Literature / Tortall: A Spy's Guide

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Tortall: A Spy's Guide, published 2017, is a collection of Fictional Documents from the Tortall Universe. George Cooper, Baron of Pirate's Swoop, has found himself needing to clean out a room next to his office because Alanna, to her surprise, got pregnant again, despite being in late middle age. As the newly-retired King's Champion returns home, George finds many interesting documents while sorting through the contents of the room...

Tropes:

• A Day in the Limelight: There are several minor such 'days' for characters who were mentioned or barely appeared in other books.
  • Evin Larse is here revealed to be associated with the Shadow Service since before Wild Magic, and ends up in a very prominent position as "John Juggler". Many documents in the book are authored by him.
  • In Protector of the Small, Wyldon suggests that the Crown pick Padraig haMinch to be the replacement training master as he's a conservative from an old ducal family. This book has a profile of the man and while he certainly is from an old family and has a solid military record, "conservative" isn't really the right term. Padraig married a Bazhir woman and was heavily involved with her tribe until her death, and the deaths of their children, in a disease outbreak. In the capital he turns down attempts to recruit him for political causes of any kind and does not socialize much with the traditionalists - his friends are mainly Bazhir and Yamani, including the delegation that came to Tortall with Princess Shinkokami.
  • One of the documents is a guide Kel's mother Illane of Mindelan has written for Princess Shinkokami about adjusting to Tortall as quite a different place from the Yamani Islands, suggesting quite a bit about both of their personalities and tendencies that isn't clearly evident previously.
• Always Chaotic Evil: In the section on Immortals, Daine gives a rundown on some of the common types and a few are this. Hurrocks and minotaurs especially. She also notes that she's heard baby Spidrens have to be taught to be cruel but she doesn't really believe it.
• Always Someone Better: During Lioness Rampant an agent going by Harvest Spider was in Sarain and investigating Thayet and Buri's background when they uncovered a Saranese plot to assassinate them. Implicitly this is the incident in which the two were attacked and Alanna and Liam killed the assassins. Spider went on to dispose of the person who'd sent the assassins. They were quite sure that they'd covered their tracks entirely... until they found a letter left in their pack by an agent of the native K'miri, making it very clear that all of their activities have been marked. Fortunately for Spider, the K'miri hold Thayet and Buri in highest regard and wish them every happiness as they go on to Tortall, far away from the coming uprising.
• And the Adventure Continues: In a general sense. This is the latest-set entry in the Tortall setting, and it's unlikely that stories set after it will be published. The introduction and the papers at the end suggest a lot though. Alanna retires as King's Champion mentioning with resignation that her successor will be a man since Kel won't do it and the "more recent girls" aren't knights yet. She's coming home for Babies Ever After and wanting to stay home to help more with this one, though George suspects she won't stay all the time and will want to travel again. At the end of the book is an exchange (six years old at that point) regarding a flyer disseminated by Gallan spies trying to incite Tortallans to rise against the "foreign-born" who've been integrating into the kingdom. This attempt seems to have failed catastrophically as onlookers literally stoned one of these agents to death and the king and queen sent a formal letter to the Gallan king threatening financial consequences if things aren't settled.
• Beneath Notice: A Handbook for a Young Spy contains advice on using the guises of a servant, a beggar and a slave, since they're supposed to go unnoticed and/or be thought stupid.
• Benevolent Boss: Several pages from the diary of the head cook at the Palace are reproduced as part of a report by one of his undercooks. The man is fussy and high-strung but has been tremendously kind to the undercook and his other employees, and the undercook does not believe he could possibly be anyone's spy plus feels low for being made to investigate him.
• Bird-Poop Gag: While talking about winged apes, Daine mentions that sometimes they roost on roofs and that if someone finds "big splats" around a castle they should look into this.
• The Bus Came Back: A number of characters who didn't make it into Character Overlap between parts of the series appear in the documents, with some of them turning out to be working for the Tortallan Shadow Service. Notable examples include Kourrem Hariq and Corram from Song of the Lioness.
• Classified Information: Many documents within the book are marked as such and carry threats of imprisonment or death for anyone sharing the information within. Naturally since they're all from George's office and he's spymaster, he's got clearance.
• Code Name: Every Tortallan spy and spy-adjacent character has at least one and there's a convenient organizational chart early in the book. Baron Myles, as Chancellor of Information, is "Father". George as Deputy Chancellor of Operations is "The Whisper Man". Below them are Chief Falconer "John Juggler" (Evin Larse), Chief Harvester "Stabler" (Stefan Groomsman), Chief of Nursemaids "Scarlet" (Rebekah Lofts), and Chief of Hostlers "Hurrock" (Ahmet Kemail). Uline of Hannalof is "Capriole". At twelve Aly was "Birdsong".
