D. T. Kane reads chapters 11-12 of his epic fantasy fiction novel, The Acktus Trials, and discusses the chapter with his audience.
If you’re enjoying the Acktus Trials, or have already read it, please consider taking a minute to leave a review. Reviews help authors by increasing the visibility of their books, which helps get it into the hands of more readers. Thank you for your support! Follow this link to leave a review: https://www.amazon.com/review/create-review?&asin=B09QZ8MQ38
The Acktus Trials, an epic fantasy novel, available now: https://dtkane.com/books/the-acktus-trials/
PRE-ORDER Part II of The Spoken Books Uprising, Declaimer’s Discovery, available April 15!
Preorder on Amazon: https://dtkane.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=749c5d9250a6b58e1deb27545&id=9ef761bc7f&e=35c8fe8c20
Preorder at your preferred retailer: https://dtkane.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=749c5d9250a6b58e1deb27545&id=1462da7a2d&e=35c8fe8c20
Map of Oration: https://dtkane.com/resources/map-of-oration/
Characters in this Chapter:
Baztian (Baz): Our main character
Rox: Deliritous’s Harbour (bodyguard)
Deliritous: Baz’s master, heir to Torchsire Library
Hellar Xavier: Reader, heir to Xavier Library, one of the competitors going on the Trials
Trunnel: Hellar’s Speaker, an Influencer
Arrow: Hellar’s Harbour
Marla Kolnar: Nice of the Duchess of Kolnar Library, one of the competitors going on the Trials
Ryle: Marla’s Harbour
Retch: Marla’s Speaker, a Creator
Below is a copy of my notes/script for the episode, not a verbatim transcription.
PERSONAL UPDATE
March 19, 2022 as I record this, Episode 10.
Well, those of you who read the newsletter saw I had a bit of a tough week. Came home from vacation last week to some water damage in my house and have been dealing with the repairs all week. Fun times.
Thankfully, I’ve still got my writing! I started work on Part IV of the Spoken Books Uprising, wrote my first 7,500 words on that, though now I’ve had to backburner that just for a few days because I got my editor’s edits on Part II back and I need to get that finalized so I can send copies to my advance readers.
Remember, Part II is out April 15 and you can preorder your copy now! Link in the show notes.
ANAYLIS CH. 11-12
Alright! I hope you enjoyed listening to these two chapters as much as I enjoyed writing them. Lots of tension here!
Mutters in the Night
So we start with Deliritous insisting that Rox get some sleep rather than keeping watch. Rox is obviously wary of Marla in particular, but finally relents. He’s been keeping watch every night, so he must be exhausted. Baz notes how it worries him, seeing Rox tired.
He’d always thought of Rox more like a massive tool rather than breathing flesh and blood. It was much easier to disdain a tool than it was a person.
I think this is a bit of theme throughout the novel too–It’s tough to go on hating someone when you’ve spent time with them under difficult circumstances.
But I don’t think it comes as too much as a surprise to any of you that having Deliritous keep the watch instead of Rox doesn’t really work out. Baz wakes to “muttering in the darkness,” and as he notes, while that might not be cause for alarm for an ordinary person, when you worried about Readers wishing you harm, it’s the last thing you want to hear.
So Marla and Hellar have obviously been plotting behind Deliritous’s back because this attack was coordinated. It’s unclear whether Hellar and Marla had planned this all along, or Hellar did initially intend to see if a truce with Deliritous could work out and then diverted after the scene with Marla and Baz at the end of chapter 10. I never make that entirely clear, and I’m not sure it really matters, though I think it’s obvious based on how they were conversing together and giving each other cryptic looks that they had something going between them.
So, to set the scene, Marla is reading this spell to her Creator that results in roots shooting out of the ground to imprison Rox, and Hellar uses his Influencer to lull Deliritous into a stupor so he can’t raise the alarm. It’s dark, the fire having burned low. Baz is laying down, apparently not in direct proximity of Deliritous or Rox, which makes sense since he doesn’t like either of them.
But we do see Marla’s and Hellar’s hubris is a bit of their undoing here. They left Baz unaccounted for because neither wanted to be without their Harbour while they were Reading to their Speakers. Baz ruefully comments on this:
Even now, out in the wilds and in the midst of turning on one of their fellow Readers, they couldn’t trust their Speakers long enough to ensure a loose end like Baz didn’t interfere with their plans.
