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queensthiefWe readers learned, at the end of Thick as Thieves (TaT), the real reason why Gen stole Kamet from Nahuseresh:
“It wasn’t spite or friendship,” I said, glancing sideways at the king…. This was why I had been brought from the Empire, and this was why the Namreen had hunted us so relentlessly. Not because Nahuseresh had been murdered, but because the emperor feared I could tell the king of Attolia where he was hiding his navy.” (TaT)
Just as, at the end of The King of Attolia (KoA) we found out the real reason why Gen decided to interfere with young Costis’s life. Not spite, and not black humor, as Costis had thought throughout the book. Policy.
“Sometimes, if you want to change a man’s mind, you change the mind of the man next to him first…. Archimedes said that if you gave him a lever long enough, he could move the world. I needed to move the Guard. I needed to move you [Teleus].” (KoA, p. 381)
Gen said this, so it must be true. Right? In the denouement, no less. It’s not like Gen ever is known to state untruths or partial truths, or Turner to mislead her readers.
I mean, Eugenides Attolis wouldn’t have set Costis aside from his fellows, forced him to learn the Mede language and to start thinking strategically, tutored him in Eddisian swordplay, ALSO because Attolis might already have been formulating a plan to steal Nahuseresh’s right hand and needed a suitable agent, right?
It was sheer coincidence that the grueling training Attolis put Costis through in the process of “changing his mind” left the young soldier uniquely qualified for a delicate mission in the Mede Empire.
It was random chance that of the hundreds of men “next to” (or more properly, under) Teleus, Attolis chose to “change the mind” of Costis: devotedly loyal once his loyalty was given, honorable, courageous—and also dogged, intelligent, and flexible enough to grow rather than break under Attolis’s unconventional training.
As, of course, it was just plain Gen’s good luck that Kamet was someone able to figure out where the Mede ships must be, though he’d never been told. Spite and friendship aside, what Attolis really stole Kamet for was the off-chance that his disgraced master was deeply enough involved in his brother’s plot that the slave might have been told that crucial detail. Gen had no other designs on Kamet’s knowledge and talents than obtaining that one solitary piece of information.
Uh-huh.
Folks, we’ve been had.
Gen’s revealed reasons for turning those two lives upside down may have been true as far as they went, but in both cases there’s more to the story.
And as always, Turner played fair; she explicitly told us everything we needed to know to understand [more of] the truth.
*
We first meet Costis in The King of Attolia, and learn about him from himself. Unlike Gen in The Thief, he’s not deliberately concealing information from us the readers. But that doesn’t mean his view of himself is reliable.
We readers see Costis throughout KoA from his own POV, starting when he’s at his nadir: he’s just destroyed his future, his life, maybe his entire family’s fortunes, through an inexcusable lapse of judgment and of self-control.
And Costis is off-balance for most of the rest of his book, being pushed into situations that are impossibly beyond what he knows how to handle. Promoted to a fake position. Forced to practice first position in swordplay, over and over. Having to partake of the King’s lessons in the Mede language. Not knowing even how to physically navigate through the palace (lower and younger guards, like he had been, are relegated to the periphery).
Spotting an assassination attempt as it’s happening and arriving too late to help the king.
So, we see him as he sees himself, perpetually feeling bumbling and stupid and clumsy.
One of the surprises and pleasures when we remeet Costis as Kamet’s Attolian is how bloody competent he proves to be.
But that shouldn’t have been a surprise, because we KNOW that Turner plays with POV to mess with her devoted readers.
Just think a moment.
What would Costis’s future have been, had he not caught the new King’s eye as a suitable lever and been provoked by Gen into throwing that fatal (to Costis’s former prospects) punch?
Or, rather, what would it have been, had the future continued predictably from the past with no intervention from the Thief in the affairs of Attolia?
What do we know about Costis’s life before Attolis ever entered and warped it?
Costis had already distinguished himself; young and hotheaded as he was, he’d been hand-picked for admission to the Queen’s Guard (a year younger than anyone else had ever been admitted) and, once in, had already so distinguished himself in action that he’d been promoted to squad leader over soldiers both older and more experienced than himself.
