Review:
Oathblood, by Mercedes Lackey
| Series: |
Vows and Honor #3 |
| Publisher: |
DAW |
| Copyright: |
April 1998 |
| ISBN: |
0-88677-773-9 |
| Format: |
Mass market |
| Pages: |
394 |
I have this story collection listed as the third book in the Vows and
Honor series, but as mentioned in the review of
The Oathbound, it's more complicated than that. This book has
the first Tarma and Kethry story, which is not found in
The
Oathbound, and two of the better stories from that volume. This is
probably the place to start for the series; you're not missing that much
from the rest of that book. However, the last three stories ("Wings of
Fire," "Spring Plowing at Forst Reach," and "Oathblood") have significant
spoilers for
Oathbreakers.
Therefore, if you care about both avoiding spoilers and reading this
series, my recommended reading order is to ignore
The Oathbound
entirely, read
Oathblood up to but not including "Wings of Fire,"
read
Oathbreakers, and then come back here for the last two
stories.
"Sword-sworn": This is the very first Tarma and Kethry story
and hence where this series actually begins. As Lackey notes in her
introduction, it's a pretty stock "rape and revenge" story, which is not
something I particularly enjoy. Marion Zimmer Bradley liked it well
enough to accept it anyway, and I can sort of see why: the dynamic between
the two characters sparkles in a few places, and the Shin'a'in
world-building isn't bad. The plot, though, is very predictable and not
very notable. There isn't much here that you'd be surprised by if you'd
read references to these events in later stories. And there's no
explanation of a few things one might be curious about, such as where Need
came from. (6)
"Turnabout": This is one of the two stories also found in
The Oathbound. Merchants are plagued by bandits who manage to see
through ruses and always catch their guards by surprise (with a
particularly nasty bit of rape and murder in one case Tarma and Kethry
stories have quite a lot of that). That's enough to get the duo to take
the job of luring out the bandits and dealing with them, using a nice bit
of magical disguise.
This story is also a song on one of the Vows and Honor albums from
Firebird (which I also have). It was one of my favorites of Lackey's
songs, so I want to like the story (and used to like it a great deal).
Unfortunately, the very nasty bit of revenge that the supposed heroes take
at the end of the story completely destroyed my enjoyment of it on
re-reading. It's essentially a glorification of prison rape, which is a
trope that I no longer have any patience for. (4)
"The Making of a Legend": In order to explain the differences
between the song based on "Turnabout" and the actual story, Lackey
invented a bard, Leslac, who loves writing songs about Tarma and Kethry
and regularly gets the details wrong, mostly by advertising them as moral
crusaders for women instead of mercenaries who want to get paid, much to
their deep annoyance. This is his debut in an actual story, featuring an
incident that's delightfully contrary to Leslac's expectations. It's a
slight story, but I thought it was fun. (6)
"Keys": Another story from
The Oathbound, this is a
locked-room mystery with a bit of magical sleuthing. Kethry attempts to
prove that a woman did not murder her husband while Tarma serves as her
champion in a (rather broken) version of trial by combat. I think the
version here is better than the edited version in
The Oathbound,
and it's a fairly enjoyable bit of sleuthing. (7)
"A Woman's Weapon": I would call this the typical Tarma and
Kethry story (except that, for a change, it's missing the rape): they
stumble across some sort of serious injustice and put things to right with
some hard thinking and a bit of poetic justice. In this case, it's a
tannery that's poisoning the land, and a master tanner who can't put a
stop to his rival. Competent although not particularly memorable. (6)
"The Talisman": A rather depressing little story about a mage
who wants shortcuts and a magic talisman that isn't what it appears to be.
Not one of my favorites, in part because it has some common Tarma and
Kethry problems: unnecessary death, a feeling that the world is very
dangerous and that mistakes are fatal, and narrative presentation of the
people who die from their stupidity as deserving it. I couldn't shake the
feeling that there was probably some better way of resolving this if
people had just communicated a bit better. (5)
"A Tale of Heroes": Back to the rape, unfortunately, plus a bit
of very convenient match-making that I found extremely dubious. For all
that Lackey's introduction paints this as a story of empowering people to
follow their own paths, the chambermaid of this story didn't seem to have
many more choices in her life after meeting Tarma and Kethry than before,
even if her physical situation was better. I did like the touch of Tarma
and Kethry not being the heroes and victors in the significant magical
problem they stumble across, though, and it's a warm-hearted story if you
ignore the effects of trauma as much as the story ignores them. (6)
"Friendly Fire": An amusing short story about the power of bad
luck and Murphy's Law. It hit one of my pet peeves at one point, where
Lackey tries to distort the words of someone with a cold and just makes
the dialogue irritating to read, but otherwise a lot of fun. (7)
"Wings of Fire": I love the Hawkbrothers, so it's always fun
when they show up. The villain of this piece is way over the top and
leaves much to be desired, but the guest-starring Hawkbrother mostly makes
up for it. Once again, Tarma and Kethry get out of a tight spot by
thinking harder instead of by having more power, although the villain
makes that rather easy via overconfidence. Once again, though, the poetic
justice that Lackey's protagonists enjoy leaves a bad taste in my mouth,
although it's not quite as bad here as some other stories. (6)
"Spring Planting at Forst Reach": On one level, this is a
rather prosaic story about training horses (based on Lackey's experience
and reading, so a bit better than typical fantasy horse stories). But
it's set at Forst Reach, Vanyel's home, some years after Vanyel. I like
those people and their gruff approach to life, and it meshes well with
Tarma and Kethry's approach. If you enjoy the two showing off their
skills and wowing people with new ideas, you'll have fun with this. (7)
"Oathblood": As you might guess from the matching title, this
novella is the heart of the book and about a quarter of its length. We
get to see Kethry's kids, see more of their life in their second
(post-
Oathbreakers) career, and then get a rather good adventure
story of resourceful and thoughtful youngsters, with a nice touch of
immature but deeply-meant loyalty. I didn't enjoy it as much as I would
have without one of the tactics the kids use to get out of trouble, but my
dislike for reading about other people's bowel troubles is partly a
personal quirk. This is a pretty typical Lackey story of resourcefulness
and courage; if you like this series in general, you'll probably enjoy
this one. (7)
Rating: 7 out of 10
So. I typo ed up some template code the other day. And once again I learned the importance of using several c++ compilers.
