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The Locked Tomb Read: Gideon the Ninth, Act 4, Part 2 [1]

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Date: 2023-02-06  

Oh my. My oh my. Wasn’t that something? Let us wipe our tears and get started — we still have one (short) act to go.

Chapter 32 (Skull header: the Second House)

Harrow and Palamedes join forces to make a bone copy of the key that Dulcinea possessed and Silas Octakiseron had taken. This requires the winnowing challenge, the first challenge that Gideon and Harrow had completed. It works. Palamedes describes the challenge, which he completed, and it’s a riddle, but the key had already been claimed. One of the things he learned is that the skeleton servitors are sentient — they’re revenants attached to their skeletons. Harrow is disturbed that she hadn’t figured it out, while Palamedes really wants to learn how it worked. He shows Harrow the tooth, and she removes the enamel to uncover a message: “Five Hundred into Fifty. It is finished!” (p. 367) . Gideon and Palamedes look at a pinboard covered with groups of colored pins clustered around single white pins; although most have just a few pins surrounding a white pin, one has more than one hundred. Flipping through a binder, Camilla finds a note and a series of photos, and one of them is of Teacher. Just then, the fire alarm goes off and the four head to the atrium, where they find a skeleton sprawled on the floor. They find more skeletons in the kitchens, where a fire on the stove has gotten out of control and set off the alarms. Piles of bones are everywhere. The four head to Dulcinea’s room, where the attending priest is dead. They go in search of Teacher and find him dead, Marta Dyas horribly dead, and Judith Deuteros well on the way to being dead. Harrow tells Judith that Teacher was a prototype and a “thing of ridiculous power,” but he wasn’t a murderer. Judith reports that the Emperor is coming and, with his last breaths, Teacher says that the Emperor can’t return. Then he says, “Oh, Lord — Lord — Lord one of them has come back —“ (p. 374). Judith won’t leave with them, and they leave her there, keeping watch over the bodies.

A lot of information is laid out in this chapter; a lot of strings are being drawn together. Things to note among them:

Palamedes can replicate an item down to its microscopic level. But by himself he can’t do anything with it. With Harrow, though, they have a chance: “She was using bone like clay — a medium she could shape not just into one of a bunch of predetermined forms, but into something that had never existed before” (p. 363). Not that Harrow doesn’t have her doubts: “I’ve never had to work with something so small before.” “’That’s what she said,’ murmured Gideon, sotto voice” (p. 363). We’ve seen this before. Palamedes’ reaction: “’No I did not actually think that was going to happen. Masterful work, Reverend Daughter —“ and he gave her a little mock bow. “’Yes,’ said Harrow. ‘Congratulations to you also, Master Warden” (p. 364). This mutual respect is adorable. Imagine how it could have gone if the contestants hadn’t gone all stabby-stabby on each other.

“Gideon did not know how to handle this new, overprotective Harrowhark, this girl with the hunted expression. She kept looking at Gideon with the screwed-up eyes of someone who had been handed an egg for safekeeping and was surrounded by egg-hunting snakes” (p. 364). Let’s talk about how much this relationship has changed. I’m not saying that rainbows unfurled and unicorns flutter through them, but just the sharing their mutual trauma has lightened the burden on both, and left Gideon unsure of herself.

Muir has a habit of folding essential information in the spaces between critical events, almost encouraging us to glide over it. She does it here: the skeleton servitors are fully sentient revenants. Palamedes: “No ghost remnants, nothing — this is impossible, you understand, it meant the spirit had somehow been removed entirely...The skeletons aren’t reanimations, Ninth, they’re revenants: ghosts inhabiting a physical shell… They are autonomously powering themselves. It debunks every piece of thanergy theory I ever learned.” (p. 366). So where is the energy coming from? On this same subject, Palamedes takes up Harrow’s argument for a secret power source: “The problem with necromancy...is that the acts themselves, if understood, aren’t difficult to do. But maintaining anything . . . we’re glass cannons. Our military survives because we have hundreds of thousands of heavily armed men and women with big swords… Thanergy’s transient. A necromancer’s biggest threat is honestly themselves. My whole House for a reliable food source —“ (pp. 367-8). Something provides the power for all the spells that make Canaan House run, but they/we haven’t found it yet. The power source issue is still unsolved. Also, note the Shakespearean echo from Richard III, Act V, Scene 4.