• Company Cross-References: In the notes Neal takes while serving as Alanna's squire he spends some time on the use of threads and knots in magic and asks her if there's rope or fishing net magic, or magic using thread made into a net. Neal vaguely recalls reading something related at the university. Magic in thread, and in nets, is a significant part of Circle of Magic.
• Continuity Nod: Plenty. Most every document in the book is connected to some event from one of the various subseries.
  • For instance, Evin Larse alerted the Crown to Lord Sinthya's treasonous plots, and the Workbook for a Young Spy that George wrote for Aly quoted in Trickster's Choice is seen in its entirety.
  • Although the Provost's Guard is no longer called the Dogs, their name for the Good Cop/Bad Cop routine is "Good Dog/Bad Dog".
  • Aly's use of a Liar's Palace on Topabaw is mentioned in a draft of a Shadow Service training handbook.
  • Lord Wyldon of Cavall agreed to become the pages' training master, as he was in Protector of the Small, partly so that he could be in a position of power to try to revoke Jonathan's proclamation that women could be knights. This also calls back to Pierce's original plans for Wyldon, in which he'd cause a lot more trouble for the heroes in the name of traditional values. In this, rather than lead an uprising he's content to pursue legal avenues.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: In the section about killing devices there's an account of a thirteen-person squad that included a mage encountering one and being completely unable to stop it. All but four died and those survivors have career-ending injuries - and the device went on to slaughter most of the population of a village.
• Diplomatic Cover Spy: Many Harvesters are diplomats or diplomatic staff.
• Ear Ache: George, re-using one of his favoured tactics from his time as the Rogue, sent the King of Tusaine a boxful of the ears of his spies after an operation launched by the king's spymaster that led to the deaths of a dozen people and the burning of three city blocks in the Mire.
• Fantastic Contraception: Daine mentions that the Immortals called winged apes have very little magic and that it does include the ability to control if and when they get pregnant, which is useful since they mate for life but "canoodle" a lot before considering themselves mated.
• Fantastic Slur: Merfolk call whales "sea slugs". They don't get on in general. Daine points out that some whales and merfolk are close friends but they're each in for mockery from their own kind for it.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Merfolk and whales dislike each other. Daine, not over the whales in Wild Magic being able to refuse her request to kill and die for her, thinks merfolk have the right of it.
  • A centaur herdsman sends the Crown a complaint - if the centaurs are Tortallan subjects, they should have representation in politics and noblemen who try to hunt them should face the consequences they would be in for if they hunted humans. If the centaurs aren't, then they don't have any obligation to defend neighbors from bandits or refrain from murdering the hunters. Taking that to heart, Thayet makes inroads into getting representatives for centaurs, ogres, and merfolk - but not Stormwings.
• Fate Worse than Death: There used to be spells to trap baby griffins in "undeath", where a fledged baby griffin would be sunk partially into a shield, not living or dead, with no way to bring them back. It goes a long way towards explaining why griffins are so incredibly protective of their children.
• Feed the Mole: Several documents discuss Kuni Yoro, a servant who came to Tortall with Princess Shinkokami and appears to be the Yamani equivalent of a "Sparrow", a spy who talks to a lot of people and gathers more or less publicly available information. The Tortallans, who put agents into friendly countries themselves, decide to watch her and put pretty Sparrow women her own age in her vicinity to try to find out more about Imperial spies and try to control what she learns.
• Feeling Their Age: One of the reasons Alanna intends to retire as King's Champion, as she's in her late forties and has been fighting since she was a teenager. Queen Thayet's noticed and has also been suggesting she retire.
• Fictional Document: Presented as a collection of documents George found while he was cleaning out a room at Pirate's Swoop. This is specifically said to be the contents of a single crate, with notes in a few places that the rest of a document is likely in a different crate. They are not in a linear order.
• Fierce Unicorn: Non-killer unicorns are quite fierce and may gore and trample people they think are threats, but they love and protect children, who are sometimes used as virgins are in some media as bait to hunt them - and the children used as bait usually try to protect them from the hunters. Even killer unicorns, while they don't protect children, won't harm them and prefer to leave the area.
• Framing Device: George rediscovered the documents while cleaning out a room at Pirate's Swoop, after Alanna had an announcement...