Here is a very reduced version of my code:
I deal with compromises often enough of PHP-based websites that I wish
to improve hardening.
One obvious way to improve things is to not serve PHP files which are
writeable by the webserver-user. This would ensure that things like
After finishing the 
The Road to Gehenna does not bring much new game play elements, but loads of new riddles. And the best of all, playable on Linux! And as with the original game, the graphics are really well done, while still be playable on my Vaio Pro laptop with Intel integrated graphic card a plus that is rare in the world of computer games where everyone is expected to have a high-end nVidia or Radeon card. Ok, there is not much action going on where quick graphic computations are necessary, still the impression of the game is great.
The riddles contain the well known elements (connectors, boxes, jammer, etc), but the settings are often spectacular, sometimes very small and narrow, just a few moves if done in the right order, sometimes like wide open fields with lots of space to explore. Transportation between various islands suspended in the air is with vents, giving you a lot of nice flight time!
If one searches a lot, or uses a bit of cheating, one can find good old friends from the Portal series, burried in the sand in one of the world. This is not the only easter egg hidden in the game, there are actually a lot, some of which I have not seen but only read about afterwards. Guess I need to replay the whole game.
Coming back to the riddles, I really believe that the makers have been ingenious in using the few items at hand to create challenging and surprising riddles. As it is so often, many of the riddles look completely impossible at first glance, and often even after staring at them for tens and tens of minutes. Until (and if) one has the the a-ha effect and understands the trick. This often still needs a lot of handwork and trial-error rounds, but all in all the game is well balanced. What is a bit a pain similar to the original game are collecting the stars to reach the hidden world and free the admin. There the developers overdid it in my opinion, with some rather absurd and complicated stars.
The end of the game, ascension of the messengers, is rather unspectacular. A short discussion on who remains and then a big closing scene with the messenger being beamed up a la Starship Enterprise, and a closing black screen. But well, the fun was with the riddles.
All in all an extension that is well worth the investment if one enjoyed the original Talos, and is looking for rather challenging riddles. Now that I have finished all the Portal and Talos titles, I am hard thinking of what is next looking into Braid
Enjoy!
As I've already mentioned in 
What happened in the 
My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for 
Been playing with user namespaces. But it seems we lack documentation, and moreover, it lacks coherent design as an API, probably because we are playing whack a mole on new holes as they are discovered.
As for the naming, seems to be called 'userns' in patch sets.
The API is unshare(CLONE_NEWUSER) with bunch of files in proc such as
/proc/self/uid_map,gid_map.
CAP_SETGID seems also be related but not sure if it's doing anything.
As I understand it, having a GitHub profile as a portfolio has become
an essential element in applying for entry-level computer programming
jobs insightfully, a friend of mine draws a comparison with the rise
of unpaid internships in other fields. Something about GitHub that
gets in the way of maintaining a presentable portfolio is that forks
of other people s repositories made just to submit a pull request can
crowd out repositories showcasing one s work. Sometimes pull requests
can take months to be responded to by upstream maintainers, leaving
unimpressive repositories sitting around on one s profile for all that
time.
The following Python script, 
Back safely from FOSDEM; just wanted to write down a few things while it's
still fresh.
FOSDEM continues to be huge. There are just so many people, and it overflows
everywhere into ULB even the hallways during the talks are packed! I don't
have a good solution for this, but I wish I did. Perhaps some rooms could be
used as overflow rooms , ie., do a video link/stream to them, so that more
people can get to watch the talks in the most popular rooms.
The talks were of variable quality. I were to some that were great and some
that were less than great, and it's really hard to know beforehand from the
title/abstract alone; FOSDEM is really a place that goes for breadth.
But the main attraction keeps being bumping into people in the hallways;
I met a lot of people I knew (and some that I didn't know), which was the
main thing for me.
My own talk about 
. So, who can guess the date of 7777?
Squeeze LTS
This was my nineteenth month that I did some work for the 
.