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). Stick a pin here (metaphorically, of course.)

There’s Teacher, in a 10,000 year old photo! There at the beginning! Gosh, do you think he has anything to do with those clusters of pins and the “Five Hundred into Fifty / It Is Finished!” notation? Note the “It is finished” echo and its equivocation: the sacrificial nature of Jesus’ words, “It is finished” vs the triumphant sense of “we got it done!” We don’t yet know enough to tell how to read these words. Harrow and Palamedes realize that Teacher is also a construct. A construct (a puppet) needs a puppeteer, but no one appears to be controlling him. Just what is Teacher? Harrow says later that he’s a prototype, but for what?

All the skeleton servitors collapsed. Camilla touches one of the bones and “it dissolved into ash like a sigh” (p. 370).

Weird little interlude with Dulcinea. The priest is dead and she asks, “What can anyone do to me now?” (p. 371).

When the Second attacked Teacher, the skeletons tried to intervene, but couldn’t get into the room. Before dying, Teacher did the pair some horrific damage. Judith’s left arm is withered and she has a horrific gut wound. Marta is worse: “her skeleton and her body had apparently tried to divorce” (p. 372). Who’s at fault? Was it the Second, trying to call for help and save lives? Or was it Teacher, who maintained that Canaan House was beyond human authority and his directions came straight from the Emperor? Can we assume the Emperor intended this to happen? Or can we say that the Emperor, who is also God, failed to anticipate events? How can God not anticipate all outcomes? Judith is unrepentant: “Go tell them she avenged the Fifth and the Fourth… We fixed the problem none of the rest of you could” (p. 373). But did she? Harrow says not, and believes that Teacher was created to guard Canaan House. “There is something a great deal more dangerous than an old experiment loose in the First House, and he could have helped us find out what it is” (p. 373). A couple of weeks ago I noted that Judith and Marta, for all their annoying mannerisms, appear to be the only ones to recognize that they’re being murdered by monsters. Is that reason to either discount or despise them for being buzzkills on the “let’s solve the mystery!” front? Judith: “Nobody should ever have to watch their cavalier die” (p. 374). Cue the foreshadowing!

“One of them has come back” !?! Did Teacher not recognize her before now?

Chapter 33 (Skull header: Eighth House)

The Eighth House has entered the chat! Silas is out of sorts because the Third has “opened up” Abigail. The Ninth and Sixth go with the Eighth to the morgue, where Palamedes realizes his error — Abigail and Magnus had completed a challenge and gotten a key, and the murderer had stashed it inside her body and smoothed the flesh over the wound (have we seen that particular kind of magic in action yet?) Turns out the Eighth hasn’t even used the keys they took.

Silas: “I hate this House. I despise the reduction of a holy temple to a maze and a puzzle. I took the keys so that you wouldn’t have them. Nor the Sixth, nor the Third” (p. 378). The monks of the Eighth House exemplify blind obedience, or such strict adherence to the letter of law that they miss the spirit of it. With the loss of the Second House and the revelation that part of the lyctor experiments involved a “how many souls can you cram into a Volkswagen?” challenge, Silas is fixated on the fact that someone massaged Abigail’s kidney. Palamedes calls Silas “a dog in a manger,” which is not a meme but is an idiom that apparently survived the extinction event.

They agree that half the ashes from the incinerator are from Protesilaus. They don’t know who belonged to the other half.

Palamedes: “’The living have to take precedence here, if we want to keep living.’ “As it turned out, he was wrong” (p. 378). Unless I’m much mistaken, this is the first time a narrator’s voice intrudes in the book. In the whole book.