Costis denigrates himself, and Attolis humiliates him; but it’s observable that Aris and Costis’s other peers apparently regard Costis with marked respect. Throughout KoA, Costis makes excuses for this: men who’ve been soldiers for far longer than Costis has even been alive, the servants even, show Costis all the respect due to a senior commanding officer? Well, uh, that’s because behaving as though Costis merits the king’s fake promotion is the only way to thwart the king’s nefarious intention to humiliate the Guard by giving such a promotion to a nothing like himself.
Not because, in fact, Costis ACTS like a commanding officer when he finds he must. Where necessary, like a senior officer. Taking the responsibility that needs to be taken. Repeatedly. As most of his fellows could never have done.
Fake promotion? Right, Costis. Tell yourself that.
But indeed, we see clearly what the rest the Guard really thinks of Costis after the incident when Gen killed those assassins.
The Guards’ mistaken belief that Costis had done so and falsely given Attolis the credit could only have been possible if Costis’s fellow Guards had regarded him as competent enough to have defeated several assassins single-handed. As well as pigheadedly honorable enough to allow the slippery King to whom Costis owed his life to claim the credit if he chose. (Mind, the Guard would have wanted to believe that one of their own had saved the king rather that the king had saved himself, but—well, put it this way. Had Legarus been the first Guard on the scene, could the rumor have gotten started?)
So. Costis saw his own flaws, and (burningly!) every error he ever made due to his inexperience and his hotheadedness.
And we readers largely saw what Costis thought of himself.
What his peers saw, and his superiors, was apparently different.
What his peers apparently saw was someone like them except demonstrably better. Morally, for most of them—with a stronger sense of duty and honor—but also in terms of competence in the skills that matter to a soldier. And traits, not just learned skills: physical strength and agility, discipline (usually), courage, intelligence, stubbornness.
What his superior officers apparently saw was much the same, but for them that added up to: talent to be groomed. He’d already been recruited and promoted.
Surely, had Attolis never occurred, Costis was slated to move slowly but steadily up the ranks, gaining responsibility as he gained experience? Squad leader, then centurion, then lieutenant, then…?
Costis was not just some random “man next to Teleus,” whose mind Attolis could change as a lever to change Teleus’s. He was Teleus’s (very tentative) possible heir.
(If, of course, the Guard hadn’t been destroyed in the Attolian civil war, when Attolia’s desperate juggling of her many bad options finally failed.)
So. Costis was an unusually gifted young soldier, spotted as such by both his peers (Aris!) and his officers, and given the opportunity and training to become the kind of officer they needed.
And spotted by Eugenides Attolis, and given the opportunity and training to become the kind of tool HE needed.
Costis was always a remarkable young man; it’s just that we were mostly blinded to that fact by seeing him through his own eyes while he was undergoing Attolis’s grueling and unconventional and often humiliating training course.
So Costis was never actually stupid or negligible; it’s just that when we readers first meet him, we were strongly encouraged to see him as both those things. A bog-standard young Guard, hot-headed and thoroughly disgraced, as he saw himself.
And, again, we met Costis at his nadir, and then facing (and often failing) challenges far outside anything he’d previously been trained to surmount.
Rather than seeing him as, we are told, his peers and superiors saw him: someone on the fast track to success, with outsized abilities (and honor), handpicked by Teleus for training and promotion.
When we see finally Costis facing the kinds of challenges he HAS been trained for (by Eugenides, sneakily, at length, after Teleus had tried to make Costis a perfect Queen’s Guard), he responds superbly.
Or so seems to think Kamet, observing him.
As do we readers, reading Kamet’s account of Costis in action, instead of Costis’s jaundiced view of himself.
What a difference POV can make, even when the POV narrator makes no deliberate attempt to mislead….
*
Now let’s turn to Kamet.
Whom we also meet at a nadir in his life, when a misjudgment has cost him dearly, and whom we watch throughout his book struggling with challenges completely outside his previous experience. Off-balance. Pushed into situations that are impossibly beyond what he knows how to handle. (And successfully meeting all the challenges thrown at him, hmm?)
