Read the previous entry in the series here.
Read the next entry in the series soon.

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An excerpt from another dream journal precedes “A Way In,” which begins with Fitz and his companions waiting for Motley to return. They confer and watch the dwindling crowd uncertainly, marking the gossip they can make out. Perseverance sees Motley return, and the group hastens to take the bird back in. Fitz reaches for Motley through the Wit and is rebuked, but he receives Bee’s message and begins to formulate a plan.

Fitz and his companions begin to enact Fitz’s plan, reducing their carried burdens as they prepare to infiltrate Clerres via its sewage outlet. Under cover of darkness, they proceed, going quickly to the water and slowly thought it. Fitz offers yet one more chance for his companions to turn aside and is once again refused. They proceed up Clerres’s waste-release into the depths of its fortress, finding a body, a guard who soon becomes nothing more than another body, and the Fool, beaten and showing no signs of life.

The present chapter makes the note that Fitz “looked out at the sea and thought of El, the harsh god of those waters. I had seldom prayed, but that night I offered El both my prayers that he would spare those who accompanied me, and curses for him if he took them from me” (588). Veneration of El in the Six Duchies has been mentioned before, as might be expected, and I comment on it here and elsewhere. The comments made about said veneration earlier in the Realm of the Elderlings novels depict overt prayer to El as a dangerous thing to undertake; that Fitz does so here seems a combination of his desperation and yet more of the foreshadowing of which the Realm of the Elderlings novels make much. Given the looming end of the novel, and from the vantage of rereading, I think it both.

I’ll note in the present chapter also a crass joke at work: Fitz and his companions are going up Clerres’s ass to wreck the place. That they come in by way of an emptying sewer, one described more than once earlier in the series as discharging from a chamber that fills during the day and is evacuated at intervals by receding water, makes the jape clear; Clerres, something of a porcelain throne, acts as if it fills and flushes a toilet, voiding itself. And, well, if there is still medievalism at work in the Realm of the Elderlings at this point, a story of Edmund Ironside comes to mind as a possible reference, here. (For more of a stretch on that point, so does a similar story about Uesugi Kenshin.) Yes, it’s scatological. Yes, it’s puerile. Yes, it’s scurrilous. But none of that means it isn’t there, and none of that means the work cannot be of quality; even Shakespeare makes such jokes, after all, and Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale is little but such a joke. I think Hobb can get away with it once or twice if such company can.

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