Chapter 34 (Skull header: Third House)

The three pairs (the Sixth, Eighth and Ninth) go to the door with the jammed lock, the one that Harrow cleared, and find it unlocked. The door opens on a very different kind of room, one that’s actually beautiful, or would be had there not been a message “YOU LIED TO US” on the wall, Coronabeth huddled on the floor, crying, Naberius sprawled on the floor, dead, and Ianthe reclining on the floor, having become a Lyctor. Ianthe tells them that she reverse-engineered the lyctoral process by herself, because Coronabeth is not a necromancer and never was. Silas challenges her. Despite attempts to dissuade the Eighth, Colum fights her until Ianthe raises the grossest protective shield imaginable (Ianthe’s magic is unspeakably disgusting). Silas steps up and, ignoring Colum’s pleas not to siphon him, he uses Colum to drain Ianthe, until something possesses Colum’s body and kills Silas. Ianthe kills it and tells them, “There are worse things than myself in this building. Have that one for free” (p. 393). She disappears in a puddle of Silas’ blood, and Gideon moves to comfort Corona, who says, “She took Babs...And who even cares about Babs? Babs! She could have taken me” (p. 394).

Whew, lots to unpack here:

Whose rooms are these? (Bet you know already).

“You lied to us” in caps and bold, for emphasis. Who lied, and to whom?

So Ianthe is a lyctor. She’s having trouble because Naberius did not go willingly, and fights her the whole way. Her triumphant speech is half self-pitying boast and half anticlimax.

So now we know why the energy signatures didn’t add up, and what lyctorhood is. “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?” (p. 382). Stick a pin in that. 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. Palamedes had already figured it out and rejected the process as “ghastly, and obvious” (p. 383). “’I haven’t killed Naberius Tern. I ate Naberius Tern,’ she said indifferently. ‘I put a sword through his heart to pin his soul in place. Then I took it into my body. I’ve robbed Death itself...I have drunk up the substance of his immortal soul. And now I will burn him and burn him and burn him, and he will never really die. I have absorbed Naberius Tern… I am more than the sum of his half, and mine’” (p. 384). “Even the rapiers — light swords, light enough to be held by an amateur . . . . Did you notice that none of those challenges could be completed by yourself? No, you didn’t, and yet that was the biggest red flag” (p. 385). Silas starts to get it: “To walk with the dead forever...enormous power, recycled within you, from the ultimate sacrifice...to make yourself a tomb” (p. 385). He sees it and even the ghastly monk rejects lyctorhood.

The necromancer/lyctor battle between Silas and Ianthe is really something else, and Silas has her on the ropes . . . right up until the moment he doesn’t. And that happens when Colum becomes something else: “He now moved like there were six people inside him, and none of those six people had ever been inside a human being before” (pp. 391-392). The mouths for eyes, the long tongue — this is something we’ve not seen before. Make a note of it.

In the middle of everything, Palamedes touches the writing of the “You lied to us” message and goes entirely still. Remember, he can read psychometric signatures by touch. Again, to whom is this message addressed and what was the lie? (she asks rhetorically). Of course we don’t know yet. Do I even need to mention pins at this point?

Coronabeth’s weeping: I have to confess that the first time I read this chapter I thought Corona was just unbelievably self-pitying and shallow. The second time I read it, I realized that Corona was planning to be Ianthe’s cavalier, wanted to be Ianthe’s cavalier, and was heartbroken that her sister didn’t pick her.

Chapter 35 (Skull header: Sixth House)

Leaving Coronabeth to “her bitter, alien grief,” Camilla asks where Palamedes has gone. When Gideon says he’s probably gone to Dulcinea and is an utter weenie over her, Camilla tells her that Palamedes and Dulcinea have been corresponding for twelve years, that he specialized in medicine so he could help her, and he asked her to marry him. Gideon realizes how badly she misread his situation and runs after him, but first asks Harrow to get her two-handed sword from the false bottom of her trunk. She catches up with Palamedes outside Dulcinea’s room. He freezes her in place and goes in alone to interrogate “Dulcinea.” She confesses that she’s been behind the murders, but that she never lied to anyone because everything she said was phrased in hypotheticals. She also reveals that the real Dulcinea is dead, and it’s been a plot to lure the Emperor to the system to witness her destroy his creation. She compliments Palamedes on his restraint and sensibility, and he answers that he decided to kill her as soon as he learned that Dulcinea was dead, and all he needed was to keep her talking while he augmented her cancer’s aggressiveness beyond her lyctoral ability to contain it. Before he takes the final step in debilitating her, though, he calls to Gideon to deliver a message to Camilla, and then he blows himself up. Gideon runs from the destruction and shelters in the atrium. Dulcinea emerges from the wreckage and proclaims herself “Cytherea the First, Lyctor of the Great Resurrection, the seventh saint to serve the King Undying,” and, as she approaches Gideon, she smiles and says, “This begins with you” (p. 405).

