# Buried Alive *The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 03 Oct 1999* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Alice Turner *03 Oct 1999, 22:28* Robert and Alex, No, we're somewhat at cross purposes here. Horn knows perfectly well how to kill an inhumu--he was present at Quetzal's death, after all. The secret he has learned from Krait is how *not* to kill an inhumu while giving the appearance of doing so. Let's use Occam's razor here. Horn as political leader has presided over the live burial of (let's assume) 25 inhumi. Horn as military leader covertly digs up and coerces or bribes 18 or these (more to come) into operating in his side in a highly original military maneuver (I applaud whoever it was who remarked that Wolfe has put some new, well, maybe not life--undeath ?--into the overworked vampire genre). How would he possibly know how to do this, and to plan it so far in advance, without help? That is why I think this knowledge (and possibly advice too) is Krait's secret. Alex's "intelligent blood" theory remains strictly theoretical. But you need a rational explanation for Horn's strategy, which is why I invoke Occam's razor. -alga *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun. ---