So a potential weakness here that Baz is able to exploit, and maybe one to keep in mind for the future as well. Hellar and Marla assume Baz is essentially useless if Deliritous isn’t able to Read spells to him, and it costs them, as we’re about to see.
Oh, hello there, chaps.
So Baz shouts a warning to Rox, but it’s too late, Rox is caught by the roots, though he does manage to injure Trunnel, Hellar’s Influencer, before being confined. And we see that perhaps the relationship between Hellar and Marla isn’t a smooth one either. Hellar demands that Marla heal his Speaker, but it seems like she’s going to refuse until she notices that Hellar’s Harbour has a clear shot at her with his bow. Marla’s in it to win it, so to speak. She could have potentially greatly handicapped both of her opponents here, and it certainly raises questions about whether Hellar is wise to be trusting her. What do you guys think is going to happen between the two of them? Let me know, dtkane@dtkane.com!
During the confusion of Rox injuring Trunnel and nearly escaping the roots, Baz runs and hides behind a tree, so now he’s watching the scene from afar. Interesting that he doesn’t run away completely, right? I mean, he comes up with pretty good reasoning–there’s no way he could survive in the wilds alone, he’d never see his brother again. Baz says he’s not a very good runner, though of course he doesn’t say it quite like that:
He had few talents, and none of them involved running farther than the distance from his sleeping pallet to the privy back in Torchsire Library.
But still, you get the sense there’s something more. Hold that thought.
At this point, Deliritous wakes up from the spell Hellar had put him under. Despite the savvy he showed earlier, we still see his innocence, or maybe you’d say naivety, here. He initially doesn’t think anything’s amiss: “Oh, hello there, chaps.” Of course, he’s quickly debased of that when Marla’s Harbour grabs him by the throat and lifts him off the ground.
And then Deliritous realizes Baz isn’t there and starts shouting for him. Almost like he’s concerned, fearing that Marla’s killed Baz. Baz actually feels bad listening to him.
And we really see that all our fears about Marla were totally warranted. She’s here just kind of toying with Deliritous, telling him how they didn’t see him as a threat, they just wanted to eliminate Rox from the competition. “Don’t be daft, deary.”
You spineless Book burner!
Then things for from bad to worse. Marla asks Hellar to have his Harbour kill Rox, which Hellar does. Deliritous frantically tries to bargain, saying he’ll just forfeit the Trials. And that shows his regard for Rox, right? We saw how important it is for him to do well in the Trials, with all the pressure his father’s putting on him and his resistance to his uncle’s suggestion that he just sort of hide and keep himself alive. But Marla declines he entreaties, reasoning she doesn’t want the risk of Rox being around even after the get back from the Trials.
So then Deliritous gets angry, cursing at Marla. He says something about her mother… and that proves to be a mistake. She stomps down on his leg and breaks it.
And now Baz has his moment. Probably the most pivotal moment in the whole book. Remember, I told you Baz was going to make a big decision last week. Here it is.
But Baz was surprised to find another emotion mixed with the fear. Anger. Anger at Marla’s casual cruelty, at Hellar’s detached indifference. And most of all, anger at how ill-equipped Deliritous was to deal with them. Not because he was entirely inept, though he’d plenty ineptitude in him. But because he lacked the deplorable characteristics of Marla and Hellar—he wasn’t despicable enough to concoct a plan like what Marla and Hellar had hatched, nor hard enough to carry it out with the apathy Hellar demonstrated. He was still the ink-spilling bastard who had ruined Tax’s life, but…
Baz’s innate sense of right shines through again! He decides to try and save Deliritous. And how is he going to do it? Well, I’m sure most of you saw this coming–he’s going to Read! He does remember, back from when his brother taught him.
At least, that’s partially it. Baz tells us he hadn’t tried to Read in 10 years, yet he’s still able to Read this very complex spell. He gives two explanations for this: (1) even if Deliritous doesn’t utilize him often, he’s still Spoken thousands of spells, so it’s not as if he hasn’t at least had practice repeating Words Deliritous Read to him; and (2) this is the far more interesting one, I think–Tax’s songs. Baz suggests that they’ve had some innate effect on him, they’ve helped him learn by listening to them over and over. Baz doesn’t say anything definitive here, but it seems perhaps there’s more to Tax’s songs than just passing the time.
