Welcome to Act 1! Let’s dive right in
Chapter 1 Skull header: Ninth House. Time: Nine months before the Emperor’s murder. 2nd person.
The chapter opens with another exalted “In the myriadic year...” statements, which contrasts nicely with what happens whenever Harrow touches her sword. Harrow is a Lyctor, a saint of God, an immortal and supremely powerful magician, and her greatest achievement is that she can power-heave. She has the sword with her all the time, and whenever she touches it, she throws up. Moreover, touching the sword burns her. She hates it, and it hates her.
Harrow is on the ship Erebos with the Emperor. Lacking face paint, she uses blood to cover her bare face, and fashions a mask from a sheet. She’s in and out of consciousness. As she wakes up, she hears the heartbeats of all the people aboard Erebos and discerns the difference between necromancers’ and everyone else. The Body stays with her.
- “Maybe the sword had reified your grief into six feet of steel. You had loathed that thrice-damned blade from sight, which might have been unfair before you knew it loathed you in return . . . you felt nothing except the sword’s enormous, empty hate of you, which you knew to be real” (p. 28).
- “Details sat at awkward angles to one another” (p. 28). Harrow experiences memory gaps.
- This is a very different Harrow from the one we knew in Gideon. Instead of never failing, she can’t succeed at anything except humiliating herself.
- She’s let her hair grow and can’t keep it under control. She can’t paint her face with sacramental grease because there isn’t any, wears a turquoise hospital gown, and has made a makeshift veil out of a ripped-up sheet. “You took the poetic way out and used a black vestal’s last-choice gambit: you opened a vein and, trembling neither from pain nor blood loss, daubed blind upon your skin the sacramental skull of the Inglorious Mask” (p. 29).
- Remember the importance of masks? Why does Harrow need a mask in order to feel more comfortable? This is a rhetorical question, of course. She’s lost her robes, her face paint — all the symbols that made Harrow Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Who is this new person, and what happened to all her competence?
- If she’s neither in pain nor suffering blood loss, why does she tremble?
- I love there are so many different masks available to the Ninth House, including the Crushed-Under-A-Rock one and the Inglorious one. No one does abasement like the Ninth.
- Harrow has memory issues. She comes to consciousness in strange places, having experience gaps in time. “In these digestions of time the Body would come” (p. 30).
- Erebos is the Emperor’s flagship. In mythology, Erebos (or Erebus) is the personification of darkness. Also the god of darkness. Also a region in Hades where the newly dead arrive. Also a ship that was part of the disastrous 1845 Franklin expedition to find the Arctic’s Northwest Passage, alongside the Terror. Is this portentous? I don’t know. Is it? Given that it’s captained by Admiral Sarpedon (so many of Muir’s character names derive from mythology of the Trojan War) it’s worth wondering what will be the ship’s fate.
- Despite the fact that Harrow absolutely hates the sword, she feels responsible for it. That doesn’t stop her from trying to destroy it.
- “Around you, people would go back and forth, giving you the widest berth possible, ignoring you so entirely that at one point you were convinced you were dead. With that conviction, you had felt only intense relief” (p. 31).
- I know I’m belaboring this, but Harrow is really going through some trauma, piled on top of an already-traumatic life. I’m belaboring it for all the Harrow-haters.
- Pay attention to the narrative voice.
Chapter 2 Skull header: Ninth House. Time: Same. 2nd person.
God visits Harrow. In the background Harrow hears plans for the Erebos’ next mission and the report that the Saint of Joy is countermanding (presumably) one of God’s orders. God assigns the lowest-ranking cadet aboard to distract her by making static noises which, coming from God and directed toward a saint, is hilarious. Harrow thinks that God can see the Body but isn’t sure. God dismisses his officers and takes Harrow with him through the ship to the second cargo hold, where he shows her the preserved and sleeping bodies of almost 500 people, who will renew the Ninth House. She looks at all their faces and eventually arrives at the caskets that hold (or don’t hold) the remains of the dead from Canaan House. She realizes that Cytherea will go to the Mithraeum. God again offers Harrow the choice to follow him or not.
What follows is Thanergy 101, which is important to understand. It’s the basis of the magical system. In the case of natural or gradual death, “liminal osmosis” draws the dying soul into the River, the place where the dead go. The discussion, by the way, is based on biochemistry. Where death is sudden and violent, however, the soul is shaken loose and becomes a ghost. If the ghost attaches to an object, it becomes a revenant. This happens to humans, and it also happens to planets. A planetary revenant is a Resurrection Beast. Nine Resurrection Beasts were created 10,000 years ago. Three remain; five were presumably destroyed by Lyctors, and the ninth one God doesn’t mention. The Resurrection Beasts are chasing God, but they also chase the Lyctors because they committed the “indelible sin” of becoming Lyctors. For this reason, God explains, Harrow can’t return to the Ninth House, because she would lead the Resurrection Beasts back to the Dominicus System.
The Body tells her that this means she will have to learn the sword. It’s the first time the Body has spoken since the night of her parents’ deaths. Since her ascension to Lyctorhood, the Body’s eyes have turned from black to yellow. She speaks to the Body, but God answers, telling her that Ortus Nigenad didn’t die in vain. She answers that she’s wasted Ortus Nigenad’s death, which confounds God as Harrow faints.
- God makes someone pretend the comms system is out so he doesn’t have to answer the Saint of Joy. Which is altogether mundane, passive-aggressive, and funny. Compound this with the fact that God spends most of his time in committee meetings, and divinity doesn’t sound like all it’s cracked up to be.
- God: “I mastered Death, Harrowhark; I wish I’d done the smarter thing and mastered Time” (p. 34).
- This is one of those “blink and you’ll miss it” important moments.
- “The ancient dead. You’ve committed resurrection” (p. 35). God explains that, no, he’s been keeping these bodies stashed “for safety,” and is glad for the chance to “wake them up.”
- Who keeps bodies around for 10,000 years???
