Deliverer by CJ Cherryh

This book closes the third trilogy of the Foreigner series, the trilogy about the coup against Tabini. Days after the end of the last book, an Eastern lord working with the still-alive pretender kidnaps Tabini’s heir, Cajeiri. Bren and his friends head east to try and recover the eight-year-old boy. While there, Cherryh fleshes out the East to a depth she hasn’t before. In the opening book of the whole series, Ilisidi kidnaps Bren to the East, but Bren doesn’t yet understand what he should, and what he knows now. So, in this book, the readers finally come to grips with the East as a culture and political force, as well as some of the characters who exist out there. This showing that Cherryh does helps add complexity to the whole series. She often recasts past events in the light of future information, and here this whole book does that. But even within this book, the early dinner with the Eastern lords in the western capital is consistently shifting in the characters’ understandings as new information comes to light. Nothing is forgotten or unimportant.

It had been five days since the shooting stopped. They had had time to do a bit of mopping-up, some of it bloody, and they had done a bit of repair—and now messages flowed. Air service resumed, though it was sporadic. The trains ran.

But the most surprising aspect is that she adds a second voice. The whole series has been solely from Bren’s point of view up until now, when Cajeiri gets a voice as well. This addition helps solidify the focus of this third trilogy on the heir. This tactic fits this book into Cherryh’s ouvre more directly—she usually has multiple points of view that the reader follows. The immediate impetus for this appears to be Cajeiri’s kidnapping—it’s hard to discuss the kidnapped with Cherryh’s tightly focused, third person narrative when Bren is elsewhere. So, Cajeiri gets a voice, and he’s an eight year old boy. A remarkable boy, sure, whose important life experiences outweigh most adults, but he’s still eight and chafing under adult control.

Well, he supposed he had had adventures enough for one year at least, riding on mecheiti and buses and trains and being shot at—he had shot a man himself, because he had to, to save their lives, but he had no wish to remember that part, which was not glorious, or an adventure, or anything but terrible. He thought it ought to have changed him—but it was mostly just not there in his thinking.

In terms of the counter-revolution, this book shows the pretender shuffling his plans for the opportunity of getting control of Cajeiri. In other words, the last gasp of the pretender. And this last gasp intrigues me in that it shows something Bren’s perspective doesn’t: the pretender still thinks he has a chance. I don’t think he’s stupid, due to the success of his earlier coup, so somebody is out there supporting him. Somebody is on his side. And Bren and Ilisidi rush into a rescue attempt without knowing who, because the rescue attempt is something they can do.

At very least, it was a plan, and it was something to do, rather than sit in the bed and be scared. And when he got out, oh, some people were going to be in trouble.

The theme here is doing what you can when you can. The pretender has an allied lord kidnap Cajeiri, Cajeiri escapes, Bren kills the pretender, Ilisidi tries to patch up relations with her cousin, and all are simply doing the best of limited options available to them. The kidnapping forces events to happen, pushes the characters to reactions. But Cajeiri could’ve just as easily submitted instead of attempting escape based on the Count of Monte Cristo. Ilisidi could’ve asked somebody else to attempt rescue. Bren could’ve held his fire at the end. The pretender could’ve surrendered. But no, these characters have motivations and priorities that drive them to these actions. It’s an important warning to examine where habits and priorities could drive anybody.

He hated most of all being shunted aside and told he was a child. Most of all—loneliness, after being in the center of things, was entirely unjust, and such injustice—hurt. Hurt made him sulk. And sulking only worried the servants and brought them to hover around him.

So, that first part. Beyond being Cherryh’s usual contemplative context-setting, this introduces a kid unhappy with what his life is offering him at the moment. And the whole thing seems a bit too overlong before the kidnapping happens. The last book was a split narrative—in the house, convoy to the capital, and retaking power being three distinct portions. The book before that was split between on the space ship, and then the counter-revolution. But this book starts out without much tension—too much telling and not enough showing of tension. Then Cajeiri gets kidnapped and the tension explodes, but I wish there was some other opening here, something to get the tension going right off the bat, or earlier. I wondered why, after Tabini took power, this trilogy was still progressing. Well, because the pretender needed to die, but he’s hardly discussed throughout. Anyways, I liked the book, but some minor dissatisfaction exists. The lander seems like it could be interpreted as a deus ex machina, but it's been so heavily discussed that I didn't take it that way.