This is the pivotal chapter, so I draw heavily from it. So many reveals!

When Camilla decides to spill the beans: “There was something in her gaze starker than impatience. ‘The Warden,’ she said, ‘has been exchanging letters with Dulcinea Septimus for twelve years. He’s been — a weenie — over her. One of the reasons he became the heir of the House was to meet her on an even footing. His pursuit of medical science was entirely for her benefit…. He asked her to marry him a year ago,’ said Camilla ruthlessly, some floodgate down now, ‘so that she could spend the rest of her time with someone who cared about her comfort. She refused, but not on the grounds that she didn’t like him. And they weren’t going to relax Imperial rules about necromancers marrying out of House. The letters grew sparser after that. And when he arrived here — she’d moved on. He told me he was glad that she was spending time with someone who made her laugh,’” (pp. 396-397). This is one of those occasions when gossip and/or oversharing would have been useful.

“Five people had died that day; it was weird how the small things ballooned out in importance, comparatively. The tragedy saturated the stiffening bones and static hearts lying in state at Canaan House, but there was also deep tragedy in the flawed beams holding up their lives. An eight-year-old writing love letters to a terminally ill teenager. A girl falling in love with the beautiful stiff she’d been conceived solely to look after. A foundling chasing the approval of a House disappointed with her immunity to foundling-killing gas” (p. 396). I love how this passage pays tribute to both the big tragedies and the daily tragedies that have formed their lives — not just Gideon and Harrow, but Palamedes as well. Take this as evidence of Gideon’s widening perceptions, that she’s able to understand and, indeed, empathize with Harrow (natural enough) and Palamedes. As soon as she learns his story, the most important thing in the world to her is that she make it up to him for her perceived offense against him.

Also, note the evidence of the evolution in the relationship between Harrow and Gideon: “Gideon, facedown on the dusty ground, moaned: ‘I want to die.’ She was nudged with a foot, not unkindly. ‘Get up, Griddle.’ ‘Why was I born so attractive?’ ‘Because everyone would have throttled you within the first five minutes otherwise,’ said her necromancer. Her attention was on Camilla. ‘Yet why her about-face, if it’s all you say it was?’” (pp. 396-397) Gideon and Harrow have reached easy camaraderie in lightspeed time. Enemies to besties forever! Harrow doesn’t minimize Gideon’s guilt or ignore it; instead she treads a fine line between empathy and soppiness. Even as she does, she’s identified the main question: Why would Dulcinea treat Palamedes as a stranger, as if she didn’t know him at all? (I think Palamedes has had serious doubts about Dulcinea for a long time, which I’ll point out when we get to the evidence), but he doesn’t act on it until he has evidence.

Palamedes freezes Gideon where she is, “surveyed his work, and he saw that it was good” (p. 398). Obvious call out to the book of Creation, where God saw it was good, right before he rested. This is less about Palamedes as creator, and more about Palamedes about to “rest.”

Gently, obliquely, Palamedes elicits a full confession from “Dulcinea,” and gets her to admit everything: the murders of the Fifth: because Abigail was a historian and crabbed about in the leavings of the first group of lyctors. When next you read the dinner party and Dulcinea engages Abigail on the subject of historic research, you’ll be mentally screaming “shut up!” It was her love of history that got her killed. the murders of the Fourth: she doesn’t explain. But I think I can guess, and there are two reasons: the Fourth House supplies soldiers for the Emperor and she wants to destroy the Emperor, and because it was a crime of opportunity. With one very young necromancer isolated, it was a perfect chance to act. Eventually, she had planned on killing everyone, after all. the murders of Protesilaus and Dulcinea. Aboard the shuttle, with a rapier, before arriving at Canaan House. she plans to kill everyone else now, to draw the Emperor in. Without the other lyctors, and alone, “before he sees what will come when I call . . . and then I won’t have to do anything. It will be too late” (pp. 401-402). What will come? It’ll be too late for what?