- Am I the only one who remembers the desperate circumstances at Drearburh and is thinking that God could have easily fixed it at any point?
- Sensing the scraps in the Sixth House casket, “much less than a corpse,” Harrow feels some emotion, “but it struggled and died, much to your relief” (p. 37).
- There’s a flicker of memory, but it escapes.
- God tells her that they searched through Canaan House thoroughly, but the missing bodies are just that. He’s declared the missing are dead.
- “If you had seen him and not known you would have thought him utterly nondescript; but you could not look at him and not know. Terrible divinity clung to his skin” (p. 38).
- God’s clothes are worn. Not even God wears Prada.
- He tells her the cost is too great for him to return to the Dominicus system, but doesn’t say what the cost is.
- He won’t let her kneel in worship until she knows what it means, “if you knew the full story — you might strike me full in the face instead” (p. 38). Time will tell.
- The Thanergy 101 dialogue is really important for understanding major future events.
- “Why have we not an immortal soul? I would give gladly all the hundreds of years that I have to live, to be a human being for only one day” (p. 40).
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In the dialogue with God, Harrow says that, although necromancers begin the process of thanergetic conversion, “Nothing happens . . . plant and animal life both change, of course . . . and eventually the planet flips totally and the population has to be moved, but that’s such a long-term process that it takes generations. You can’t quantify it as something happening” (p. 41).
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It’s a deeply bigoted and naïve view to say that, if destroying a planet happens slowly, it doesn’t happen. So you just kill all the life and move the survivors. Cost of doing business. Did I not mention earlier that we’ll see a critique of colonialism? This is where it starts. It’s our first overt indication that a magical system that harvests energy off killing things might not be great.
- “The choice I offered you was always a false one,” God tells Harrow (p. 43). She can’t return to the Ninth House because, he says, a Resurrection Beast will follow her forever for having committed the sin of becoming a Lyctor. So he lied at the end of Gideon. Why?
- “The Body raised its eyebrows when the Emperor Undying says there are three Resurrection Beasts left (p. 43). Note this.
- “’You are walking down a long passage,’ said the Body. ‘You need to turn around’” (p. 45).
- “I am standing in the dark . . . I lost it. It’s gone. There’s nothing there. I must have misapprehended the process. I am half a Lyctor. I am nothing, I am pointless, I am unmanned.”
- She failed the process of Lyctorhood. Somehow.
- The “need to turn around” repetition: these are warnings. Harrow has to do something other than she’s doing.
- “’Ortus Nigenad did not die for nothing,’ he said. As he spoke, his mouth looked strange. A hot whistle of pain ran down your temporal bone” (p. 46). Why would his mouth look strange, and why does Harrow have a physical reaction to hearing Ortus’ name? (This is a hint. Notice that, whenever someone says Ortus’ name in Harrow’s hearing, she has a physical reaction.)
Chapter 3: Skull header: Ninth House. Time: same.
The chapter presents Harrow’s life story. It’s told in third person, but the fact that there’s not a fractured skull heading the chapter means that it doesn’t fit the pattern followed in the rest of the book. It’s an extended info-dump, but an interesting one.
- Harrow should have been the 311th Reverend Mother in direct descent from the original Tomb keeper. She was also the 87th Nona of the House, and the first named Harrowhark.
- The next book is called Nona the Ninth.
- No, I don’t know what it means.
- She has always known that her parents committed mass murder in order to conceive her and save the House. “Crux told her that her parents had been different, once. This must have been before they committed a little light child massacre” (p. 48).
- Her entire life has been wretched. Unrelievedly, dismally, wretched.
- “One very bad day — when it seemed as though everyone hated her, and as though this were a completely correct way to feel — with bloodied fists and a bruised heart, she wrote a note explaining her suicide then went and unlocked the door” (pp. 49-50).
- The time line doesn’t entirely track with what Harrow tells Gideon in the pool in Canaan House. Something, something, unreliable narrators, something.
- Puberty is a real trial, and her relationship with the Body changes over time.
- After she falls in love, she starts hearing and seeing things that eat at her sanity. We get a measure of the sheer determination and hard work it takes Harrow to be Harrow, as well as the sense that she’s holding on by her fingernails as the House slowly falls apart. “So the years passed, unshriven, crusting up and drying as they went” (p. 53).
- Harrow “snatched the chance” to renew the House “with both hands. But like falling in love the first time, becoming a Lyctor had all gone wrong. Her cavalier had given himself to her with a numb readiness that still burnt her to ash with shame. Even with that readiness, she had committed the indelible sin halfway; she had gathered up the matter of Ortus Nigenad’s soul and not been able to choke him all the way down” (p. 54).
- There had been another girl who grew up alongside Harrow — but she had died before Harrow was born” (p. 54).
- Are you gutted yet? It’s the reference to Gideon that does it, and the fact that Harrow doesn’t remember her. I have to confess that I can’t read this chapter without feeling most of my Harrow dislike fade away. I’m not entirely Team Harrow yet, but warming to the idea.
Chapter 4: Skull header: Third House. Time: Same. 2nd person.
Someone tries to kill Harrow by smothering her. She shoots fingernails at them. Then she wakes up to find that her pillow is dry and her nails intact. Ianthe is sitting beside her, and gives her a letter, written in Harrow’s hand, in her personal cipher, addressed to herself and naming herself as “now dead.”
The letter contains instructions for Harrow to live the rest of her life, referring to what she’s done as “the work.” She instructs Harrow to make sure Ianthe’s tongue and jaw haven’t been replaced; if they have, she has to kill her. To determine whether or not Ianthe’s mouth is intact, Harrow kisses her thoroughly and pledges her fealty. Ianthe gives the rest of the letters to Harrow; the only one not written in cipher is to be opened if she meets Coronabeth. Ianthe confirms that Harrow wrote that letter in front of her, and it pledges her service to Corona as well. Harrow asks to be alone. Before she leaves, Ianthe takes out Naberius’ trident knife and puts it through her palm. She withdraws it and the wound heals immediately. Then she plunges it through Harrow’s hand and withdraws it; Harrow doesn’t heal without effort.
