Last Q and A for Queen’s Gambit coming at ‘cha! As always, if you haven’t read the novel, please avoid this note as it contains spoilers.

1) I was wondering what type of Fey did Jonathan use to create the body he was using in Queen’s Gambit?

I’m a little confused by this question. Jonathan was in his own body in Queen’s Gambit. He had reanimated it using the pieces of his soul that had been deployed in experiments when he died. But a zombie only lasts so long, which was why he was attempting to get a new, immortal body for himself instead, namely Louis-Cesare’s.

2) Those strange zombies also had his soul inside them? I’m not really sure how this Fey’s splitting soul gizmo is working.

Jonathan’s story was told obliquely for the most part, in bits and pieces throughout the book, rather than outright explained. That may be why you’re having trouble. Let me lay it out for you a bit more plainly, and I think it will make sense.

Jonathan was attempting to discover if fey bodies made good zombies. It was part of the experiments on life and death that had consumed him for centuries, and were his real passion. He was only helping the fey in order to get the life energy he needed to continue living, but he didn’t really care about their war. He was a necromancer, and a genius one at that, and his experiments were where his real interests lay.

But he’d never before been able to experiment with the light fey, for obvious reasons. They were the strongest of the fey, and would have killed him for even suggesting such a thing, which was sacrilege among their people. But after the battle in Faerie that you saw in Shatter the Earth, Aeslinn didn’t care if Jonathan took some of the Svarestri dead. He was no longer concerned about petty mortal issues, being well on his way to godhood, and so Jonathan finally got his guinea pigs.

That is why the fey that Dory encountered in the Hong Kong warehouse were so grotesque. Jonathan had been using the soul-splitter to graft pieces of other creatures’ souls onto them, to see what he could create. He was trying to improve them, but instead, he only deformed and mutilated them. He was not accustomed to working with fey souls, which are part and parcel with their bodies. So, when he changed their souls, he changed their bodies, too, and not in good ways.

But Jonathan did not use the soul splitter on himself at that time. He had used it previously to graft pieces of other people’s souls onto his, as you saw in Shatter the Earth. It had allowed him to co-opt Jo’s time traveling abilities, for instance, but that wasn’t what he was doing in HK.

There, he was in his own body, which he’d reanimated as I explained above. That did not require a soul splitter. That was basic necromancy. He had also used basic necromancy on the fey. He used the soul splitter to try to change them into something better by grafting on different types of souls, but he reanimated them using his own power, so that they would be under his control.

But then Cassie killed him, leaving him with only the tiny bits of soul he’d been using in his experiments, and a rotting corpse. He needed a new body, and he needed it fast. He also needed his soul splitter back, which he’d lost in the attack on Dory/Dorina.

That left him having to reanimate the dead triad members at Hassani’s court to try to retrieve it. Unfortunately for him, he reanimated something far worse at the same time, and screwed up the assault, because demigods don’t take orders. However, he was correct in the idea that the splitter was at Hassani’s court. Hassani’s people had found it and the consul gave it to Louis-Cesare in that scene in his office. LC thus had it in his possession when the group made their way to Jonathan in HK. LC planned to use it to put Dory and her sister back together, but he was unwittingly doing Jonathan a favor and returning it to his hands.

Not that that ended up helping Jonathan, however. Efridis had already seen what he had done with the Svarestri fey bodies, and was–in the immortal words of Saturday Night Live–starting to worry that she might be “one of the baddies.” She concluded that she was, because nobody on the side of light could possibly be allied with somebody like Jonathan. It probably helped that she still had Nimue’s words echoing in her ears. So, she took care of the triad and was in the process of taking care of Jonathan when Dory’s group arrived.

Does that clear things up?

3. Is the fog in Hong Kong natural and simply useful or was it created on purpose?

It wasn’t fog; it was free-floating magic. Some clouds were thinner than others, and so had less of an effect on the magical devices they came into contact with, and some were thicker and thus more powerful. But all of it was magic escaping from the city’s underlying vortex.