So, as with Costis, we see Kamet as he sees himself, perpetually feeling bumbling and stupid and clumsy and out of his depth.
If Gen hadn’t interfered in Kamet’s life, what would the slave’s future have been?
What future was Kamet looking forward to?
He was Nahuseresh’s secretary. When Nahuseresh’s brother ascended the throne, he expected to be given to said brother and to wield power as Naheeleed’s slave.
Personal slave, which is not the same as body-servant. Secretary, presumably, as he was for Naheeleed’s brother. Ho hum.
Wikipedia has an entry about a post, and title, used by the Sassanid Empire (the last Persian pre-Islamic Empire). There was a position designated by them “katib” (secretary) which is more familiar to us from the Anglicized version of the title used by the following Abbasid caliphate.
The Abbasid word for such a “secretary” was “wazir.”
Anglicized, that turned into the word “vizier.”
That’s right.
Kamet has been trained, since he was six or so, to become the next Mede Emperor’s Vizier.
(The current Vizier, the current emperor’s “secretary,” being slated for automatic execution when the emperor dies.)
Gen didn’t just steal Nahuseresh’s “right hand;” he stole (and suborned!) the carefully-groomed “secretary” who was to be gifted to the Mede Emperor’s Heir upon his ascension to the throne.
(And the current Emperor is mortally ill ….)
If Kamet is right in his own estimation of his value, then Eugenides stole, and caused to become loyal to Attolia, the man who might otherwise have been running the Mede Empire during its war against the Peninsula.
The emperor decides general policy. His secretary, his “personal slave,” is responsible for implementation.
If Kamet is truly as competent as he thinks he is, Gen has just struck a crippling blow against his enemy empire.
It’s comparable to, but worse than, Gen’s stealing Sounis’s Magus in QoA, because the emperor-to-be’s personal slave (vizier, katib, secretary) is expected to administer the day-to-day running of the Empire, not to be his master’s mere (sometimes disregarded) advisor. As Kamet has been running all his master’s personal estates and finances, while learning what he will need to know to run the Mede empire.
Well worth stealing even if he hasn’t been told a particular piece of information Gen needs.
And we readers missed all this (even though Kamet told us!) because, of course, Kamet is just a lowly slave, and estimates himself as such.
This analysis, of course, applies only if Kamet is right about his master’s intention to give him to his brother the Emperor-to-be, and right about what his authority would be. And right about how competent he is.
And whether Gen knew all this when he decided to steal him.
Which he did.
The Annux said to Kamet in the throne room, “I know you wanted your chance at the Emperor’s side, even if it meant you would die with him.”
So, Gen knew of Kamet’s ambitions and had made his own estimation of Kamet’s strengths and foibles. We can never know Gen’s mind (least of all if he tells it to us!), but we can judge Gen’s actions: and Gen chose to steal Kamet from the Medes.
And there are a number of reasons to think Kamet is nearly as smart as he thinks he is.
We readers met him, like we met Costis, at a nadir of his life; and we saw him, as we saw Costis in his book, unrelentingly pressed by challenges completely outside his previous experience, and feeling throughout the book humiliatingly unready to meet those new challenges.
Our very sympathy at their predicament led us to underestimate them both.
But within Kamet’s area of expertise? (Bearing in mind that the great failure of judgment which got him beaten so badly at the opening of the book was itself finally a clue, when Kamet finally came to consider it: he should have been right, unless there was some major factor that had been hidden from him.)
How smart is Kamet really, and how competent?
For years he has administered Nahuseresh’s estates and monies.
He rescued Nahuseresh from Attolia, and Nahuseresh refuses to be parted from him.
He survived the trip with Costis. And contributed materially to their joint survival.
He recognized instantly when the King of Attolia entered the throne room that he’d been entirely misprizing him all this time, that this was a man of power, based solely on the reactions of others. Which he was too nearsighted even to see clearly!
(This incident also shows that Kamet can instantly cast aside a long-cherished conviction when presented with evidence that overturns it.)