In the quiet, Harrow goes to the Body for comfort, but she notices the gap behind the boxes along the wall, pushes them aside, and sees the wall damaged by nails. What she had assumed was a dream was real, and someone hid the evidence from her. The Body tucks her into bed and she falls asleep.
- Ianthe doesn’t look well, now has two arms, and is watching her: “Ianthe was fond on languid attitudes and postures; she affected a heavy, artificial tedium, or a faint and glittering malice, sometimes even a self-deprecating and idle humourousness; but she looked at you now with a soft and thoroughly uncharacteristic hunger” (p. 56). Draco in Leather Pants — it fits. “The brain, you knew grudgingly, existed. The heart was an open question.”
- “It has been forty-eight hours since you became a Lyctor at Canaan House. . . the Harrowhark of the writing will be dead and gone. Her resurrection constitutes a fail state and must be avoided at all costs . . . You are the living surety of promises I have made. . .” (p. 59)
- #1: Stay alive.
- #2: Don’t go home
- #3: Keep the sword with you all the time. Interestingly, old Harrow tells new Harrow never to use the sword to cut flesh or bone. Pin this.
- #4: You’re compromised. You’ve got the Lyctoral battery, but for the rest, you’ll have to compensate. “It pains me to admit this, but you know piss-all.”
- #5: You owe Ianthe everything, even above your loyalty to God. Your agreement with her extends into the Ninth House but not into the Tomb. “It goes without saying that Ianthe will destroy you if she can. She has helped me ably, but it has cost her nothing and you everything. I have guarded her from full understanding of the work so that she cannot undo it on a whim or by accident. You are in her power. I am in no doubt of her misusing it. You yourself never had power over anyone else but you misused it violently” (p. 60).
- Imagine the Harrow of Gideon writing this. This paragraph is self-aware and damning. Harrow has done something that powerfully makes her a thrall to Ianthe. And she has done it deliberately and unapologetically.
- The “favor of the chain”: the chain was the offhand weapon of Samael (Anastasia’s cavalier). Harrow 1 gives almost everything to Ianthe — almost. Her obeisance ends at the Tomb.
- #6: Don’t read the other letters unless the conditions arise.
- #7: Check Ianthe’s tongue and jaw first.
- Old Harrow doesn’t ask for forgiveness now, but hopes for it someday: “I look upon your birth as a blessing. Look upon me as a Harrowhark who was handed the first genuine choice of our lives; the only choice ever given where we had free will to say, No, and free will to say, Yes. Accept that in this instance I have chosen to say, No” (p. 61).
- “I swear by my mother; by the salt water; by that which lies dead and unbreathing in the Tomb; by the ripped and remade soul of Ortus Nigenad” (p. 62).
- Salt water! Also, the lineage of the Tomb keepers runs through Harrow’s mother.
- When Harrow 1 wrote that Ianthe would abuse her power, she wasn’t kidding. The point will come when you look back on this passage and realize that Ianthe does at least four extremely cruel things to Harrow in few paragraphs. The first is pretending not to know who Ortus is.
- The “check the tongue and jaw” requirement presumably has something to do with Ianthe consenting to become a Sewn Tongue. What does that mean? I also presume it means that she’s prevented from revealing whatever Harrow 1 did to become Harrow 2.
- “[W]e are about to embark on what promises to be a truly beautiful friendship, with me the lone fruitful thing in your salted field” (p. 63).
- A double reference: the “beautiful friendship” at the end of Casablanca, and the “fruit in a salted field” from Psalm 107. By the way, when Muir quotes from the Bible, often she uses the Douay-Reims version, which is a translation of the Latin Vulgate, not the RSV or NIV.
- Ianthe has trouble with her right arm, which is the arm that Cytherea removed at Canaan House.
Chapter 5: Skull header: Ninth House, fractured. Time: Indeterminate. 3rd person.
Hint: It’ll help you interpret these 3rd person passages if you pay attention to what happens just before they begin.
Harrow is drenched in light and screaming, with Ortus trying to calm her. They’re in the shuttle, waiting for clearance to land at Canaan House. She finds a piece of flimsy in the pilot’s seat and reads, “THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME” (p. 72). Ortus tells her the page is blank.
WHAT????
- Harrow is sitting on a placket of House dirt, which is different from the way she travels in Gideon. Is it because this Harrow is different, or because the earlier Harrow didn’t want to appear weak in front of Gideon? (Shrugs — who knows? It’s interesting, though.)
- She says, “At times now I forget . . . I thought I was dreaming, perhaps” (p. 69).
- “Bone frenzy” heh heh heh. Dirty jokes are universal. Ortus’ response is interesting: “he went on to suggest that such a person probably didn’t even read in the first place, and would be more inclined to trifle with prurient magazines or pamphlets” (p. 70). Between this comment, Harrow’s wish for a helpmeet over a circus performer, and the Ninth House being low on “wild and confident fucks,” reminders of Gideon are everywhere in this passage.
- Interesting question from Ortus about Lyctorhood. “Do you think it is a central tragedy to them, their great age, their timelessness? . . . Time can render one impotent beyond meaning” (p. 71).
- Where does this question come from? It doesn’t sound much like the Ortus we know, not that he’s incapable of deep thought, but that he’s unlikely to ask Harrow.
- “I contain multitudes” (p. 72): Shoutout to Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass.
- The message means nothing yet. You haven’t missed anything. Will it mean something? Oh yes. When you see it, you’ll see it.
Chapter 6: Skull header: Eighth House. Time: Same. 2nd person.
