The Sorcerer's House Questions (Major Spoilers)

Craig Brewer · 19 Apr 2010, 14:40 · from 2010-April.txt.gz

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From: cnbrewer at yahoo.com (Craig Brewer)
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 07:40:18 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) The Sorcerer's House Questions (*Major Spoilers*)
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>>3) The letter from the psychic confirming and charging for the vampire lock-up incident.

>A psychic who is in on the con, at least part way.

I do wonder about her "fee." It's over $4k, right, which she says is just for "travel reimbursement" since she mentions elsewhere that she decided to do her other services for free. But that seems pretty steep just for a plane ticket and a few nights in a Hilton. 

>>4) Evidence found by the Collator that Bax had an ancient samurai sword.

>IIRC, the Collator never could find the sword.

He couldn't, but he did find a safe that could have housed it. And the sword was also supposed to be "George's," right? 

>>Where do you plan on obtaining this independent evidence?  The Collator is amazingly negligent when it comes to gathering evidence.  There should be all sorts of
>>records of things that went on - deeds, newspaper articles, police reports, other witnesses - yet the Collator examines none of them.  It's like he doesn't want to
>>know.

If Shell's letters are legitimate, then Skotos and the "skinny man" (Nicholas-the-vampire, I assume) were in fact looking for information on Bax, at least according to the guy Shell talked to. Is it possible that Skotos really was Bax/George's father, but that Bax was trying to still create a huge fiction to dupe George after he'd learned all about it? It'd be hard to piece that together, and it would be quite a fragile con.

In the end, I'm not convinced that the entire thing was a total fabrication. But I am convinced that Wolfe means us to think that it's a possibility since, otherwise, I have a hard time understanding why Bax should ever have been a con man at all, unless it was just an easy way to get the character into (and then out of) jail.

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