He figured out, correctly, where the ships must be, based solely on his understanding of how the Mede court works and Mede geography. When that knowledge had been specifically concealed from him, and possibly even from his master.
He figured out almost immediately that neither spite nor friendship could account for Gen’s decision to steal him from Nahuseresh.
And he was stuffed full of intimate inside knowledge of how the Mede Empire and Court worked, Mede geography and politics, which he passed on in full to Attolis’s intelligencers….
*
So, yeah. Kamet was well worth stealing even though, as it transpired, he’d never been explicitly told where the Emperor’s war fleet was anchored. That Kamet could figure out that information despite its having been kept secret even from him just demonstrates how valuable an asset he’d have been to Emperor Naheeleed. Particularly since, if Vizier Kamet had ever found out that the King of Attolia was that sandal-polisher he’d once befriended, he might have had a privileged insight into how the enemy’s mind operated. (Not that that helped the Magus much in QoA…. but it is true that one of Gen’s standard cons is to induce people to underestimate him, and then take advantage of their misappraisal. And it works less well with people who’d dealt with him before.)
Indeed, notice that in KoA, Gen arranged for Costis to start learning Mede well before Relius’s Mede spies were returned to Attolia with the news about the armies massing and the hidden navy. So, Gen’s plans to steal Kamet probably pre-date his need to find out where the navy is being hidden.
Kamet is smart, and competent, and now allied with Attolis.
And, um. Okay, I’m going out on a limb here.
But. Our Gen’s such a sweet guy, isn’t he, sending Costis and Kamet (OTP!) off together to copy scrolls and incidentally do a little spying for Attolia….
At a port located just outside the Mede empire, if I remember the maps.
Erm. A man who spent his life being groomed as the next administrator of the Mede Empire before his life was wrenched off course by The Thief. Guarded by a man who’d once been in training to become the head of a Sovereign’s Guard, and has since had his training expanded.
Both of them fiercely, personally, indebted to and loyal to Attolis.
I would hate to be all nasty and suspicious. But if Gen ever decides that the best defense is a good offense, and that he can best protect the Peninsula from being invaded by the Medes by staging a Medean coup, he’s got the pair nicely positioned, doesn’t he?
“It wasn’t spite or friendship,” I said, glancing sideways at the king…. This was why I had been brought from the Empire, and this was why the Namreen had hunted us so relentlessly. Not because Nahuseresh had been murdered, but because the emperor feared I could tell the king of Attolia where he was hiding his navy.” (TaT)
Just as, at the end of The King of Attolia (KoA) we found out the real reason why Gen decided to interfere with young Costis’s life. Not spite, and not black humor, as Costis had thought throughout the book. Policy.
“Sometimes, if you want to change a man’s mind, you change the mind of the man next to him first…. Archimedes said that if you gave him a lever long enough, he could move the world. I needed to move the Guard. I needed to move you [Teleus].” (KoA, p. 381)
Gen said this, so it must be true. Right? In the denouement, no less. It’s not like Gen ever is known to state untruths or partial truths, or Turner to mislead her readers.
I mean, Eugenides Attolis wouldn’t have set Costis aside from his fellows, forced him to learn the Mede language and to start thinking strategically, tutored him in Eddisian swordplay, ALSO because Attolis might already have been formulating a plan to steal Nahuseresh’s right hand and needed a suitable agent, right?
It was sheer coincidence that the grueling training Attolis put Costis through in the process of “changing his mind” left the young soldier uniquely qualified for a delicate mission in the Mede Empire.
It was random chance that of the hundreds of men “next to” (or more properly, under) Teleus, Attolis chose to “change the mind” of Costis: devotedly loyal once his loyalty was given, honorable, courageous—and also dogged, intelligent, and flexible enough to grow rather than break under Attolis’s unconventional training.
As, of course, it was just plain Gen’s good luck that Kamet was someone able to figure out where the Mede ships must be, though he’d never been told. Spite and friendship aside, what Attolis really stole Kamet for was the off-chance that his disgraced master was deeply enough involved in his brother’s plot that the slave might have been told that crucial detail. Gen had no other designs on Kamet’s knowledge and talents than obtaining that one solitary piece of information.