Harrow wakes to find herself paralyzed and being pushed down a corridor in a wheelchair while listening to an argument between a Lyctor — Mercymorn, the Saint of Joy (who is anything but) and founder of the Eighth House — and a military officer about whether or not Harrow should be moved. Mercymorn wins. Harrow realizes that she’s paralyzed because someone tied the dorsal root of her spinal cord into a knot and she undoes it. When Mercy asks her age, the Body, who is nearby, tells her to lie, so she tells her she’s 15. Mercy is relieved by that, and then blames Harrow for God sitting outside the Dominicus system for so long, calling her, “Some lost Ninth scrap who never had anything to do with anything . . . a nobody” (p. 78).
Mercy deposits her at a shuttle, where Ianthe is already waiting. Inside, a Cohort necromancer paints a ghost ward in her own blood on the back wall. Ianthe tells her that the Empire has lost 3 warships and 18,000 people to orbital missiles, and the Erebos will go back into action. God arrives, argues with Mercy, loses the argument, and makes a farewell speech before boarding the shuttle and leaving.
God explains that, to reach the Mithraeum, 40 billion light years away, the shuttle is going to travel through the River. What follows is a (relatively) easy to follow explanation of River dynamics and it’s worth reading twice, since the River is the metaphysical place where the dead go and, if you thought Canaan House was haunted, the River is much more so, absolutely filled with vengeful and angry spirits. God explains that he can keep their physical bodies intact, but they will have to hold on to their souls during the trip.
Only Ianthe and Harrow can see what haunts them. Something terrifies Ianthe. The water comes in.
- This is a packed chapter. First off we meet Mercymorn, and she’s had just enough of everyone. Throughout the book, Mercy is simply done.
- “A sudden one-two punch . . . a stiletto, an unutterably focused dart, a syringe” (p. 75) and the officer faints. This is the first indication of Mercy’s absolute mastery of the body.
- “Mercy threw her hands in the air, milking an invisible and gigantic cow in order to assuage her feelings” (p. 87).
- Mercy is really. . . extra.
- The shuttle “was of a size, in fact, with the type that had used to bring the Ninth House lightbulb filaments and vitamin supplements” (p. 79). Recall from Judith’s “Cohort Intelligence Files” that deliveries to the Ninth House were top secret and the military really ought to investigate what went on there. So what went on? Lightbulbs and vitamins.
- The necromancer painting the ghost ward is from the Seventh House (seafoam green ribbon), and painting it with her own blood. As she finishes, she lies dying on the floor — a perfectly beautiful death — until God brings her back and gives her a commendation instead. She seems disappointed.
- When Ianthe reports the loss of 18,000 troops, what’s been going on in the background — conversations about resources and allocations, etc., becomes clear: they’re on a war footing, and the war that was distant and abstract in Gideon has moved a lot closer.
- Admiral Sarpedon protests Mercy taking the Emperor away, but Mercy is having none of it. In Greek mythology and literature, Sarpedon was a demi-god, a son of Zeus and a soldier who fought for Troy. He was killed in battle by Patroklos and carried to Hades by Death and Sleep. And this Sarpedon commands the Erebos, personification of darkness, a god of death, a region of Hades, and a powerful figure in Magic, the Gathering. (Muir draws from many sources.)
- The admiral has last seen Mercymorn around twenty years ago. Tuck that in the back of your mind. Also you might remind yourself that he sees fit to remind her of this.
- Arriving, God embraces Mercymorn, who “froze as though dipped in liquid nitrogen” (p. 83). Not a stretch to assume that this is a complex relationship.
- God’s “wind ‘em up” speeches (there are two) are worth noting for several features.
- He tells Sarpedon, “I know who was behind this.”
- “Our enemies have once more raised their hands to those who would be at peace with them . . . Again, we are a violated covenant, and again we are struck at with anger, and with fear, by those who cannot reason and those who cannot forgive what we are . . . On your death, I will make the very blood in your body arrows and spears” (p. 91).
- Beyond the rhetoric of grievance there’s a perfunctory quality to this speech. In 10,000 years, how many times has he given it?
- The empire that harvests death energy is the one that wants peace. Let that sink in.
- God wears a “crown of office” — ribbon, endlessly moving pearlescent leaves, and infants’ fingerbones.
- Gross.
- Also, his clothes are worn and shabby.
- “There was a partitioned area that might have been for bodily functions — or going to the toilet, as everyone else in the known universe would have put it” (p. 86). A distinctive narrative voice, one that’s also put out because Harrow doesn’t know what a pommel is.
- “The option of destruction had been your constant companion since you were three years old” (pp. 92-93). We have not heard about this before. Something happened when Harrow was three to put her life in constant jeopardy.
- “Faster-than-light travel turned out to be a snare — the way it was originally cracked, anyway. The first method destroyed something to do with time and distance, rendering it unusable for any good purpose...” (p. 93).
- Here Muir introduces the idea of FTL and it not working as advertised. Note it here, embedded early but very important — pivotal, I suspect, by the time we get to Alecto.
- hyperpotamous: adj., Greek. Def: ability to move fast through a river. Courtesy of my undergrad Classics professor. Thanks, Dr. Lisle — you were awesome.
- “We are about to travel forty billion light years, to where we first ran . . . myself, and my remaining six. One of our number was dead already, and another had been removed from play” (p. 95). The dead and removed have not yet been named.
- Mercy tells Harrow and Ianthe that, if they leave their souls behind, she’ll kill their bodies before letting them become hosts for “any horrible or evil or lonely thing, any miserable revenant, or worse” (p. 98).
Chapter 7: Skull header: Sixth House. Time: Same. 2nd person.
The Emperor (hereafter referred to as John) tells Ianthe and Harrow that in the River their souls will leave their bodies, so they have to focus on staying inside the shuttle. The shuttle fills with water and gross body parts. Something bumps Harrow’s foot and she tries to ice her feet over with bones but the theorem doesn’t work properly, her leg opens up, and she opens her eyes to find she’s in a sea of bodies, the 200 who were killed to create her. No one else can see them. John tries to retrieve her soul from its depths in the river as Mercy begins to panic and relives Cassiopeia’s death. As the shuttle starts to disintegrate and Mercy is thoroughly panicked, John grabs Harrow and she feels him catch hold of her just before she loses herself.