• Friend to All Children: Three Immortals listed have this tendency - unicorns, merfolk, and Stormwings. Unicorn magic is such that children used as unicorn bait often defend the creatures. Merfolk are vengeful towards those who have angered them but won't hurt children and refuse to sink a target's ship if children are aboard. Stormwings, as has come up earlier in the series, will rescue children from riots. A letter from Corram describes his first encounter with Stormwings - they landed in a tower in Fief Trebond and chatted with his children, who thought they'd get cold and tried to bring them clothing, then waved and called for them to come back as he approached and the Stormwings flew away.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: The Provost's Guard calls this "Good Dog/Bad Dog", but the spy writing about it doesn't know why.
• Good Parents: When young Alan sends a letter to Lord Imrah asking to enter his service as a page, George's agents intercept it along the way and bring it to George's attention. Alan hadn't brought this concern (wanting to become a knight, not wanting to train under Wyldon who hates Alanna) or his plan to his parents ahead of time. George allows the letter to go to Lord Imrah, though he and Imrah and Alanna all correspond furiously about the matter around Imrah and Alan's more straightforwards messages.
• The Handler: Known as "Nursemaids" in the Shadow Service.
• Hard Truth Aesop: At the end of Mastiff, after Prince Gareth was rescued his parents pushed the legislature through to end slavery in Tortall. Beka immediately worried about knock-on effects of this, knowing what a big industry slavery was. The timeline in this book shows that after the pronouncement came a thirty year era of civil wars in Tortall as a great number of people rebelled rather than free their slaves and start paying them. The era only ended when Gareth, then King and about thirty, started executing the heads of rebellious noble houses and keeping the families of their replacements at court, harsh measures that Alanna feels were wrong. It's true what Jonathan told Kel in Squire - the Crown has to take into account how the rest of the country will react if it wants to make necessary changes.
• Harping on About Harpies: Most of the information written about Stormwings isn't new, but Daine does say that any shed Stormwing feather can be used to transform a human permanently into another Stormwing. (When it happened to Ozorne in Emperor Mage, the feather might have been a 'gift' from the Graveyard Hag) Considering that stormwing feathers are collected and used to make Mage Killer arrows, this certainly suggests Ozorne's not the only one to end up clad in steel feathers since the Divine Realms were breached.
• Humans Are Bastards: Humans can be as repulsive to Stormwings as Stormwings usually are to humans. Stormwings sometimes fight and kill each other and of course are drawn to human battlefields but despite thriving on war, due to being created by a traveler who found that War Is Hell they really don't like the scale at which humans kill each other.
• Immortal Procreation Clause: Most Immortals, Daine notes, reproduce quite slowly and generally with difficulty, and as a result tend to feel kindly towards human children. The exception is spidrens, who live in sometimes large family groups that have thirty or more eggs at a time. At least spidrens, while fast and dangerous, also don't have the same toughness and defensive abilities as many other Immortals.
• Jerkass Gods: Gods in this setting can be very touchy and reactive. It's advised that spies not carry magic items around day to day unless that item is a token given to them by a god. Mages will be able to sense the token but it's to be hoped the god will interfere enough to keep them from tracking down their favored spy. Leaving the token behind is out of the question, and dressing in the clothing of dedicates to a god is potentially quite dangerous. The major exception is the god of beggars who will allow spies to disguise themselves as beggars, so long as any money they acquire while in such a guise is given to actual beggars, the god's worshipers. Weaker gods tend to be less on the jerkass side and a god of beggars is probably not very powerful.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: In his advice to Aly George emphasizes again and again that a spy is not a fighter, detailing a number of things she could do if cornered and ending each by telling her to RUN. Her first duty is to escape.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: It's emphasized that most spywork is boring. Trainee spies or "Nurselings" who yearn for adventure and dramatic skullduggery are watched. If they don't calm down they're evaluated for whether they're suitable to that rare, more exciting form of spycraft - if not, they'll be happy to become Queen's Riders and live exciting lives that require more thought and planning than a rank and file soldier would need, but not a spy's degree of control and subterfuge. But first they have to take a potion or have a spell put on them that removes all memory of their spy training and the people they met while doing it.
• Last-Second Word Swap: Aly's written a report of the mission she went on with George and is trying to sound professional, but she's twelve at the time and very bad at obfuscation, tending to start referring to George as her father and scratching that out to write "the Whisper Man".
• Low-Literacy Setting: A pamphlet set many years into Thayet's queenship mentions that her reforms and public schools have majorly raised the literacy rates across the country. Among the noble class, ninety five percent are literate. Among the merchant class, ninety eight, with a note that this is comparable to the literacy of merchants in neighboring Tyra. Among other commoners: forty five percent.