Uh-huh.
Folks, we’ve been had.
Gen’s revealed reasons for turning those two lives upside down may have been true as far as they went, but in both cases there’s more to the story.
And as always, Turner played fair; she explicitly told us everything we needed to know to understand [more of] the truth.
*
We first meet Costis in The King of Attolia, and learn about him from himself. Unlike Gen in The Thief, he’s not deliberately concealing information from us the readers. But that doesn’t mean his view of himself is reliable.
We readers see Costis throughout KoA from his own POV, starting when he’s at his nadir: he’s just destroyed his future, his life, maybe his entire family’s fortunes, through an inexcusable lapse of judgment and of self-control.
And Costis is off-balance for most of the rest of his book, being pushed into situations that are impossibly beyond what he knows how to handle. Promoted to a fake position. Forced to practice first position in swordplay, over and over. Having to partake of the King’s lessons in the Mede language. Not knowing even how to physically navigate through the palace (lower and younger guards, like he had been, are relegated to the periphery).
Spotting an assassination attempt as it’s happening and arriving too late to help the king.
So, we see him as he sees himself, perpetually feeling bumbling and stupid and clumsy.
One of the surprises and pleasures when we remeet Costis as Kamet’s Attolian is how bloody competent he proves to be.
But that shouldn’t have been a surprise, because we KNOW that Turner plays with POV to mess with her devoted readers.
Just think a moment.
What would Costis’s future have been, had he not caught the new King’s eye as a suitable lever and been provoked by Gen into throwing that fatal (to Costis’s former prospects) punch?
Or, rather, what would it have been, had the future continued predictably from the past with no intervention from the Thief in the affairs of Attolia?
What do we know about Costis’s life before Attolis ever entered and warped it?
Costis had already distinguished himself; young and hotheaded as he was, he’d been hand-picked for admission to the Queen’s Guard (a year younger than anyone else had ever been admitted) and, once in, had already so distinguished himself in action that he’d been promoted to squad leader over soldiers both older and more experienced than himself.
Costis denigrates himself, and Attolis humiliates him; but it’s observable that Aris and Costis’s other peers apparently regard Costis with marked respect. Throughout KoA, Costis makes excuses for this: men who’ve been soldiers for far longer than Costis has even been alive, the servants even, show Costis all the respect due to a senior commanding officer? Well, uh, that’s because behaving as though Costis merits the king’s fake promotion is the only way to thwart the king’s nefarious intention to humiliate the Guard by giving such a promotion to a nothing like himself.
Not because, in fact, Costis ACTS like a commanding officer when he finds he must. Where necessary, like a senior officer. Taking the responsibility that needs to be taken. Repeatedly. As most of his fellows could never have done.
Fake promotion? Right, Costis. Tell yourself that.
But indeed, we see clearly what the rest the Guard really thinks of Costis after the incident when Gen killed those assassins.
The Guards’ mistaken belief that Costis had done so and falsely given Attolis the credit could only have been possible if Costis’s fellow Guards had regarded him as competent enough to have defeated several assassins single-handed. As well as pigheadedly honorable enough to allow the slippery King to whom Costis owed his life to claim the credit if he chose. (Mind, the Guard would have wanted to believe that one of their own had saved the king rather that the king had saved himself, but—well, put it this way. Had Legarus been the first Guard on the scene, could the rumor have gotten started?)
So. Costis saw his own flaws, and (burningly!) every error he ever made due to his inexperience and his hotheadedness.
And we readers largely saw what Costis thought of himself.
What his peers saw, and his superiors, was apparently different.
What his peers apparently saw was someone like them except demonstrably better. Morally, for most of them—with a stronger sense of duty and honor—but also in terms of competence in the skills that matter to a soldier. And traits, not just learned skills: physical strength and agility, discipline (usually), courage, intelligence, stubbornness.
What his superior officers apparently saw was much the same, but for them that added up to: talent to be groomed. He’d already been recruited and promoted.
Surely, had Attolis never occurred, Costis was slated to move slowly but steadily up the ranks, gaining responsibility as he gained experience? Squad leader, then centurion, then lieutenant, then…?