4. What precisely was inside the bag that Hassani destroyed? Aeaslin and his forces? Or one of the gods also?

Hassani could not have destroyed Aeslinn as he did not have him in his possession. He never met him. He had Jonathan, the army that Jonathan was creating for Aeslinn, and the remains that had not completely burned of Sokkwi (Setep-en-Ra). Those were therefore the ones who were included in the portal, the gateway to which he then destroyed.

From Hassani’s perspective, it made a weird sort of symmetry: Jonathan was a necromancer fascinated by reanimated things, and Sokkwi was a demi-god who kept reanimating. He couldn’t die. He just kept coming back, allowing the death obsessed Jonathan a chance to study the ultimate zombie. Jonathan also couldn’t die, of course, being a zombie himself now, so he and his army would basically be locked in immortal combat with Sokkwi. Considering their collective guilt, Hassani thought that to be a more fitting end for them than a quick and easy death, plus it got rid of the dangerous army.

5) Is the Consul heading towards the dangerous obsession that really old vamps get? She’s older than Mircea and he’s already in the danger zone, I wonder about her.

If you read Masks, the Mircea stand-alone novel, it should answer your question.

6) Why do the wards at the vampire strongholds and Circle HQ wreak havoc with electricity but not the wards on Cassie’s suite? We were tossing around some theories, but none of them really hit home.

First, the wards on vamp strongholds only interfere with electricity when the really big-time wards are brought online, not the usual ones for daily use. The consul’s court, for instance, usually has electricity, and only switches over to candles when it has to batten down the hatches. So, Cassie’s regular wards wouldn’t interfere with it.

Secondly, we need to talk a little about why big-time wards and electricity don’t mix. It’s actually not about electricity at all, but what it attracts. As you saw in Siren’s Song and other places in the series, wild magic loves electricity. They have some of the same properties, so whenever one is present, the other usually is as well.

Now, this isn’t a problem with basic wards, which don’t have a lot of extra magic to burn. Most of their power is being used at any given time by the spell; it is not available for anything else. But the bigger the ward, the more excess magic it has, for ramping up during an assault. But when the assault hasn’t arrived yet, the excess is just sloshing around in there with nothing to do, and is therefore available to be co-opted. Co-opted by what, you ask? Why, by all that wild magic sizzling around any source of electricity.

Now, you have to recall that wild magic is exactly that—wild. It does its own thing. It can also tempt magic that is supposed to be properly contained in a spell, but that doesn’t really have anything to do at the moment, to get a little wild, too. It can, for example, make a bridge between a ward and a nearby magical object, say a small alarm spell that usually patrols the halls, looking for trouble. Well, suddenly, said spell has all the awesome power of a major ward being channeled into it, thanks to the bridge created by the wild magic. This means that a) you have no ward anymore, because its power has just putzed off to do something else, and b) you get a really freaking loud security spell rupturing a lot of eardrums.

You can see how this would be a problem.

So, yeah, when the big-time wards come online, electricity—and the wild magic it attracts—get cut off. It’s a preventative measure so you don’t have a bunch of crazy stuff taking place like what happened in Hong Kong. As for Cassie’s wards, there are three additional things to remember:

a) As stated above, the big-time wards aren’t up all the time. They are used during an attack, but they need a crap ton of magic to operate on, so are reserved for emergencies like a siege. Cassie doesn’t get a lot of sieges. Cassie gets surprise attacks, which is why she also has a bunch of vampires, mages and witches around her, because wards don’t do everything.

b) You did see the electricity go out when there was a siege by the dark mages in Ride the Storm. That’s why it was dark on the drag in Dante’s, despite the attack taking place in daytime. The lights went out.

c) The biggest wards on Cassie’s suite are not human but fey, which operate on different rules entirely than Earth magic, and were laid and maintained by Pritkin. He did this so that, no matter whether the rest of the wards on the hotel fell, Cassie would be fine. The only reason that the three coven leaders were able to get past those spells was because he’d been missing for a while at that point, and hadn’t maintained them. Otherwise, they would have been locked out, too.

Hoped that helped.