- For the first time we see Ianthe vulnerable; the water, and whatever she’s seeing, terrify her.
- Harrow hears “a thin cry of violence” and says, “Someone’s crying, Lord” (p. 104).
- You just know the three-syllable nonsense word John mumbles is “kumbayah.”
- Take note of the “thin cry of violence” that no one else seems to hear.
- “’She can’t be using theorems,’ said Mercy. ‘She’d be barely awake and it’s totally beyond her at this poi — John, stop her she’s using theorems!’” (p. 104).
- Mercy routinely underestimates Harrow’s abilities.
- Among the pile of murdered children, “A rubber-bodied toddler with a painted face and very red hair lay dead beside your knee and for some reason it was this that destroyed you, it was this that kindled within you something you had no hope of defending against. You howled in a purity of fright” (p. 105).
- Something in Harrow remembers Gideon.
- “The throttle, Mercy, in Christabel’s name!” (p. 107). As we shall see, a most serious oath.
- “Five points of light” (p. 107). Five souls in the shuttle. Harrow sees them.
- There’s John, Mercy, Ianthe, Harrow. . . and who else? Or:
- Since Harrow is the one who’s seeing it, she sees John, Mercy, Ianthe, and who else?
Chapter 8 Skull header: fractured Fourth House. Time: indeterminate. 3rd person.
At the welcome ceremony at Canaan House, Teacher asks for the Ninth House prayer. Harrow blanks, so Ortus delivers the prayer, with an additional blessing to God as “the Lord of the Sharpest Edge.” For blessing, Ortus asks only that his bones be interred in the Anastasian, which is the tomb of warriors, which Harrow thinks is unlikely. Teacher doles out the key rings, and each has a facility key attached. He outlines the history of Canaan House and what happened there, and warns the group to be quiet, lest they wake the Sleeper, because the Sleeper will destroy them all. Ortus is terrified, and on the way to their quarters, tells Harrow she needs a different cavalier. She reprimands him, and their skeleton servitor turns and asks, “Is this how it happens?” (p. 115).
- These are short but packed chapters!
- Note Harrow being utterly off her game, so that she can’t start the Ninth House prayer, can’t tolerate the looks the others of the group give her and Ortus, can’t stand the skeletons, and can’t even deal with the fact that they scatter flower petals for them as they arrive. And she hates tea, both for the taste and the temperature. She’s not so far gone, though, that Ortus doesn’t bring out her cruel and snarky side.
- The Anastasian: named for Anastasia, Harrow’s forebear, who founded the line of Tomb Keepers (p. 109).
- “Ortus went up for his prize and returned it to present to his necromancer, as he ought” (p. 110). It’s upside-down day in Canaan House! Or maybe this is an indicator of how different things would have been, if Harrow had taken Ortus in Gideon.
- Teacher’s speech is worth bookmarking and reading a few times. He’s gone from revealing nothing (in Gideon) to spilling everything.
- One thing is the same: in Gideon Teacher warned of terrifying unfed ghosts in the billions; here he warns of the Sleeper: “how long that creature has lain there I do not know; but I do know that they are your greatest threat, for although they lie in sleep . . . in that sleep, they walk” (p. 111).
- “One of the grotesquely young pair of the Fourth . . . bleated, ‘There’s a — monster in a research laboratory? And we’ve got to — fight it?’” (p. 112) Which is archetypical and funny, until you remember that the monster in the research laboratory killed them.
- Moreover, they can’t wake the Sleeper: “I know the Sleeper yearns to escape its incognizant state and pick up where they left off — for if they wake, none of us will live” (p. 112). This means nothing now, but make a note.
- Ortus asks Harrow why she chose him and she says there was no one else: “His mask slipped, and not a mask made of alabaster and black paint [again with the masks!] . . . she realised with electrified astonishment that he was exasperated. ‘You never did possess an imagination’” (p. 114). This is a strange little slip-up.
- Again with the masks. Again with the hiding of the self.
- “Is this how it happens?” (p. 115).
Chapter 9 Skull header: Seventh House. Time: Same. 2nd person.
Harrow comes to lying in the pew of a chapel on the Mithraeum, which is beautiful in a bony, creepy way. John, Mercy and one other that Harrow comes to learn is Augustine kneel by Cytherea’s coffin. It’s her funeral and they’re telling stories. John sees Ianthe and Harrow are awake and he brings them to the coffin to introduce them, cutting through a simmering argument between Mercy and Augustine. A third Lyctor bursts in to tell them that Number Seven is at the galaxy rim and will arrive within ten months. He asks whether they should run or fight? John decides it’s time to fight, thanks the Lyctor for coming home, and calls him “Ortus the First.” Harrow’s ears start to bleed and she faints.
- There’s a lot of history in this chapter that you’ll be tempted to skip. Understandable. It’s important chronology though, so you should expect you’ll come back to it at some point.
- There’s not so much history, though, that we can pass over Ianthe peeking down Harrow’s shirt, and both Harrow and the narrator noticing it (p. 119).
- There was a miracle at Rhodes that John had gone to see, “but I asked not to see the woman — just so I could be a disinterested party — and of course once I saw that she was necromantic I said yes . . “ (p. 119).
- “Loveday brought her in, looking as though she wanted every one of us beaten to death, and she could hardly walk. . .” (p. 119) Pronouns are a little imprecise: I take it to mean that Loveday wanted everyone beaten to death, and Cytherea could hardly walk. Loveday was Cytherea’s cavalier.
