Gideon the Ninth

“No one in the Ninth House understood what cruelty was, not really, none of them but the Reverend Daughter; none of them understood brutality.”

Gideon sees Harrow turning her self-loathing out onto the world. As the perfect necromancer carrying 200 dead souls, she’s capable of brutalizing in a way that others would struggle with. Before the two reconcile, Gideon views Harrow as a terrifying oppressor.

“Visible even up here were the floating chains of squares and rectangles and oblongs, smudging the blue with grey and green, brown and black: the tumbled-down cities and temples of a House both long dead and unkillable. A sleeping throne.”

Canaan House is characterized as an empty chair awaiting somebody. It is caught in an eternal stasis, similar to the immortality of the Emperor and Lyctors. Gideon’s feelings and description of Canaan House will steadily become more sinister as the plot progresses.

“It was not the first time she had received that look. […] [T]he way you’d look at an unexpected maggot.”

Gideon receives the same treatment from the Eighth that she received back home on the Ninth. At first, Gideon is a misfit amongst the other Houses and feels just as useless as she did back home.

“You didn’t need half of what she’d done to gain medical entry to the Cohort, but she had fed her entire life into the meat grinder of hope that, one day, she’d blitz through Trentham and get sent to the front attached to a necromancer’s legion. […] Gideon wanted a drop ship—first on the ground—a fat shiny medal saying INVASION FORCE ON WHATEVER, securing the initial bloom of thanergy without which the finest necromancer of the Nine Houses could not fight worth a damn.”

Trentham is the military capital of the Second House. Gideon has dedicated her whole life to a fantasy of being useful, recognized and praised. These are all things she lacks in the Ninth House.

“At this clarification, a very strange thing happened to Gideon Nav. She had already exhausted neurons, cortisol, and adrenaline, and now her body started moving before her head or heart did; she strode past the boy and yanked so hard on the top of the hatch that it damn near broke her wrists.”

Gideon cares deeply about Harrow despite the surface-level hatred between the two, only breaking her vow of silence when she thinks Harrow is in serious danger. The “very strange thing” that happens is Gideon acting on an instinctual level. Her instincts require her to save Harrow.

“You haven’t spoken more than twenty words to me since we arrived, you’ve kept me totally in the dark, and yet I’ve done every single thing you ever goddamned asked of me no matter what it was […] I kept my head down and I didn’t start shit. So if you could see your way to being even ten percent less salty with me, that’d be just terrific.”

Gideon’s feelings on an instinctual level don’t erase the bad blood between her and Harrow. Gideon tries repeatedly to open up and communicate with Harrow, but Harrow shuts her down and walls herself off until the climactic action of the novel.

“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.”

Harrow describes the lab facility as a pit of tortured souls, not unlike how she describes herself later. Muir uses Harrow to draw parallels between the mass murder that created her and the mass murder that led to the Resurrection.

“Harrowhark was pleased because everything was coming up Harrowhark—she was glutted on getting her own way, and the moment that glow wore off the knives would come out again. Gideon couldn’t trust Harrow. There was always some angle. There’s was always some shackle closing on you before you could even see it, and you’d only know when she turned the key.”

Gideon compares Harrow to a capricious predator with words like “glutted” and claw-like “knives.” Gideon also reveals that she has been hurt several times by Harrow when trying to fix their relationship. Gideon would not know that there “was always some angle” if she hadn’t been in this situation many times before.

“The First House was no longer a beautiful and empty shell, buffeted by the erosion of time. Now it seemed more like the blocked-up labyrinths beneath the Ninth House, kept sealed in case something became restless.”

In the Gothic, haunted castles and houses are treated like characters who change throughout the story. As tension rises and people are murdered, Canaan House looks less like a promised land and more like a tomb for horrible secrets. Peeling back a beautiful veneer to reveal ugly corruption underneath is a common trope in the Gothic.

“One flesh, one end.”

This passage is an example of foreshadowing as the vows between a necromancer and their cavalier contain the secret of Lyctorhood. The scrap of paper Gideon finds the phrase scribbled on is likely from where the phrase originates.

“In the thick dimness of the room she watched the black-garbed girl in front of her struggle around a thing that had settled over them like a net; a thing that had fused between them like a badly broken limb, shattered numerous times, healing gnarled and awful. Gideon recognized these strictures all of a sudden: the rope tying her to Harrow and back to the bars of the House of the Ninth. They stared at each other with shared panic.”

The painful and traumatic relationship between Gideon and Harrow is visualized as a mangled web of flesh and limbs. The grisly image indicates that the relationship is not necessarily a bright and happy one, but it is crucial to both women. They share a panic because they both realize how badly damaged they are and that the Ninth House is the source of it. Muir’s description paints their bond as murky and ambivalent, but one that can survive anything. Whether this is morally good or healthy is not addressed and implied to not be of concern to Muir.

“Gideon…you’re so young. Don’t give yourself away. DO you know, it’s not worth it…none of this is worth it, at all. It’s cruel. It’s so cruel. You are so young—and vital—and alive. Gideon, you’re all right…remember this, and don’t let anyone do it to you ever again. I’m sorry. We take so much. I’m so sorry.”

Cytherea frequently reveals pieces of herself underneath the ruse of “Dulcinea” when she interacts with Gideon privately. Cytherea sees destroying the Houses as an act of mercy precisely because of what the Empire demands of its people. Gideon’s actual death is less excruciating than the torture she experiences in the avulsion chamber. Cytherea’s feelings toward Gideon are complex, despite her attempts to kill Gideon later.

