[Called-by-the-Voices]

Dude, we still don't know for sure if Rake was telling the truth. Therefore, I don't take the argument "we know it isn't rake, cuz he told Baruk" 100%...

And cuz I've grown to like Tay lately

[Dolorous Menhir]

Why on Earth would Rake lie to Baruk about Tays' actions outside Pale?

What does it matter to Baruk if Tays is killing his own mages, it's hardly going to start turning him against the guy considering he's already poised to overthrow Baruk and seize his city. Baruk doesn't appear to have repeated the info to anyone important, and Rake telling him didn't really matter, I think.

And of course, everyone of note in the series just assumed it was Tays killing the mages in the first place, Rake mentioning it offhand to someone not directly involved isn't going to make any difference to opinion.

It seemed to me that Baruk & Rake's conversations in GotM were similar to Rake & WJ in MoI, just talk between friends (though much more friendly in WJ's case). I don't think there was any deeper scheming going on.

[Agraba]

Rake said to Baruk that Tayshcrenn was deflecting his (rake's) magic indiscriminately, without thinking of where he was sending those sorcerous strikes. "I tried to make the price too high" Rake said to Baruk. All those soldiers marching on Pale (of whom there were barely any mention) were destroyed by Tayshcrenn's desperate deflection of all those Kurald Galain waves, so Calot and Hairlock were probably killed the same way.

[jammer]

In the heat of battle sometimes details blur

I'm just gonna try to beleive this

[Monoch Ochem]

Iirc, Tattersail noted that Hairlock was surprised, not so much that the attack came but where it came from. What Dolorous said about A'karonys' death is really interesting...a detail I never picked up on. I'd always thought it was Nightchill but now I'm wondering if it was Rake's spell...or even one of his 'exceedingly bookish warlocks' who were with him at the time.

Given Nightchill's schemings however, I think it was she who was atacking from the plain...though deflected KG is plausible- even so, it's funny sort of deflection to bounce off Tayschrenn to rebound back from the plain, no???? I'd say Tayschrenn was heavily engaged and would have no reason to be throwing demons around anyway...must have been Nightchill.

It was probably when Tayschrenn sourced the true nature of the sorceries that he discovered Rashan among the KG attacks and summoned a demon for Nightchill.

[cauthon]

IMO, most of the cinfusion stems from the fact that we have the characters POV and their statements, but we have nog reference grid to place them in and see if they are truthfull. I think there's much much more to Tayschrenn that we know atm.

Spoiler

See also BH at the end.

[Dolorous Menhir]

I'd never considered Bellurdan for A'karonys before...

On the one hand, he's in a rage and possibly knew that Nightchill didn't trust A'karonys - and so maybe he lashed out and froze him, right there and then.

On the other, his woman did just die right in front of him and then he got pretty messed up by the demon while killing it, so perhaps he was in no state to attack anyone. Though he must've still been holding it together, since he did survive the remainder of the Enfilade and Rake was presumably still striking that position even after two of the three mages had died.

Don't really have any sense of Bellurdan's magic - was it particularly cold/icy? Now that I think about it, the Teblor don't really have active magic of the kind Bellurdan must've wielded, so no help there.

Can't rule him out, it seems?

[Dolorous Menhir]

So do you think he's a likely candidate? There's nothing in his later conversation or other characters thoughts to suggest it was him, that I can think of.

[Dolorous Menhir]

But we don't know how close the three were (we are talking about Bellurdan, Nightchill & A'karonys here, right?). They were companions for a long time in the Emperor's day, maybe. But Hairlock & Tattersail were colleagues for a long time too, and there was no trust there. Mages seem to be a particularly untrusting - and untrustworthy - bunch, as Kulp notes in DG.

We also don't know how much Bellurdan really knew about Nightchill, if anything. He may have known that A'karonys and Tays were going to move against her, and so he took down A'karonys when Nightchill died...

I don't really buy Bellurdan being able to use Omtose Phellack though. Even Icarium doesn't really seem to use OP, he just seems to have a kind of general magic power, and the warrens in his arrows, whatever that's supposed to be.

[Dark Mac]

What's the human form of OP? It seems like all the Elder Warrens have a degenerate version, so that could be Bellurdan's Warren. We didn't find out about the existence of Telas until MoI, so there could still be some unknown ones.

[Smiles]

In SE's defense, when two people watch something, never mind a full scale fight, you don't always see the same things, or remember them in the right sequence. You're too busy!

Then again it could be a mistake.

[Dolorous Menhir]

Dark Mac said:

What's the human form of OP? It seems like all the Elder Warrens have a degenerate version, so that could be Bellurdan's Warren. We didn't find out about the existence of Telas until MoI, so there could still be some unknown ones.

The list of human warrens in the BH glossary includes no human Path of Ice. Parhaps there exists a Path of Fire - Telas - because humans derived from the Imass as Telas derives from Tellan, but no such link exists between humans and Jaghut, and so there is no human derivative of OP.

OP is kind of out there on its own, Tellan does have links to Kurald Thyrllan but OP has no correspondence with KE or KG that we know of. (though I would guess at a link to KG, for reasons of symmetry).

[Dark Mac]

Telas wasn't in the glossary at all until MoI, when it was first used. The same could be true of the Path of Ice. Humans aren't the descendants of the Tiste Liosan, but they can still use Thyr just fine.

I don't think it's really relevant that Tellann is linked to Thyrllan. Why would it be?

[Dolorous Menhir]

I'm just saying that Tellan has known connections to several other warrens, including human ones.

But Omtose Phellack appears totally independent of all other warrens - it has a different naming convention, no know Elder parent or younger derivative. Makes it a bit less likely there's a human offspring.

[Smiles]

One other thing about Omtose Phellack, the Imass actively look for traces of its use. I should imagine that even a weakened human version of it would bring the Imass down, although... (NoK ref)

Spoiler

The ice-demons in NoK use very powerful ice magic, maybe not as epic as the jaghut, so there may be more than just Omtose Phellack.

[Dolorous Menhir]

A new piece of info:

rereading MoI, just came across this unexpectedly - p129, Whiskeyjack POV

"Whiskeyjack had not known Nightchill - they'd never spoken and the breadth of his knowledge was based solely on the tales he'd heard. Mate to the Thelomen, Bellurdan, and a practitioner of High Rashan sorcery, she had been among the Emperor's chosen. Ultimately betrayed, just as the Bridgeburners had been..."

So Nightchill is Rashan - how does that affect her standing as suspect in freezing of A'Karonys? I'm not convinced WJ is right here, although Nightchill-as-human-mage may have used Rashan, we know that Nightchill was an EG with her own realm, which must have been distinct from Rashan (a human warren, and thus younger than Nightchill herself). So we can't rule out Nightchill having access to some ice-based warren, such as Omtose Phellack.

Which begs the further question - if Nightchill was attempting to take Dragnipur at Pale, no matter how ludicrous that seems, then would she have been willing to blow her cover as a human mage and waste A'Karonys with her Elder magics in front of everyone else?