Welcome back to my re-read, recap, and reaction to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. This post will only have spoilers through the current chapter.
You can find my previous chapter recaps HERE.
Chapter 6: Threads Woven of Shadow
NOTE: The following chapter summary comes from wot.fandom.com
Point of view: Sammael
Setting: Arad DomanSammael is plotting to become Nae’blis, just as much as the other Forsaken must be. He is meeting Graendal at her palace in Arad Doman. Graendal enjoys subtly baiting Sammael as they debate what to do since Rand has killed off so many of the Forsaken. Moghedien, Lanfear, and Asmodean are still missing. Semirhage missed the last meeting with Graendal.
Point of view: Graendal
Setting: Arad DomanGraendal believes Rand is too dangerous to be allowed to live, but the Great Lord has forbidden direction action for now. She worries that the Great Lord wants Rand to be Nae’blis. She plans to trick Sammael into killing Rand, since Sammael will be able to call it self defense when Rand attacks Illian.
Rodel Ituralde arrives for an audience, so Graendal switches to her guise as Lady Basene.
Point of view: Semirhage
Setting: Shayol GhulSemirhage has been ordered by the Great Lord to extract information from an Aes Sedai. She is the very best at extracting information. During the Age of Legends she was a renowned Healer, but she always enjoyed inflicting pain along with the Healing, for which she was disciplined. This eventually led her to become one of the Forsaken. After stimulating the pain centers in Cabriana Mecandes, she begins the interrogation. After leaving Cabriana, Semirhage beings interrogating Cabriana’s warder in another room using pleasure instead of pain. She fails to pay attention and the warder dies of pleasure―he has also bitten off his tongue in a vain attempt to distract himself from the pleasure. When Semirhage goes back into the room with Cabriana, Cabriana seems much more pliable (due to bonding).
REACTION:
I really enjoyed Sammael’s thoughts on Graendal and a little of their shared backstory. She was his go-between when he joined the Shadow initially. He gives a lot of insight on her and through him we learn that she is the psychology genius from among the Forsaken.
Their interaction was particularly entertaining because while he thinks he understands her so well, he completely misses that she was subtly telling him something about the lands beyond the Aiel Waste and which of them might be in charge there. He interprets what she told him as a diversion, instead. She even brings it up more than once and he brushes it aside each time. We see through this interaction that he’s relatively single-minded. It’s hard to view him as a tactical genius – his Age of Legends reputation – if he isn’t equally brilliant reading this type of stuff. If Sammael is the next big fight for Rand, this doesn’t feel to me as though he’s being built-up as a credible threat. The whole first half of this chapter is her stating the obvious of how successful Rand has been against them, and Sammael in some denial of that fact. We’re in his POV, too, so we have good reason to believe he’s not feigning that denial.
To the extent Sammael’s plan has been hard to figure, it seems his goal is the same as Rand’s. He wants to unite the world under his banner prior to the Last Battle. He’s starting in the main part of Randland because that’s where he believes the Great Lord’s touch will land first. This is why he’s building a nation and an army, not simply trying to fight Rand and kill him. The nation-building is part of the competition to be named Nae’blis.
We see in the Sammael POV that the Forsaken are all competing to be named Nae’blis (the CEO of the Shadow, essentially). This competition seems to have heated up after Ishamael died, which kind of tells you who the big bad boss really was/is. [If Aginor and Belthamel can return, Ishy will return, too… be ready.]
Graendal trying to help Sammael is just practicality. We see in her POV that Demandred, Semirhage, and Mesaana are allied and if Sammy dies, she’s even more exposed to an attack from her allies. She needs Shadow alies.
The Semirhage POV is mostly designed to let us know that more so than any of the other Forsaken, she’s a straight-up sociopathic monster. We haven’t really met any of them like her, yet. She likes hurting and torturing people and playing with them while she hurts them. She’s presented as a kind of an anti-Nynaeve. She’s an unemotional genius of healing and how the body works more generally, who prefers hurting people. She’s also still fixated on when the Age of Legends authorities made her stop hurting people, too.
On the whole, this chapter is a bit Prologue-ish, jumping around from non-traditional POV, to non-traditional POV. I think Jordan really needed to remind the readers of the “new” bad guys that Rand is up against now that the two primary baddies from the first five books are gone. We don’t actually learn a lot of plot substance, but we get to know the characters involved a little better.
Would it be better to fall into Graendal’s hands and completely lose your own agency (but retain your health) or to fall into Semirhage’s hands, be tortured by the most sociopathic torturer of all time, and either die or lose your agency via torture? Graendal is probably the better of those two horrible options. Semirhage is a human a’dam.
So we still have some serious baddies to deal with going forward.
2 thoughts on “Lord of Chaos (Chapter 6): Threads Woven of Shadow”