- I want to mention here that, in Gideon, John tells Harrow that Cytherea had been in pain the whole time she was a Lyctor. Imagine 10,000 years of existence. Imagine being in pain and actively dying for 10,000 years. Imagine being one of God’s saints, one of the handful closest to him. God can resurrect the dead. God can heal any infirmity. Why does God let Cytherea suffer for 10,000 years when it’s clearly in his power to heal her? What does this tell us about God?
- Cytherea was the second generation of John’s disciples. They agree that the Sixth House installation was “up and running” but some of the Houses were empty. Valency and Anastasia were with them (p. 120). These are just names right now, but they’re not put here randomly.
- “’When was the last time you saw her?’ This last question was asked a little abruptly” (p. 120)
- Augustine says it was ten years ago, Mercymorn says it was twenty.
- Mercy on Cytherea: “I never say her cry except once . . . The day after. When we put together the research. When she became a Lyctor. I said, There was no alternative. She said . . . She said, We had the choice to stop” (p. 121).
- “After a second, the Prince Undying sank his head into his hands. . . It was the first time that he had seemed at all mortal. Humanity touched him briefly, like a passing shadow” (p. 121).
- Nobody liked Loveday.
Chapter 10 Skull header: fractured Fifth House. Time: indeterminate. 3rd person.
In the library, Abigail Pent and Harrow have a conversation about poetry and lyctoral remnants when Abigail rattles Harrow about her ability to read spirit signatures. She retreats and picks a fight with Ortus who, surprisingly stands up to her. Abigail has given her a lyctoral note, which reads one way to Harrow, and another to Ortus. This chapter is all about the delicious details.
- We start with some poetry from the Noniad, which Ortus is reciting for Abigail and Magnus when Harrow interrupts. Magnus protests, “Nonius is about to give the rebels what-for. I never got what-for in school. Fifth poetry is very much I come from climes of sulphur gas/I shine in plasma sheet/Er-hem-er-hem-er hem, surpass/My spot a crimson feat, and by then I was always comatose. One little stanza of what-for, I beg of you” (p. 127).
- Not only is this delightful, it indicates that the Fifth House writes poetry in common measure. And that the House is on Jupiter. Appropriate.
- Harrow might hate the Noniad but she knows it thoroughly, and can’t imagine that others might not agree with her.
- Abigail has been ransacking the library and loving all the “Lyctoral traces — phwoar” (p. 129).
- Magnus found an ancient epigram with a punchline “Yes, but my bone expands when I touch it, which at least proves that joke is as old the the Nine Houses themselves” (p. 129).
- Abigail offers Harrow a Lyctoral note. Harrow notes that she’s reassembled from some torn flimsy part of an old recipe, and Abigail says with with a positive ID and some blood, maybe a few more samples of the writing, she could call the writer’s ghost. Magnus discourages her. Saying that scholarship is “best made as a communal effort,” she gives a paper — real paper — to Harrow and asks her what she makes of it.
- “M told us yesterday that Nigella ‘eats like a child,’ so I” (p. 130). The author is likely Cassiopeia, founder of the Sixth House. Her cavalier was Nigella. The recipe is also likely Cassiopeia’s as (later) she’s mentioned as a splendid cook [this is really not a spoiler]. M is Mercymorn, the only one of the original necromancer/cavalier group whose name starts with M. It’s nice to know she’s always been such a ray of sunshine.
- Magnus has asked Abigail not to try to call the ghost because, as Harrow deduces, “You would need something for it to feast on” (p. 130), and there’s no telling what it might be hungry for.
- Abigail notes that no one has ever tried to call a Lyctor, and she doesn’t know where their spirits go, whether they enter the River. “Do Lyctors pass as we pass? I don’t know where they wait. I don’t know how to direct them” (p. 130). So the spirits in the River are . . . waiting? Waiting for what? And what does it mean that she can direct them? These are questions we can’t answer yet.
- Harrow has no idea how to answer Abigail’s generosity: “if it had been her in possession of Abigail Pent’s resources, she would have kept them all to herself. On dying she would have put them all in a chest and buried them to keep them from the greedy eyes of other scholars for another thousand years” (p. 131). Yet another difference between Harrow and the other Houses, which speaks to the poverty and isolation of the Ninth. It’s also a comment on scholars in general, that some share collegially while others hoard.
- In the middle of the conversation, Magnus looks hard at Harrow and asks, “Is this really how it happens?”
- Another instance of the “Is this how it happens?” question. Eventually, we’ll turn it into a drinking game.
- “Is it an ancestral Locked Tomb tradition for your spirit energy to be so diverse? . . . I’ve counted up to one hundred and fifty signatures contributing to you, and there’s more — they’re stamps rather than complete revenants, of course, which means their spirits were manipulated to leave marks on you in some way, which is fascinating if it means . . .” (p. 132). More information about how Harrow was conceived. It’s going to be important, I suspect.
- Having been so frightened by Abigail’s perception, Harrow immediately lashes out at Ortus, even yelling at him for the tone of his voice. He agrees that she’s in charge of his body, but assets his right to his own emotions: “When I lay me down to sleep, I am a fully grown man who is allowed to feel precisely what I want, about anything I want. There has never been a rule against doing so, and that has always been my deep and unyielding relief with regard to you — to my lady mother — to Captain Aiglamene” (p. 133).
- Not to belabor the point, but life in the Ninth has been awful for all, if pampered Ortus’ dearest comfort is that he has a private interior life not subject to anyone else. Everyone in the Ninth adored Harrow, who felt the full weight of their devotion; everyone hated Gideon, traumatizing her; Ortus is a complete misfit: a poet in a cavalier’s body, neither 8th nor 9th, ostentatiously coddled by his mother, the only man under the age of, well, dotage, and a disappointment to all.
- Also, “Now I lay me down to sleep” — either poetic or infantalized, since it’s a children’s prayer. You choose. Could be one thing to Ortus and another to the reader.
