, this is of course the logic you have to apply to Rakes calculation.

But, as I complained about when I originally read TTH, breaking Dragnipur could have been done when ever Rake had felt like it. You have to wonder why he didn't just invite Brood to come visit him in Black Coral a year earlier, stabbed himself in the cellar of the keep and had Brood break the sword then. Thus avoiding the need for the army of death, the comvergence and the destruction of good chunk of Darujistan.

The reason to why the convergence had to take place in Darujistan is simple. It was a cooler setting than just killing Rake in his own basement.

This post has been edited by Aptorian: 22 August 2010 - 07:41 PM

[haroos]

GingerBreadMan, on 22 August 2010 - 07:16 PM, said:

I've seen several posts from members who seem to have embraced this line of thinking, that Rake was planning the end from the day he turned his back on Mother Dark, why do people believe this and are you one of them?

i think he saw potential in events.
he said his entanglement with the malazan empire was partly a mistake.
from tth i think we saw more than any other book his involvement, he didn't shape events as i see it, more like reacted.
although he did react to what he suspected might happen, and seemed to be right.
and was willing to pay the price.

[Silencer]

Read the passage in TtH where Spinnock, I believe, is commenting on Rake's ability to think about a thousand things simultaneously. We don't really see that part of him - the part that's just sitting there talking about one thing, brings up something else that seems completely unrelated but is in fact quite important to the discussion at hand, but that's what the exposition by other characters is for.

I also wonder if, despite the Word of God on the matter, a better explanation to why Rake did Dragnipur the way he did it, is that like Brood with the Hammer, he was waiting for an alternate solution to arrive. He left things until the absolutely last minute - chaos was practiaclly upon the Gate - before doing what had to be done. Moreover, while he could predict the free-for-all over the sword upon his death, he likely could not predict the magnitude of that event precisely. He had to get the sword somewhere out in the open, where many protectors could operate. The basement of the palace in Kharkanas sounds great, but if the HoL's and Envy/Spite had showed up down there, it would have been really, really messy. That, and he likely did not want to draw all the Andii of the city into this conflict, this personal act of redemption on their behalf.

So, what you then find is that it was all necessary, if not in the specifics, in the general. That doesn't mean that Rake didn't make very specific plans and see them come into motion, but I very much doubt that he predicted, back when he turned away from Mother Dark more than three hundred thousand years ago, that he would need to kill Hood, do a deal with Shadowthrone and Cotillion - who were yet to be born - to get Dassem Ultor to arrive and fight him in a battle resulting in his own death at the hands of a sword he didn't yet hold. While I think he foresaw, at some point, a lot of this, it would have been the 'broad strokes' version until, say, a thousand years prior to the event. And for that entire thousand years he would have been plotting alternate courses to see if they could work out, thus giving his actions the appearance of prescience.

Just imo.

He was definitely a genius, however, by any standards.

[champ]

Rake, yeh, pure genius, just simple things along the way in the series that help you come to that decision - like in MoI and his conversation with Envy!

Envy thinks she's got one up on him about the Master of the Deck and knowing who he is etc and Rake's like - what Ganoes Paran, the Malazan, who walked in my sword and released 2 Hounds of Shadow into the gate of Kurald Galain... yeh i know... jog on Envy!

Got to love that guy!

This post has been edited by champooon: 22 August 2010 - 08:55 PM

[Grief]

Silencer, there must be another reason for him choosing that moment though. It can't simply be that he left it late. As you say, he leaves it until chaos is almost at the wagon. However, that is only because he decided not to kill the necessary amount of people to pull it away.

He may just have decided that delaying further by killing people wasn't worth it, but considering how long he's been using it, it seems unlikely.

I would guess that he wanted Mother Dark(or maybe even Draconus?) to return. It's an odd choice though. Had he continued killing, he could have been present to help with the CG, and then dealt with dragnipur afterwards. Or perhaps chaos' existence within the sword somehow would have affected how that proceeded. It seems that he must have decided it was more important for the gate to be freed that for him to continue existing though.

[Sindriss]

Crazy theory - He knew about the curse on Draconus and thought that a long time in the sword would make him more mellow and also keep him safe. He waited until literally the world is about to end and breaks the sword so that Draconus can come out and possible help save it.

Crazy theory mode off.