• Momma's Boy: Alanna's son Alan wants to be a knight but at ten hated the thought of training under Wyldon, who openly said Alanna wasn't a true knight. He writes to Lord Imrah of Legann asking him to take him on, following an ancient tradition where an impoverished would-be knight served as page and squire to an older warrior. Lord Imrah fully understands why Alan wouldn't want to learn chivalry from a man who despises his mother. (This also serves to explain why Alan, the only one of Alanna's children interested in knighthood, never met Kel in page training.)
• Mundane Utility: The diary of the head cook of the palace includes an incident where one of his undercooks quits unexpectedly and has copied his recipes, which will somehow cause the head cook to be fired and not given references. One of his staff brings in the Whisper Man to track the undercook down, make him surrender the copies, and send him elsewhere with threat of dire consequences should he return to Tortall, saving the head cook's position. The head cook is no fool and manages to piece together that this is George Cooper, so makes certain to show him gratitude.
• Noodle Incident: George writing to Aly says that as she's well aware, geese will noisily attack intruders and it's very embarrassing for a spy to be driven off that way.
• Odd Friendship: Mermaids and wyverns have what Daine outright calls an odd sort of friendship. They sometimes sing together and make beautiful music.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. Neal mentions a Blayce of Carmine Tower who helps teach mage students about entry-level healing and is (presumably) not the same person as Blayce the Gallan, the man who Kel vows to kill.
• Out of Focus: Although this book was published shortly after the Beka Cooper trilogy, which was the most heavily worldbuilt and detail-rich entry in the series at the time, very little of it shows up here. That's justified, of course, as Beka Cooper lived two centuries before Song of the Lioness and the setting heavily, extensively averts Medieval Stasis.
• Overt Operative: Generally regarded with scorn by Tortallan spies, one of whom complains about countries who have really blatant and destructive agents.
• Papa Wolf: Baron Myles was absolutely outraged when he found out that George took twelve-year-old Aly with him to a meeting that went violent, to the point where a cowed George, who'd initially been quite proud, tells him Aly will not be working in the field from now on.
• Pet the Dog: From Neal's notes, initially Alanna was a difficult master, but as he applied the things she taught him, she clapped him on the back, quoted back a line from the same poem he'd cited part of, and responded to the look on his face by grinning and saying "Yes, I read." He reflects that this is his first indication that maybe his time as a squire won't be all threats and bad weather.
• Resolved Noodle Incident: An incident first mentioned in the Trickster's Duet where George took Aly on a mission that went unexpectedly violent, which is one reason why he refuses to let her work as a spy later, is fleshed out in a report she wrote for her father.
• The Reveal: Various individuals, notably Evin Larse from The Immortals and Protector of the Small, are revealed to work or have worked for the Royal Intelligence Service at some point in their lives. Other agents include Lady Uline of Hannalof and Kourrem Hariq. Stefan Groomsman's involvement, however, should come as no surprise — he did used to be George's spy in the palace back when George was the Rogue.
• Ridiculously Long-lived Family Name: The organizational chart for the Tortallan spy service includes Rebekah Lofts with the footnote that she's the seven-times great grandaughter of Tansy Lofts.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: In the political sense. The book contains reproductions of a lot of royal correspondence. As non-absolute monarchs who have to take into account the opinions and convictions of a great many people across the kingdom, Jon and Thayet have to write back and forth a good deal to persuade subjects and get many things done, but they do get a lot of things done. A letter penned by a centaur herdmaster complaining about Fantastic Racism and wanting to have his people represented at court is taken quite seriously, with Thayet jotting a note in the margins about what she's going to have to do to have this done.
• Sapient Eat Sapient: According to Daine, humans sometimes kill merfolk and consider their flesh delicious. Wyverns, which she says have the intelligence of young children, are also considered delicacies by the gods, so although they're something of a pest in Tortall Daine doesn't blame them for fleeing the Divine Realms en masse.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • Thom's homework assignment with a list of Tortall's monarchs notably does not include the first and third Jonathans and Bairds, despite Jonathan I having been mentioned in the books, notably Protector of the Small. And while his tutor regularly notes errors in the margins, this isn't brought up. This isn't the only discrepancy in this section, either...
  • The official timeline at the back also has some odd interpretations regarding things from the previous books that don't quite fit. In one instance, Rikash Salmalín is said to have been born in 464, but in the timeline at the end, the epilogue of Trickster's Queen, in which he appears as a baby, is said to have been in 463.