“Thank your lucky stars [they’re magically delicious] that none of you became Lyctor, Palamedes Sextus. It is neither life nor death — it’s something in between, and nobody should ever ask you to embrace it. Not even him. Especially not him” (p. 402). Our first real definition of lyctorhood.

She was afraid of Teacher, whom she calls “a soul melange” who was “nearly demented” and was the creation of the Sixth House Lyctors. “He was the only one here who scared me. He couldn’t have stopped me, but he might have made things stupid” (p. 402). Just how? We don’t know. Remember, Teacher is a prototype, but we still don’t know who/what was modeled on him.

Something to notice about the confession, which you will note also on rereading the book: how sensitively Cytherea is drawn, and what we know about her existence: she’s been dying for 10,000 years. What must that do to a person? And now we know that Cytherea painted the “You Lied to Us” sign, and presumably it’s addressed to the Emperor. So she intends the Emperor to come back eventually to Canaan House (where Teacher said he can’t return, with dire consequences implied) to see her message. So: God lied. We still don’t know what he lied about. And while Cytherea is a villain, she’s not a one-dimensional villain. We still don’t know what motivates her; we’re not even sure she’s out for revenge, since she freely confesses that she loves God “like a king. Like a god! Like a brother” (p. 402). She wants to draw him back to Canaan House, alone, and will burn down everything to do it.

Speaking of Cytherea, who has accused God of lying, Palamedes asks why she lied to them and she protests that everything she said was phrased as hypothetical. Which is only a slightly better grade of lying.

In case you think Palamedes is all sympathy and kindness, he has a steel spine. “All this time we’ve been talking, I’ve been taking stock of everything that’s wrong with you — your bacterial lung infection, the neoplasms in your skeletal structure — and I’ve pushed them along. You’ve been in a terrific amount of pain for the last myriad. I hope that pain in nothing to what your own body’s about to do to you, Lyctor. You’re going to die spewing your own lungs out of your nostrils, having failed at the finish line because you couldn’t help but prattle about why you killed innocent people, as though your reasons were interesting...” (p. 403). Then he blows himself up.

As Cytherea emerges from the wreckage, Cytherea names herself and states her intention: “I am the vengeance of the ten billion. I have come back home to kill the Emperor and burn his Houses. And Gideon the Ninth...” She walked toward Gideon, and she raised her sword. She smiled. “This begins with you” (p. 405). In all the tension in this the climax of the novel, two details I want to note before the action goes all Avengers: 1) “the vengeance of the ten billion” — where have we heard that before? And what does it mean? 2) We assume that Cytherea plans to kill Gideon, but I’m not convinced that’s what she intends. I’ll go deeper into this point next week in the wrap up, but keep it in the back of your mind. Gideon means something to Cytherea, and has ever since they met. We just don’t know what that something is.



Chapter 36 (Skull header: Ninth House)

There is nothing duller than trying to summarize beautifully written action scenes, so I’m not going to do that. It’s Jackie Chan meets Captain America and Aragorn and the Seven Samurai. Things to notice: Harrow fetches Gideon’s two-hander, and they fight together. They fight with Camilla and eventually Ianthe on their side, but it’s not enough. Finally, with Ianthe out of the fight, Camilla and Gideon badly wounded and Harrow barely holding on, Gideon makes a decision to save the rest, and she kills herself, freeing her soul for Harrow.

Yes, that’s a poor summary, but it’s the general outline of the fight. And the fight is not really the point; it’s the emotional wallops that come hard and fast as necromancer and cavalier finally click into one being, each trusting the other entirely. So...things to note:

This passage: “’I’m not running, Harrow!’ ‘Of course we’re not running,’ said Harrowhark disdainfully. ‘I said a necromancer alone. I have you. We bring hell.’ ‘Harrow — Harrow, Dulcinea’s a Lyctor, a real one —‘ ‘Then we’re all dead, Nav, but let’s bring hell first,’ said Harrow. Gideon looked over her shoulder at her, and caught the Reverend Daughter’s smile. There was blood sweat coming out of her left ear, but her smile was long and sweet and beautiful. Gideon found herself smiling back so hard her mouth hurt. Her adept said: ‘I’ll keep it off you, Nav, show them what the Ninth House does.’ Gideon lifted her sword. The construct worked itself free of its last confines of masonry and rotten wood and heaved before them, flexing itself like a butterfly. ‘We do bones, motherfucker,’ she said. Her arms were whole again. Her most beloved and true companion — her plain two-hander, unadorned and perfect — smashed through tendrils and teeth like a jackhammer drill” (pp. 408-409). Everything is now in place: Gideon and Harrow are in perfect accord. This entire journey has led up to this moment: “With Harrow there, suddenly it was easy, and her horror of the monster turned to the ferocious joy of vengeance. Long years of warfare meant that they each knew exactly where the other would stand — every arc of a sword, every jostling scapula. No hole in the other’s defenses went unshielded. They had never fought together before, but they had always fought, and they would work in and around each other without a second’s thought (p. 409).

Despite heroics, one by one our team goes down. Camilla is stabbed, Harrow exhausted and unconscious, Gideon with something in her knee that went crunch, and Ianthe being siphoned to heal Cytherea. We know what power siphoning a regular person can do — how much more powerful is a lyctor as a battery. While everything is breaking apart, Gideon moves both Harrow and Camilla outside and onto the crumbling terrace. Camilla asks Gideon if Palamedes said anything and Gideon chickens out, telling her that he loved her. “What? No, he didn’t,” she answers. “Okay, no, sorry. He said — he said you knew what to do?” And she does. We don’t, but she does. Place for a pin right here.

Meme alert: Airholes for speed (p. 412).

Cytherea offers Gideon her life. “Please. You don’t even know what you are to me . . . You’re not going to die here, Gideon. And if you ask me to let you live you might not have to die at all. I’ve spared you before” (p. 424). Now of course Gideon thinks of all the people Cytherea murdered and goes straight for her, but that leaves the question hanging: what is Gideon to her? Better yet, who is Gideon?

Harrow rallies yet again and collapses into Gideon’s arms: “Gideon stumbled, sick with terror, kneeling them both down to the ground as Harrow lay like a broken rag doll. She forgot her sword, forgot everything as she cradled her used-up adept. She forgot the wrecked ligaments in her sword arm, her messed-up knee, the cups of blood she’d lost, everything but that tiny, smouldering, victorious smile” (p. 428). Talk about stripping the story down to its absolute essentials: it’s all about Gideon’s feelings for Harrow. And it always has been.

Camilla, Harrow and Gideon argue just a bit over their various escape plans, realizing none of them will work. Harrow wants Gideon to live, and Gideon won’t leave her. She asks, “Have you really forgiven me?….I don’t deserve it,” and Gideon answers, “Maybe not, but that doesn’t stop me forgiving you” (p. 430). Have I mentioned that you’re going to start seeing references to Gideon as Christ?

The next passage is worth quoting, as Cytherea is battering down their defenses: “You know I don’t give a damn about the Locked Tomb, right? You know I only care about you,” she said in a brokenhearted rush . . . “I’m no good at this duty thing. I’m just me. I can’t do this without you. And I’m not your real cavalier primary. I never could have been” (p. 430). Gideon completely bares her soul. Note that Camilla turns away, giving them privacy. And Harrow laughs. “Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House,” she said hoarsely, “you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph. The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer” (p. 431). This is all Gideon needs. She’s spent her life chasing the approval of the Ninth House. Harrow is the Ninth House. Gideon has been validated. She knows exactly what to do next. Harrow begins to suspect, and asks, “’Nav, what are you doing?’ ‘The cruellest thing anyone has ever done to you in your whole life, believe me,’ said Gideon” (p. 432). She knows what she’s going to do, and she knows how much it’ll hurt Harrow. But since it’s the only way to save her, Gideon is willing.

“She mentally found herself all of a sudden in front of the doors of Drearburh — four years old again and screaming — and all her fear and hate of them went away. Drearburh was empty. There was no Crux. There were no godawful great-aunts. There were no restless corpses, no strangers in coffins, no dead parents. Instead, she was Drearburh. She was Gideon Nav, and Nav was a Niner name. She took the whole putrid, quiet, filth-strewn madness of the place, and she opened her doors to it. Her hands were not shaking anymore” (p. 432). The trauma Gideon endured hasn’t gone away; it’s always been there, but for the first time she faces it and realizes that it has no power over either her or what she does next. She’s won; she accepts who she is.