Costis was not just some random “man next to Teleus,” whose mind Attolis could change as a lever to change Teleus’s. He was Teleus’s (very tentative) possible heir.
(If, of course, the Guard hadn’t been destroyed in the Attolian civil war, when Attolia’s desperate juggling of her many bad options finally failed.)
So. Costis was an unusually gifted young soldier, spotted as such by both his peers (Aris!) and his officers, and given the opportunity and training to become the kind of officer they needed.
And spotted by Eugenides Attolis, and given the opportunity and training to become the kind of tool HE needed.
Costis was always a remarkable young man; it’s just that we were mostly blinded to that fact by seeing him through his own eyes while he was undergoing Attolis’s grueling and unconventional and often humiliating training course.
So Costis was never actually stupid or negligible; it’s just that when we readers first meet him, we were strongly encouraged to see him as both those things. A bog-standard young Guard, hot-headed and thoroughly disgraced, as he saw himself.
And, again, we met Costis at his nadir, and then facing (and often failing) challenges far outside anything he’d previously been trained to surmount.
Rather than seeing him as, we are told, his peers and superiors saw him: someone on the fast track to success, with outsized abilities (and honor), handpicked by Teleus for training and promotion.
When we see finally Costis facing the kinds of challenges he HAS been trained for (by Eugenides, sneakily, at length, after Teleus had tried to make Costis a perfect Queen’s Guard), he responds superbly.
Or so seems to think Kamet, observing him.
As do we readers, reading Kamet’s account of Costis in action, instead of Costis’s jaundiced view of himself.
What a difference POV can make, even when the POV narrator makes no deliberate attempt to mislead….
*
Now let’s turn to Kamet.
Whom we also meet at a nadir in his life, when a misjudgment has cost him dearly, and whom we watch throughout his book struggling with challenges completely outside his previous experience. Off-balance. Pushed into situations that are impossibly beyond what he knows how to handle. (And successfully meeting all the challenges thrown at him, hmm?)
So, as with Costis, we see Kamet as he sees himself, perpetually feeling bumbling and stupid and clumsy and out of his depth.
If Gen hadn’t interfered in Kamet’s life, what would the slave’s future have been?
What future was Kamet looking forward to?
He was Nahuseresh’s secretary. When Nahuseresh’s brother ascended the throne, he expected to be given to said brother and to wield power as Naheeleed’s slave.
Personal slave, which is not the same as body-servant. Secretary, presumably, as he was for Naheeleed’s brother. Ho hum.
Wikipedia has an entry about a post, and title, used by the Sassanid Empire (the last Persian pre-Islamic Empire). There was a position designated by them “katib” (secretary) which is more familiar to us from the Anglicized version of the title used by the following Abbasid caliphate.
The Abbasid word for such a “secretary” was “wazir.”
Anglicized, that turned into the word “vizier.”
That’s right.
Kamet has been trained, since he was six or so, to become the next Mede Emperor’s Vizier.
(The current Vizier, the current emperor’s “secretary,” being slated for automatic execution when the emperor dies.)
Gen didn’t just steal Nahuseresh’s “right hand;” he stole (and suborned!) the carefully-groomed “secretary” who was to be gifted to the Mede Emperor’s Heir upon his ascension to the throne.
(And the current Emperor is mortally ill ….)
If Kamet is right in his own estimation of his value, then Eugenides stole, and caused to become loyal to Attolia, the man who might otherwise have been running the Mede Empire during its war against the Peninsula.
The emperor decides general policy. His secretary, his “personal slave,” is responsible for implementation.
If Kamet is truly as competent as he thinks he is, Gen has just struck a crippling blow against his enemy empire.
It’s comparable to, but worse than, Gen’s stealing Sounis’s Magus in QoA, because the emperor-to-be’s personal slave (vizier, katib, secretary) is expected to administer the day-to-day running of the Empire, not to be his master’s mere (sometimes disregarded) advisor. As Kamet has been running all his master’s personal estates and finances, while learning what he will need to know to run the Mede empire.