  • A section on the discovery of the killing devices from Protector of the Small describes them as having heads like bowls and glowing red eyes - in Kel's quartet they had longer heads and dark pits for eyes - and an artist's rendition shows them with four arms, though the description, as in the quartet, gives them two arms but with extra joints.
  • Daine's section on Immortals has some information that contradicts The Immortals. Here she says dragons are infants for three years and are able to speak to other species at the age of ten. (She also says that Kitten was "barely more than an infant" when she went to Carthak, but Kitten was under three years old at the time.) In The Immortals, she said they were infants for thirty years and the youngest dragon she met who could speak was two hundred; in a story in Tortall and Other Lands Kitten gets the ability when she's sixteen, but it's because she encountered an opal dragon who helped her out.
• Shout-Out: There's mention of a group of rogues who were caught after their stick figure cypher was figured out by Deputy Provost Sherringford Adler.
• The Spymaster: Myles, George, and the Falcons under them all qualify to some degree or another.
• Spy Speak: Mostly this is in the names of different classes of agents, and things like actions are much more straightforwards - "spirited" for "abducted" probably didn't need to be clarified, as it is here.
• Stylistic Suck: A few of the poems Neal has written for crushes are included. One he wrote for Yuki has better imagery than what he wrote about an instructor in the Healer's college but it appears to be an attempt at Yamani-style haiku, and it doesn't even have the meter.
  The shukusen speaks plainly: / You amuse me, sir. / Please stay. Please go. / Bleed.
• Surprise Pregnancy: Alanna, who is in her late forties in 466 H.E., writes George in October of that year to reveal that she's pregnant as a result of a damaged anti-pregnancy charm and them spending time together in May. This is the impetus for both George recovering the documents that form the book while cleaning a room and Alanna's retirement as King's Champion.
• Taking the Veil: Marenite king Qual the Foolish abdicated in favour of his cousin Kirikene before becoming a priest of the Black God and taking a vow of silence.
• Teeny Weenie: In his homework Thom says that if he says why he thinks Emperor Strassic III was called "the Small", his tutor will cane him. His tutor notes in the margins that he should try writing with less wit and more learning.
• Tempting Fate: In the timeline Thom writes out he mentions Roger IV, "the ill-fated", who caught cold while bear hunting in the mountains, didn't take a healer with him, and refused to turn back for "a ridiculous fit of the sneezes", so died.
• 10-Minute Retirement: In her letter Alanna says that she's retiring and having this child and this time will stay at home in Pirate's Swoop to care for it. George, writing to one of his sons, says he expects her resolution will last "as long as winter". She's presumably not returning to being Champion, but there's always work for the Lioness.
• Theme Naming: The Shadow Service, Tortall's spy apparatus, mainly refers to different classes of agents as birds, though there are several exceptions. "Sparrows" perform day to day street-level intelligence gathering and message passing. "Hostlers" are the more traditionally "dramatic" spies who do the cloak and dagger stuff and are considered quite distinct. "Nursemaids" teach trainees and decide which roles they're best for, and collate and compile reports from Sparrows and Hostlers assigned to them. Their intelligence is passed on to "Harvesters" who pass it on and bring back orders. "Falcons" are in charge of espionage in a given territory, giving orders. "Owls" are helpful non-agents like mages and friendly Immortals. "Magpies" are informers.
• Unicorns Prefer Virgins: In a section on Immortals which covers them in more detail than in any main series books, unicorns do not specifically care about virgins but are instead friends to children, who can be imperiled to cause unicorns to try to save them and get killed, though the pull is two ways and children often try to defend unicorns. The clawed, fanged, flesh-eating variety of unicorns won't protect children but they won't harm them either and prefer to leave the area.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Stormwings really can't stand the scent of onions, which Daine says smell as bad to them as Stormwing reek does to humans.
• You Go, Girl!: It's downplayed compared to a lot of this author's other works, but present.
  • The Tortallan spy service doesn't casually resort to hard forms of interrogation, including torture, with the awareness that it's not reliable. Apparently other nations which feel differently think that's soft of Tortall and the result of it being so influenced by women. George dryly notes that anyone who thinks Thayet or especially his wife is soft and ineffectual has not faced either.
  • Thom mentions a king of Maren who abdicated after making a bad situation much worse, and was replaced by a female cousin who the council of nobles chose imagining she'd be easy to control. Instead Kirikene the Clever, as she's later known, was strong, wise, and managed to resolve the conflict and make peace through the realm, and whose consort adored her and refused all efforts to make him take over.