“’For the Ninth!’ said Gideon. And she fell forward, right on the iron spikes” (p. 432).

Sorry for bailing on everyone last week. I had surgery (nothing horrific) and it took more out of me than I had expected it would. I want to thank you all for the terrific comments and highlight a couple for more discussion:

1) Strawbale’s comment about the planets and their Houses. I think you’re right about planetary mythological correspondences, although they don’t always line up, and some of the IDs are still not clear, not even after having read Nona the Ninth. You questioned my placement of the Sixth House on Mercury (I have the advantage of having read ahead, and find that this is backed up in the later text). From Gideon, Chapter 27, p. 301: “The whole of the Sixth was huddled on the polar caps of a planet so close to Dominicus that exposure to the light side would melt the House clean away. The great libraries were set in a fat cake in of a station designed for the ongoing ordeal of not letting anything get too hot or too cold, which meant no windows at all whatsoever.” Later in Harrow the Ninth there’s an observation that if anything blips with Dominicus, the Sixth House will know before anyone else.

This is a bit of a spoiler: during the Resurrection, God reanimated the sun and it’s implied he rejiggered the planets (Mercury, for instance, has a volcano) so this is a solar system that may not be anything like what we know. “Polar cap” refers to the poles, and we have to assume that one of this planet’s caps permanently faces away, implying a dead-slow rotation. We have ice on our polar caps (for now), but not every planet does.

2) Coleman3 had a trio of astute observations, which I highly recommend you read: one about courtly love, two about heroism and lesbianism, and three about the significance of the pool scene. I’ll give my quick responses in order and let’s pick them up in comments.

2.1: You’ve nailed the courtly love metaphor perfectly. (For the record, expertise in any field means only that you’re aware of the depth of your ignorance. It takes a novice to think they know what they’re talking about. PS: the fantasy writer in question was also a distinguished medievalist whose work centered primarily in the ideal of courtly love — so you’re drawing from great sources.) The concept of courtly love was a purely literary convention, but this is a literary work, and it works. Nice!

2.2: These books are gloriously queer in that there is no such thing as a “normal” relationship. Which means there’s no “abnormal” relationship — it’s purely about love. I can’t imagine how powerfully validating it would feel to be a gay reader. But for all the queerness, there’s no sex. The in “in-universe” reason for that, I guess, would be that, for the most part, it seems that sex is not really necessary since most people are “vat-born,” divorcing sexuality from procreation. It frees sexuality to become something that escapes Cis/het valuation.

The “out-universe” application? I suspect that the book is more an affirmation of identity, a confirmation of being, rather than a narrative about any given set of norms. In a book that’s expressly gay and devoid of sex, it’s also very much not a young adult novel, despite the ages of its protagonists. I haven’t figured out why, though, unless maybe it’s because Muir disdains marketing niches as much as she disdains genre niches.

2.3: We don’t really clue in to the sacramental nature of salt water in Gideon, and it gets scant treatment in Harrow, but we circle back to it in Nona the Ninth. For the moment, we know only three things about water: there’s a salt water tidal pool that surrounds the Tomb (and it shouldn’t be tidal, so something’s going on there), the tradition handed down from Harrow’s mother insists that certain secrets be discussed only while submerged in salt water, and Teacher hates water. There’s a qualitative difference between salt- and fresh-water, but I’m not sure what it is or what it means. We’ll have to wait for Alecto to find out. PS: I woke in the middle of the night with this thought: the human body is not mostly water; it’s mostly salt water. I wonder if that has something to do with it.

Next week, Act 5 and the recap of all the stuff we’ve stuck pins into. Some of them have been resolved; some will wait for Harrow the Ninth, and still others for later than that. I can’t be cheery right now, not with Gideon throwing herself on some iron spikes, but I can be satisfied.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/6/2149021/-The-Locked-Tomb-Read-Gideon-the-Ninth-Act-4-Part-2

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