Someone mentioned that Rake planned to have Dassem protect the sword. Maybe that is true, it is certainly possible, however I am pretty sure he at least had a backup plan in Shadowthrone and Cotillion, as it was all arranged at the meeting in the prologue in TTH. Haven't read the book in a great time, but I seem to recall that Hood was present along with Edgewalker, Rake and Shadowthrone? I think most stuff was concluded at that small meeting

[Defiance]

Aptorian, on 22 August 2010 - 07:39 PM, said:

Rake was a Draconean Soletaken and an Andii Ascendant to boot. Among the many attributes he got from the dragons blood was some kind of almost omnipotent ability to forsee the consequences of unfolding events and act on them. Basically, when he got the sword, he knew what it was capable of and what the consequence of the design meant. That it would ultimately fail. What more, despite his cold blooded ability to do what needed to be done, like keep on feeding the sword, the nature of the sword surely chaffed on his sense of righteousness.

So, he planned. He foresaw that sword would need to be broken and he made sure that Brood would be there with the Hammer to break the Sword. He knew that to free the gate a significant sacrifice would be needed, done under specific circumstances, and being the righteous creature that he was, he knew he had to take that position (if nothing else as a final peace offering on behalf of his people to his mother and god), he knew that to pull of the ritual he would need a distraction of chaos, in the form of an army of the dead, thus he made a deal with Hood. He knew that when he died the power players would come, the good and the bad. He set things in motion to counter them. The Andii sword fighter guy to counter Kallor. Dassem Ultor to guard the sword (which ultimately proved to be a mistake), Brood to interceed between the sisters, etc. I'm not sure what the deal was with Shadow, did he ask them to help protect the sword? with the Hounds? Or were they simply to oversee the arrival of Dassem?

All this he probably for saw ages ago.

Now, this is of course the logic you have to apply to Rakes calculation.

But, as I complained about when I originally read TTH, breaking Dragnipur could have been done when ever Rake had felt like it. You have to wonder why he didn't just invite Brood to come visit him in Black Coral a year earlier, stabbed himself in the cellar of the keep and had Brood break the sword then. Thus avoiding the need for the army of death, the comvergence and the destruction of good chunk of Darujistan.

The reason to why the convergence had to take place in Darujistan is simple. It was a cooler setting than just killing Rake in his own basement.

The reason Rake waited so long, to my understanding, was so that Chaos would consume the vast majority of those chained within Dragnipur. He knew breaking the sword would release all those chained within and so wanted to release as few as possible - better to give the souls to Chaos than have thousands of ascendants roaming in the world once again. I mean, right now we've got Draconus and a few others, and look how powerful that motherfucker is. Granted, everyone else in the sword probably wasn't quite as strong as him, but even so. It wouldn't be a good thing to have a shitload of new players in the world given the showdown that's about to happen with The Crippled God, which I'm sure Rake knew was imminent.

[Silencer]

Grief, on 23 August 2010 - 12:28 AM, said:

Silencer, there must be another reason for him choosing that moment though. It can't simply be that he left it late. As you say, he leaves it until chaos is almost at the wagon. However, that is only because he decided not to kill the necessary amount of people to pull it away.

He may just have decided that delaying further by killing people wasn't worth it, but considering how long he's been using it, it seems unlikely.

I would guess that he wanted Mother Dark(or maybe even Draconus?) to return. It's an odd choice though. Had he continued killing, he could have been present to help with the CG, and then dealt with dragnipur afterwards. Or perhaps chaos' existence within the sword somehow would have affected how that proceeded. It seems that he must have decided it was more important for the gate to be freed that for him to continue existing though.

See Defiance's post above. But, perhaps just as relevantly, think about the nature of the sword. As souls expire, they are placed on top of the wagon, or dragged along behind it. So, eventually, unless you are killing at a phenomenal rate, there will be more useless souls than useful ones, leading to the wagon's stopping anyway. So further killing was pointless. From that decision onwards (to keep the killing to a minimum), Rake essentially chose when he would need to act.
Thus, it is entirely possible that he would have had to sacrifice himself sooner if he'd kept on killing, he would have had no say in the matter of when he dealt with the sword.

[Dolmen 2.0]

Ok all this is well and good but I think Rake overlooked the child God.
All his planning could just as easily gone balls up had the child God
decided to lash out. Really The guy who convinced it otherwise was the real
wild card and I'm quite certain Rake was aware of its conception.