“There’s only the challenge…and how it’s answered.”

Ianthe is amoral and believes that might makes right. She seeks power above all else, which casts the gleam of the “gem” and “smile” from the epigraph in a much more sinister light. Ianthe becomes precisely the kind of Lyctor Gideon fears Harrow would be, making her a foil character.

“‘Have you two been paired a very long time?’ […] Harrowhark lurked next to them, pointedly not looking at Gideon, head hidden deep inside her second-best hood. She still didn’t understand what she was meant to do or think or say: what duty really meant, between a cavalier and a necromancer, between a necromancer and a cavalier. ‘It feels like forever,’ she said honestly.”

Jeannemary’s question reveals that Gideon and Harrow look the part of cavalier and necromancer to everybody on the outside, which leads Gideon to realize that she’s played the part of cavalier for Harrow for a very long time. “Paired” also carries a romantic connotation in this instance.

“Next year. Gideon was taut with impatience, but still spent a couple of seconds grappling with the notion that the gawky teens in front of her would be facing the Empire’s foes at age fifteen-and-whatever. For all that she’d longed to be on the front lines from the age of eight up, it suddenly didn’t seem like such a great idea.”

Muir occasionally pulls back from the action, mystery, and intrigue of Canaan House to give us glimpses of the larger world of the Locked Tomb series. These glimpses create the grimdark world in which Gideon’s story occurs.

“Gideon, don’t be sorry for the dead. I think death must be an absolute triumph.”

Cytherea has lived for 10,000 years, which she has spent in pain due to her illness. As an original Lyctor, Cytherea has inside information on the atrocities that have occurred in the world and decides death is a better fate. Grimdark narratives often suggest that death is better than living in a brutal world.

“[She] walked in on Harrowhark, holding lengths of unused rope among the chairs her parents had kicked aside, with eyes like coals that had burnt away. Harrow had beheld her. She had beheld Harrow.”

“Beheld” has connotations of holding somebody intimately with one’s eyes. Gideon is the only one to see Harrow in such a vulnerable position with her deceased parents. The experience of shared anguish between the two is part of their unbreakable bond.

“The choice to get up in the morning—the choice to have a hot breakfast or a cold one—the choice to do something thirty seconds faster, or thirty seconds slower—those choices cause all sorts of things to happen. That doesn’t make you responsible.”

Palamedes is the voice of reason for Gideon’s guilt: Actions have ripple effects of unintended consequences that we cannot anticipate. Palamedes’s advice also applies to Gideon’s guilt over the deaths of the Fourth and Fifth. Palamedes implies that Gideon takes too much suffering onto her shoulders and centers the world on her own actions.

“The Reverend Father and Mother hadn’t found [Gideon] unnatural because of how she’d been born: they’d found her unnatural because of how she hadn’t died. And all the nuns and all the priests and all the anchorites of the cloister had taken the cue from them, not knowing that it was because Gideon was just some smothered and unfortunate animal who had still been alive the next day.”

Gideon is a walking, talking reminder of the Reverend Mother and Father’s sins. They use her as a “whipping girl” the same way Harrow does, but their guilt eats at them until they die by suicide. Harrow opening the Locked Tomb is the final straw.

“I’m an abomination. The whole universe ought to scream whenever my feet touch the ground. My parents committed a necromantic sin that we ought to have been torpedoed into the centre of Dominicus for. If any of the other Houses knew of what we’d done they would destroy us from orbit without a second’s though. I am a war crime.”

Harrow’s issues stem from her terrible birth circumstances, a situation analogous to Christianity’s original sin. It also serves as an allegory for LGBTQ+ feelings of self-loathing in a world where anti-LGBTQ+ biases don’t exist.

“You apologise to me? You apologise to me now? You say that you’re sorry when I have spent my life destroying you? You are my whipping girl! I hurt you because it was a relief! I exist because my parents killed everyone and relegated you to a life of abject misery, and they would have killed you too and not given it a second’s goddamned thought! I have spent your life trying to make you regret that you weren’t dead, all because—I regretted I wasn’t! I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me that you’re sorry? […] I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”

Harrow’s long rant when Gideon accepts her mirrors the Denial of Peter that occurs in the New Testament when the Apostle Peter denies knowing Jesus Christ. Gideon offers Harrow redemption, but Harrow denies it repeatedly. At the end of her rant, she is “undone” and accepts Gideon’s forgiveness for her actions. Harrow cannot exist without Gideon’s acceptance, cementing their relationship as necromancer and cavalier.

“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 defences went unshielded. They had never fought together before, but they had always fought, and they could work in and around each other without a second’s thought.”

Harrow and Gideon’s years of hating one another are not neatly separated from their brief period of openly loving one another. Muir muddies the line between the “bad times” and the “good times” between them in a fashion that is true to life, which doesn’t follow neat narrative conventions.

“Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House […] 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.”

Harrow confesses her true feelings in full to Gideon when she believes they’re all going to die. Gideon as a flower is indirectly contrasted to the snow leeks and gray gruel made out of them on which the Ninth House survives. Harrow presents Gideon as something that has metaphorically grown from soil that has so far only produced ugly, utilitarian things like the snow leeks.