- The note that Abigail gives to Harrow reads: THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME SO I DID THE IMPLANTATION MYSELF YOU SELF-SERVING ZOMBIE AND YOU STILL SENT HIM AFTER ME AND I WOULD HAVE HAD HIM IF I HADN’T BEEN COMPROMISED AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE SAW ME AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME AND FOR THAT I’LL MAKE YOU BOTH SUFFER UNTIL YOU NO LONGER UNDERSTAND THE MEANING OF THAT GODDAMNED WORD” (p. 134).
- Still angry, more complete. Whoever is writing these notes is getting more energetic. It’s so out of keeping with the rest of the narrative, stylistically and tonally, that you have to wonder where it’s coming from.
- Zombie? And who’s “him”? Who is this addressed to, anyway?
- When Harrow snarls at Ortus, “For the love of God, Ortus, I need a cavalier with backbone,” he replies, “You always did. And I am glad, I think, that I never became that cavalier” (p. 135).
Chapter 11 Skull header: Seventh House. Time: Same. 2nd person.
John finds Harrow in the chapel, with the sword thrust through Cytherea’s breast. She doesn’t know how she got there.
Memes
Courtesy of Reading the End. Occasionally I will note a reference they don’t have.
PINS
Here is a list of things I suggested we pay attention to.
Gideon the ninth
- Who are Gideon’s parents?
- “Die in a fire, Nonagesimus.” (p. 47)
- Aiglamene: “Things are changing. I used to think we were waiting for something...and now I think we’re just waiting to die.” (p. 55)
- “You’ll do what I say, or I’ll mix bone meal in with your breakfast and punch my way through your gut.” (p. 60)
- Canaan House: “a House both long dead and unkillable ” (p. 66) — Why can God not return?
- The common prayer: “Let the King Undying, ransomer of death, scourge of death, vindicator of death, look upon the Nine Houses and hear their thanks. Let the whole of everywhere entrust themselves to him. Let those across the river pledge beyond the tomb to the adept divine, the first among necromancers. Thanks be to the Ninefold Resurrection. Thanks be to the Lyctor divinely ordained. He is Emperor and he became God; he is God, and he became Emperor” (p. 81)
- The Eight Houses worship the Emperor; the Ninth House worships the Tomb.
- First mention of “across the river.” The liminal space where the soul goes.
- Those across the River are to pledge “beyond the tomb” to the Emperor.
- The Ninefold Resurrection: we still don’t know what it is, but it sounds important.
- Echoes of “He was God, and became Man.”
- Dulcinea: “The eyes narrowed with intent, and for a moment the face was all business. There was something swift and cool in the blueness of those eyes, some deep intelligence, some sheer shameless depth and breadth of looking…. ’Lipochrome… recessive” (pp. 105-106).
- Palamedes: “Either this entire building was scavenged from a garbage hopper, or I am being systematically lied to on a molecular level” (p. 132).
- “’Down there resides the sum of all necromantic transgression . . . The unperceivable howl of ten thousand million unfed ghosts who will hear each echoed footstep as defilement….” (p. 151).
- “Necromantic transgression.”
- Ten thousand million is ten billion.
- Harrow says, “I never liked that sword. I always felt like it was judging me.”
- Our first “ONE FLESH, ONE END,” on a book flyleaf, signed G&P. Who are G & P?
- The 10,000 year-old note that Gideon finds: “ut we all know the sad + trying realit / is that this will remain incomplete t / the last. He can’t fix my deficiencies her / ease give Gideon my congratulations, howev” (p. 210).
- “ Just hours before, she’d wrestled Harrow down in the dirt, and Harrow had scratched until she’d had half of Gideon’s face beneath her fingernails” (p. 333).
- Gideon asks Harrow what’s behind the door of the Tomb: “There’s a blood ward bypass on the doors which will only respond for the Necromancer Divine, but I knew there had to be an exploit...” (p. 357).
- The note, “CONFIRMED INDEPENDENTLY / HIGHLIGHTED BEST OPTION / ASK E.J.G. /YRS, ANASTASIA. / P.S. GIVE ME BACK MY CALIPERS / I NEED THEM” (p. 368).
- Teacher is a construct. A construct (a puppet) needs a puppeteer, but no one appears to be controlling him. Just what is Teacher? A prototype, but for what?
- Ianthe: “I studied what happened when the Lord our Kindly God took our dead and dying Houses and brought them back to life, all those years ago… what price he would have had to pay. What displacement, the soul of a planet? What happens when a planet dies?”
- Ianthe: “I’m interested in the place between death and life . . . the place between release and disappearance. The place over the river. The displacement . . . where the soul goes when we knock it about . . . where the things are that eat us” (p. 382).
- Eight steps: preserve the cavalier’s soul, analyze it, absorb it, fix it in place, incorporate it, consume the flesh, reconstruct the spirit/flesh relationship, get the juice flowing.
- God will talk about the Eight-fold word. This is it.
- Colum Asht is possessed by something with mouths for eyes, a long blue tongue.
- “’Gideon!’ he called out. ‘Tell Camilla —‘ He stopped. ‘Oh, never mind. She knows what to do” (p. 404).
- “Harrow said, with some difficulty: ‘I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it’” (p. 437).
- God: “There are things out there that even death cannot keep down. I have been fighting them since the Resurrection. I can’t fight them by myself’” (p. 441).
- God can’t go down Canaan House. Harrow asks him why not, since that seemed to be the whole of Cytherea’s plan. “The Emperor said, ‘I saved the world once — but not for me” (p. 443). He doesn’t answer her question.
- God promises to renew the Ninth House. He asks her to help him hold on to the universe for a little while longer. Or she can go home to the Ninth. He offers her the choice.
Appendices of Gideon the Ninth
- Thanergenic planets: are powered by thanergy. Only the Nine Houses are thanergenic.
- Thanergy planets: are planets in the process of being killed by necromancy. Every part of the Empire outside the Nine Houses is made of thanergy planets, whose inhabitants are colonized, but aren’t citizens.