Heres my question did Rake know the risk? did Rake know the schemes within the sword?
and how is it that the Child God came to be at the exact moment Rake showed up?
Who was the orchestrator there?

This post has been edited by Dolmen: 23 August 2010 - 08:11 AM

[Theotendo]

He certainly set the scene for the events in the sword. Could he foresee the powers and players that would ultimately contribute to events unfolding the way they did? Who knows? Anomander was one of the few characters we were never given any proper first person insight to. Truthfully, we may never know just how prescient he was.

[foolio]

I would vote for absolute genius.

What I want to know is what did Kallor do to un-"earn dragnipur??" If anyone we have met in the entire series deserves to haul the wagon, it is him.

[foolio]

Dolmen, on 23 August 2010 - 08:10 AM, said:

Ok all this is well and good but I think Rake overlooked the child God.
All his planning could just as easily gone balls up had the child God
decided to lash out. Really The guy who convinced it otherwise was the real
wild card and I'm quite certain Rake was aware of its conception.

Heres my question did Rake know the risk? did Rake know the schemes within the sword?
and how is it that the Child God came to be at the exact moment Rake showed up?
Who was the orchestrator there?

I have always wondered the same things.
But it all could just be Eriksons way of saying that Rake is so fucking cool that even some of the people that he imprisoned in dragnipur,( a fate worse than death,) still admire and respect him.

[Aptorian]

I think that Rake recognizes potential in Kallor. We saw a side in TTH that suggested that while Kallor always looks out for himself, and would kill you for looking at him wrong, there was still good left in him. From the sound of it, he was "hurt" that Rake didn't trust him to help at the convergence in Darujistan.

This post has been edited by Aptorian: 23 August 2010 - 08:41 PM

[buddhacat]

Another reason for waiting 300000 odd years: Mother Dark had turned away, pissed at the Andii brothers and the civil war. Would she have turned back if Rake had done the sacrifice after just a 1000 years? 10000? She might still be pissed, thinking the Andii had not suffered enough. But now, after 300K everyone is ready to reconcile.

[Grief]

Again, I'm not that convincied by the arguments for why he waited for long. If it was simply a case of letting chaos consume the souls, it wouldn't matter when he broke it, as long as he let chaos catch up first. He could stop killing whenever.

[worry]

I think Defiance and Silencer have it exactly right. You suggest "let chaos catch up first" as if Rake could control that. The ONLY control he had over that was how many people he killed and when, because the balance between souls on the wagon and souls pulling the wagon was so precarious. And I am positive that Rake didn't want Chaos to catch every single soul in the sword. As much as the TA and MD were his priority, Dragnipur was his responsibility, as are the souls inside of it (including that of Draconus). And in fact, when we see him, AR has pretty much ceased to kill people with the sword as much as he can. I don't think he had the whole thing planned from start to finish or anything like that, though I suspect that even if he played it all by ear he's still competent enough to know exactly what he's doing. It's probably somewhere in between.

[WhiskeyJackDaniels]

My take on Kallor un-earning Dragnipur is Rake realized he was going to break it open soon so what would really be the point?

About him waiting so long: I'm not sure I believe this, but I think its a plausible reason that I haven't seen voiced here yet.
-Rake finally wants to deal with the Crippled God
-We know that the FA (and possibly the Liosan?) are apparently siphoning off the CG's power somehow

Perhaps, with this need (and of course the overriding need to eventually bring MD and the Andii back together) he realized that MD would be needed to deal with tCG.

OR
Perhaps, he knows that bringing back MD will force FL back into the active pantheon. And with FL returned the Liosan will also be re-united with their deity and lose their fanatic zeal or be forced to stop aiding and abetting the FA in their cause to blow up the world.

[Grief]

I agree that I don't think Rake would've wanted chaos to catch everyone in Dragnipur. Rake must have had some way of knowing how close the wagon was to the chaos. Otherwise it'd be one gigantic coincidence that he showed up just as chaos was catching up.

I think there must be some reason for it. He's had 300,000 years. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a reason he chose just now, and it certainly seems to me like he could've chosen to let chaos catch up whenever he wished.

[Aptorian]

The sword itself is less than a hundred thousand years old.