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July 25 – Hubay, Lord Domestic Ch14

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cjhuitt:
I agree that Hex seems fine so far.

My biggest question, and one I assume is address elsewhere in the text, is how big of an area Hex can make invisible, and how selective it can be.  Apparently it was enough to get Jhuz out of the camp.

Hex talking about apples, not eggs: He lied about the first part (the apple's not poisoned).  It makes me wonder what else he's lied about.

Since the Servants of the Eight were legendary, and Jhuz knows about them and their talent, it seems odd that a couple of things would be as they were earlier in the story.  Not horribly unfixable, but odd.  The first is that Jhuz noticed things moving that could easily be explained by an invisible person, and he doesn't even think about the possibility.  The second is the body-guarding routine; I would think it would change some from our routine it there was a serious chance of invisible people.  For one thing, Jhuz likely would't be left to wander into his tent until either it's been checked by the guards and/or bodyguards, or the bodyguards would stay very close while he was in the tent.  In fact, they'd probably be in there with him.  I'm sure some other changes would be made as well; you might want to think of a few.  The alternative might be that nobody really thought Jhuz would be worth a contract, so they didn't bother doing the job as well as they ought to,

Finally, I wonder about the use of the word "poison."  It can certainly stand, but it makes me think of fatal poisoning.  I don't know off-hand what might be a better word, either.

Overall, it was quick and fun.  I'm looking forward to reading more.

Asmodemon:
Short chapter this time and pretty good.

So Hex is an octopus metsi. I’m trying to figure out how that might work in terms of becoming invisible. I can see him shooting ink and in the water a cloud of ink will make him hard to see, but true invisibility is something different. How does his power work?

As a character Hex was fine, but I felt his reasoning didn’t quite add up. For instance, he’s taking Jhuz to the Nothroi so they can kill him, but he won’t leave him in the wilderness for animals to find because it comes too close to killing him. That makes no sense, it’s actually the opposite as Jhuz has more chances to escape if he were left in the wild.

The contract should also have been considered void if he was contracted to kill someone already dead. He shouldn’t have to find another target to kill simply to make up for the one he couldn’t kill. And there are more ways to sow chaos than to convolutedly kidnap the enemy commander, take him back to the enemy camp, and let the enemy kill them. Assassins are efficient killers if they want to remain undetected (and stay alive to take on more contracts) and this is not efficient.

I’d change the word ‘poisoned’ to drugged or tainted or something to that effect, simply because when I read poison I expect something more lasting than a knockout.

Speaking of the knockout, Jhuz woke up after being hit in the head with a chair without obvious head trauma, which means he suffered a mild head injury. With a mild head injury he would be unconscious for about a maximum of thirty minutes. I had the feeling that he was unconscious longer than that, since Hex had to escape camp, get to a river (was the river nearby? I can’t remember), get on his boat and travel for a ways, since the camp in nowhere near anymore.   

hubay:
Octopi have better camouflage than chameleons – that was the logic I used. It's not necessarily a well-known fact, though, so perhaps I should mention that at some point in the novel.

As for his logic, I should probably re-write a lot of what he said. Part of his rationale is religious – he takes his eight strictures seriously, so he sees killing Jhuz directly as a sin, but still needs him dead. The other part is because he isn't telling Jhuz everything about his contract ( he actually was hired by the same person who had him assassinate the Emperor's bodyguard, among other thing ).

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