Brom O'Berin wrote:2. All our former thoughts re SB occurring shortly after WRO are not correct - from Varnaythus' mention of Tremala, SB now follows WMC in the Bahzell timeline, and is at least 7 years after WRO.
On the other hand, in SB Bahzell talks about how his father had been "working out" a relationship with Tellian...
not that he already had...
much less had done so with the entirety of the Sothoii Kingdom. Sure that new peace will be a bit unsettled by bad memories for some time, but with an apparently huge number of Sothoii noblemen saying "I don't have to like it, but I'm still going to do it anyway if that's what's necessary to put my thumb square in Phrobus' eye", it's not going to still be needing much "working out" for very long. If the does indeed happen after WMC, it can't be too much after it.
And there are more contradictions here. Most critical would be the mention of "sending no fewer than four of his champions off to the Wind Plain"... which admittedly is wisely vague to give Weber wiggle-room, but with the list of dead in WMC this must either be counting the dead as still among the count of "previously sent champions", or is a big hint that a new champion is about to be found among either the Hradani or the Sothoii. Or perhaps even two, seeing as how Kerry was apparently nowhere near the Wind Plain by the time of WMC. And then there's the way they mused that with so many champions being sent there's "worse to come"... which sure as hell would be well-fulfilled by those devils we just got finished watching him beat. And to return to the original point, said defeat of those devils was a HUGE part of the reason why the "building relationship" is getting pretty blank close to "built" by now. (Of course, on the other hand, if worse than even those devils is yet to come, we should see some pretty interesting fights in the next book or two... whenever they come out...)
Furthermore, there's no indication that wizards are aware when one of their number falls... unless Carnadossa decides to tell them. They aren't telepaths the way mages sometimes are, at least not so far as we can tell. And that means it's entirely possible Varnaythus could simply have been unaware that Tremala was already dead. Of course, the reverse could also be true as well, but the way Tremala claims he "deserved better" but then they also discuss his punishment as if it came from the failure of his associations with Shigu and Krahana's minions... and not those of Krashnark. Which both one one hand suggests the possibility of his already being dead... but also suggests they are discussing the possibility of current disfavor rather than some sort of punishment/destruction in an afterlife. It could easily be read either way.
And then there's this little excerpt from the prologue of WMC:
Yet there was a disadvantage to that, as well, as Sharnā and Shīgū had both discovered. It was one thing for a god to decide to withdraw his power from an avatar in an orderly fashion; it was quite another when that avatar was destroyed before he could withdraw. When that happened, the power, the fragment of his own essence, which had been poured into his mortal tool was lost with the avatar. Worse, it left him temporarily maimed, unable to reach back into that particular reality until the strength he’d lost regenerated itself once more, and that was precisely what had happened to Sharnā and Shīgū.
Sharnā had largely recovered from the damage he’d taken when Bahzell slew Harnak Churnazhson, but he’d been foolish enough to invest even more of his essence in the sword with which he’d armed Harnak. He’d seen that as a way to ensure Harnak’s victory and avoid his avatar’s destruction, but it hadn’t worked out that way, and the sword touched by his essence now lay at the bottom of the sea. It would be centuries before he recovered from that, and until he did—or until the sword could be recovered from Korthrala’s keeping and returned to him—he had no personal access to that reality.
And if Sharnā has no "personal access" to that reality, how could he summon a demon to it to help his followers? And even if that was possible despite the lack of "personal access", there were SIX of his demons -- including a "true" Greater Servant, which required Sharnā to "hold it pent" while the binding ritual was performed -- which were faced in SB. And wouldn't holding it pent at least somewhat contradict the lack of "personal access"? Yet said personal access is apparently lost for "centuries"... and I really don't think anybody wants to suggest SB was set 200+ years after WRO.
On the other hand, Weber was careful to never mention Cassan in SB... nor the detachment from the Order of Tomanak that will shortly (as of the end of WMC) be withdrawn from Zarantha's academy. So it's certainly
possible that it is actually set afterwards. But I would be hard-pressed to say it's been
proven so, either. I think instead Weber doesn't want us to know when it's set at all, because there are just so many potential contradictions here that he may well have made at least one (likely still minor) continuity mistake. But if we never truly know exactly when it actually was supposed to be set, it's probably at bit easier to overlook -- or not even know for sure what it is.