- From “A Sermon on Cavaliers and Necromancers”: “Sword marriages aren’t real.” Sword marriage: a necro/cav pair married to one other person.
The Mysterious study of Doctor sex
- Dulcinea writes a letter to “My dearest pals...” Either to Palamedes or to him and Camilla both.
- The Lyctoral letter:
Darling girl,
Tomorrow you will become a Lyctor and finally go where I can’t follow. I want you to keep this letter when you are far away and think of me and want me and can’t have me, and know that no matter how far you travel, nor how long the years feel, the one thing that never stays entombed is
Harrow the Ninth
- The Mithraeum. The bovine skulls in Canaan House.
- Harrow: “Beloved dead...let me live long enough to die at your feet.”
The houses
First House
- House of the Emperor, his servants, and his Lyctors.
- Seat: Once Canaan House, now the Mithraeum.
- Skull: no adornment.
- Planet: Earth
Second House
- Colors: white and scarlet, martial. Home of the Cohort, God’s armies.
- Characteristics: discipline
- Necro: Judith Deuteros, age 22, (Judith beheaded Holofernes), cavalier: Marta Dyas, age 27, (Marta=martial).
- Lyctor: Ortus, his cavalier: Pyrrha Dve.
- Canaan House trial: Projection and winnowing (the big bone construct).
- Specialty: Spirit magic, use of thanergy in battle. They siphon their enemies to strengthen their cavaliers.
- Skull: A Spartan-style helmet
- Planet: Mars
Third House
- Colors: Violet?
- Characteristics: wealth and flash
- Necro: Ianthe and Coronabeth Tridentarius, princesses of Ida, both age 21, cavalier: Naberius Tern, age 23, Resurrection-pure line.
- Lyctor: Cyrus; his cavalier: Valancy Trinit.
- Cyrus drew the sixth Resurrection beast into a black hole.
- Valency thinks that “one flesh, one end” sounds like instructions for a sex toy.
- Specialty: Spirit magic, “animaphilia” — lover of the soul
- Skull: Jewels in the eyeholes.
- Planet:
Fourth House
- Colors: Blue
- Characteristics: courage
- Necro: Isaac Tettares, Baron of Tisis, age 13, (Biblical Isaac foreshadows Christ’s sacrifice, Gideon Isaac foreshadows Gideon’s sacrifice), Resurrection-pure line; cavalier: Jeannemary Chateur, knight of Tisis, age 14 (ref to Jeanne d’Arc), Resurrection-pure line.
- Lyctor: Ulysses; his cavalier: Titania Tetra.
- Specialty: Spirit magic? It’s unclear, but Abigail Pent was training Isaac, so it’s logical.
- Skull: Wears a laurel wreath
- Planet: Mars? (It fits the war theme, and is adjacent to Jupiter.)
- Notes: The Fourth supplies soldiers and necromancers to the Cohort. The Fourth has large families, since so many die in battle. The Fourth is first on the ground in war.
Fifth House
- Colors: nothing formal, but sensible brown works.
- Characteristics: Intelligence. Temporal power.
- Necro: Abigail Pent, age 37, Koniortos Court cavalier: Magnus Quinn, age 38. Husband and wife.
- Lyctor: Augustine; his cavalier: Alfred Quinque.
- Alfred, with Christabel, coin the phrase “one flesh, one end.”
- Specialty: Sprit magic, speaking to the dead. Abigail is a famed historian.
- Skull: Wears a decorated headband, possibly a crown of thorns (h/t Ahianne).
- Planet: Jupiter
- Notes: “Koniortos” = “dust” (h/t BMScott).
Sixth House
- Colors: gray
- Characteristics: scholarship, rare book librarian and conservatorship skills, medical expertise
- Necro: Palamedes Sextus, master warden, age 20, (Palamedes: genius Greek soldier in the Trojan War), cavalier: Camilla Hect, age 20. Second cousins.
- Lyctor: Cassiopeia; her cavalier: Nigella Shodash.
- Cassiopeia developed the magma metaphor to explain travel in the River.
- She led a Resurrection Beast into the River and was ripped apart by ghosts in seven minutes.
- Described by John as “brilliant and sensible and careful.” (HtN, p. 97).
- Specialty: Flesh magic, emphasis on science and magic.
- Skull: Clutches a scroll in its teeth.
- Planet: Mercury
- Notes: the Sixth House developed the process of cramming numerous souls into a body. Purpose and application still unclear.
Seventh House
- Colors: seafoam green
- Characteristics: love of beauty, especially the fleeting type. Fans of the beautiful death and heirs with hereditary cancer.
- Necro: Dulcinea Septimus, duchess of Rhodes, age 27; cavalier: Protesilaus Ebdoma, age 39 (Protesilaus: the first Greek to die in the Trojan war). Rhodes: island in the Aegean, site of the Colossus, visited by both Herod the Great and the Apostle Paul.
- Lyctor: Cytherea and Loveday
- Specialty: flesh magic, with emphasis on the “beguiling corpse.”
- Skull: A rose in one eyehole.
- Planet: Venus
Eighth House
- Colors: White
- Characteristics: orthodox purity, dogmatism, “White Templars,” the “Forgiving House”
- Necro: Silas Octakiseron, age 16; cavalier: Colum Asht, age 32, 34, or 37.
- Lyctor: Mercymorn; her cavalier: Cristabel Oct.
- With Alfred, Christabel coined the phrase “one flesh, one end.”
- Specialty: spirit magic, focus on soul siphoning. Also hypocrisy.
- Skull: Blindfolded, denoting blind loyalty.
- Planet:
Ninth House
- Colors: black
- Characteristics: devotion to the Locked Tomb.
- Necro: Harrowhark Nonagesimus, age 17; cavalier: Gideon Nav, age 19.
- Not-a-Lyctor: Anastasia; her cavalier: Samael Novenary.
- Specialty: bone magic.
- Skull: lacking a mandible.
- Planet: Pluto.
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