Well worth stealing even if he hasn’t been told a particular piece of information Gen needs.
And we readers missed all this (even though Kamet told us!) because, of course, Kamet is just a lowly slave, and estimates himself as such.
This analysis, of course, applies only if Kamet is right about his master’s intention to give him to his brother the Emperor-to-be, and right about what his authority would be. And right about how competent he is.
And whether Gen knew all this when he decided to steal him.
Which he did.
The Annux said to Kamet in the throne room, “I know you wanted your chance at the Emperor’s side, even if it meant you would die with him.”
So, Gen knew of Kamet’s ambitions and had made his own estimation of Kamet’s strengths and foibles. We can never know Gen’s mind (least of all if he tells it to us!), but we can judge Gen’s actions: and Gen chose to steal Kamet from the Medes.
And there are a number of reasons to think Kamet is nearly as smart as he thinks he is.
We readers met him, like we met Costis, at a nadir of his life; and we saw him, as we saw Costis in his book, unrelentingly pressed by challenges completely outside his previous experience, and feeling throughout the book humiliatingly unready to meet those new challenges.
Our very sympathy at their predicament led us to underestimate them both.
But within Kamet’s area of expertise? (Bearing in mind that the great failure of judgment which got him beaten so badly at the opening of the book was itself finally a clue, when Kamet finally came to consider it: he should have been right, unless there was some major factor that had been hidden from him.)
How smart is Kamet really, and how competent?
For years he has administered Nahuseresh’s estates and monies.
He rescued Nahuseresh from Attolia, and Nahuseresh refuses to be parted from him.
He survived the trip with Costis. And contributed materially to their joint survival.
He recognized instantly when the King of Attolia entered the throne room that he’d been entirely misprizing him all this time, that this was a man of power, based solely on the reactions of others. Which he was too nearsighted even to see clearly!
(This incident also shows that Kamet can instantly cast aside a long-cherished conviction when presented with evidence that overturns it.)
He figured out, correctly, where the ships must be, based solely on his understanding of how the Mede court works and Mede geography. When that knowledge had been specifically concealed from him, and possibly even from his master.
He figured out almost immediately that neither spite nor friendship could account for Gen’s decision to steal him from Nahuseresh.
And he was stuffed full of intimate inside knowledge of how the Mede Empire and Court worked, Mede geography and politics, which he passed on in full to Attolis’s intelligencers….
*
So, yeah. Kamet was well worth stealing even though, as it transpired, he’d never been explicitly told where the Emperor’s war fleet was anchored. That Kamet could figure out that information despite its having been kept secret even from him just demonstrates how valuable an asset he’d have been to Emperor Naheeleed. Particularly since, if Vizier Kamet had ever found out that the King of Attolia was that sandal-polisher he’d once befriended, he might have had a privileged insight into how the enemy’s mind operated. (Not that that helped the Magus much in QoA…. but it is true that one of Gen’s standard cons is to induce people to underestimate him, and then take advantage of their misappraisal. And it works less well with people who’d dealt with him before.)
Indeed, notice that in KoA, Gen arranged for Costis to start learning Mede well before Relius’s Mede spies were returned to Attolia with the news about the armies massing and the hidden navy. So, Gen’s plans to steal Kamet probably pre-date his need to find out where the navy is being hidden.
Kamet is smart, and competent, and now allied with Attolis.
And, um. Okay, I’m going out on a limb here.
But. Our Gen’s such a sweet guy, isn’t he, sending Costis and Kamet (OTP!) off together to copy scrolls and incidentally do a little spying for Attolia….
At a port located just outside the Mede empire, if I remember the maps.
Erm. A man who spent his life being groomed as the next administrator of the Mede Empire before his life was wrenched off course by The Thief. Guarded by a man who’d once been in training to become the head of a Sovereign’s Guard, and has since had his training expanded.
Both of them fiercely, personally, indebted to and loyal to Attolis.
I would hate to be all nasty and suspicious. But if Gen ever decides that the best defense is a good offense, and that he can best protect the Peninsula from being invaded by the Medes by staging a Medean coup, he’s got the pair nicely positioned, doesn’t he?