Shadow
So Baz sneaks back into the camp, grabs a Book from Deliritous’s Bookpack… and he nearly drops it. Why? Because it’s that crazy Book of shadow spells Baz had scolded Deliritous for even picking up back in the Reading room. Now, we haven’t gotten too much into the five magical elements yet, but we do know there’s fire, earth, water, light, and shadow. And apparently shadow, as Baz tells us, isn’t very well understood and dangerous even to adept Readers.
And we see a couple things suggesting that belief is right. First, as Baz nears completion of the spell, he starts hearing voices in his head, right? Terrible voices, imploring him to do awful things. You know that’s going to become relevant later, but there’s no time for Baz to dwell on it now.
Second, we see just how vicious the spell ends up being. It vaporizes Hellar’s Harbour.
And I guess there’s a third justification for shadow being little understood. When Deliritous makes up the story that it was a dragon, even though he saw it was Baz who Read the spell, Marla and Hellar don’t think to disbelieve him. That suggests whatever the spell was that Baz cast, it’s not one seen often, so Baz alleging it came from a dragon was plausible. And see, they call it a Shadow Breather? We heard reference to Fire Breathers earlier, so there are at least two types of different dragons. Perhaps there are more?
So Marla and Hellar run, leaving Deliritous with a broken leg and Rox trapped. Likely, they think they’re leaving him to die. Baz waits until he’s certain they’re gone, then goes to Deliritous. And what does he do?
He yells for Baz to stay away from him!
A cow chewing cud
Baz is initially incredulous–he just saved Deliritous and this is how he treats him? He actually hits Deliritous when he keeps going on about how Baz will have to be blinded now like his brother. But an interesting reversal of roles here, and it makes Baz sick.
Baz threatens to his Deliritous a second time and he cowers away. And what does he say? “I never hit you?”
Wow, I don’t know about you, but that’s powerful to me. Baz realizes that the instant he was given power like the Readers, he began using it to abuse Deliritous.
Gain an ounce of power and look what his first inclination had been–treat Deliritous just like most Readers treated their Speakers.
An interesting and I guess startling idea here–it’s not always easy to do the right thing when you’re the one in a superior position. Baz perhaps grasps in this moment that having power isn’t all it’s cracked up to be with the temptations it presents. That’s another theme we’ll see returned to again and again throughout the series. Power isn’t necessarily a good thing.
Baz realizes once he cools down that maybe his brother is right about Deliritous. He’s just a product of his environment, and you can’t entirely blame him for that. Baz notes that a lot of slaves in his position would just run, maybe even cut Deliritous’s throat. But doing that would be like “killing a cow for chewing cud. It’s just what they do.”
Baz also realizes that his only chance now of ever seeing his brother again is to work with Deliritous. He can’t go back to Erstwhile if he runs away–he needs Deliritous to get back. And so Baz comes up with a plan. What if he travels to Tome and finishes the Trials for Deliritous?
Duh duh duh! Oh, man! Ending on a cliffhanger this week.
Just a couple quick other things:
- When Deliritous is resisting admitting that Baz actually helped him out, Rox chimes in: “Truuuth.” Rox understands. They’d be dead without Baz.
- Deliritous notes he has nightmares about Tax. He does feel bad, even if Baz doesn’t want to hear it.
CONCLUSION
Homework: We’ll read Chapter 13 next week. Baz and Deliritous flesh out their plan. And we get to a town. And here in this town is a big moment. A reveal of epic proportions, very relevant to the podcast, particularly those who watch on YouTube. You can’t really miss it, but keep an eye out and jump out of your seat when it comes!
Listener Question:
Quest: Any thoughts on why shadow is dangerous? There has been a subtle hint somewhere in the Book. 3XP
Quote:
“Bran thought about it. ‘Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?’
‘That is the only time a man can be brave,’ his father told him.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Until next time, this has been D. T. Kane’s Epic Fantasy Book Club.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download