Harrow the Ninth

Harrow realizes she is being followed. She stops and is confronted by Camilla Hect. The sight of Camilla deeply upsets Harrow, who saw Camilla’s dead body in her false-Canaan memories. Camilla’s presence causes Harrow’s brain to begin hemorrhaging. Harrow recalls that one of her letters is for Camilla; she hands it over and learns that she owes Camilla a great deal. The letter demands that her present self cooperate with Camilla. Harrow has many questions, but Camilla cannot answer them. She came looking for Harrow and hands her a fracture piece of skull, lovingly put back together from splinters. Contemplating the skull causes Harrow’s hemorrhaging to worsen. The skull belongs to Palamedes Sextus, Camilla’s necromancer.

Camilla believes Palamedes attached his soul to the skull as a revenant. Harrow enters into the River to discover if Palamedes succeeded. She finds him in a small pocket dimension that resembles the room he died in at Canaan House, when he tried to blow up Cytherea. Palamedes explains that necromancers can exert their will on the River and change its laws, like being in a bubble of air underwater and ignoring the physics of the surrounding water. Their reunion is cut short by the Sleeper. They barricade the door, and Palamedes begs Harrow to leave. As the door is broken down, Harrow leaves. The narrator—Gideon, who has been narrating Harrow’s journey in second person—reveals that she broke down the door, not the Sleeper. Palamedes sees Gideon just as Harrow leaves his pocket dimension.

Harrow awakes on the alien planet and finds that Camilla has brought her to a strange shuttle that is not of Nine Houses origins. Harrow confirms that Palamedes is attached to the skull and reshapes it into a hand; Palamedes had asked her to make his bones into something articulated. Harrow discovers that the shuttle has two people in it and a poster. The shuttle contains Deuteros and Coronabeth, who died in Harrow’s false memories in Act 2, Chapter 18 and Act 3, Chapter 26 and were presumed dead and missing, respectively, at the end of Gideon. The poster is of Commander Wake, though Harrow doesn’t know this. The poster terrifies her.

Harrow recalls a letter that she was meant to read if she met Deuteros. The letter tells her to silence Deuteros and kill her if she must. She does so with necromancy and silences Coronabeth as well. After Camilla works out the standoff between the three, Deuteros loudly announces that there is a plot against the Emperor’s life from the inside and that Harrow must do something. The other two women silence Deuteros, and Camilla tells Harrow that they are with Blood of Eden and no longer on the same side. Harrow is bound by her old self and cannot harm them.

In the false Canaan House, it has begun to snow while cancerous growths of organic matter invade. The group prepares to retaliate against the Sleeper, while Teacher eagerly awaits death. Teacher condemns Harrow and blames her for what is happening to them as the Sleeper hunts them down.

One month prior, the Mithraeum went into lockdown. Mercy put the ship into emergency lockdown after looking too closely at the approaching Resurrection Beast, trying to determine its trajectory. The momentary glimpse sent her into an incoherent panic.

In the present, Harrow begins praying for comfort before the Resurrection Beast approaches. The prayers remind her of childhood and bring her comfort. She grows desperate for the touch of the Body and tries to kiss the Body while they lay in bed together, to no avail. Distressed and with nobody to turn to, Harrow becomes feels paranoia about the others. She wonders who is the one who will betray and kill John. The other Lyctors and John begin making plans for the approaching Resurrection Beast; Harrow is excluded from their plans. The others think she is useless while John still hopes to convince her to hide with him. Harrow learns that they plan to drag the Resurrection Beast to the bottom of the River, where the stoma wait. The stoma are huge mouths that empty out into an unknown space beyond the River, which they all assume is Hell. The Resurrection Beasts can only be killed by jettisoning them into hell via the stoma. The stoma have so far only opened when a Resurrection Beast approaches.

Ianthe and Harrow begin last-minute lessons as the Resurrection Beast approaches. John once again offers to place Harrow in his inner sanctum when the Resurrection Beast arrives. Harrow asks why he must be shut away when the Resurrection Beasts come. He explains that, when he committed the Resurrection, he had to resurrect the star Dominicus and sustains it on his endless thanergy. Without him, the star will explode as it naturally should have 10,000 years ago. He shuts himself in the sanctum to ensure that Dominicus does not become volatile and threaten the Nine Houses.

Harrow asks who “A.L.” was: She has heard Augustine and Mercy use “A.L.” to refer to the person in the Locked Tomb. John is upset by the mention of “A.L.” He reveals that she was the first person to be Resurrected after climate change and nuclear disaster made humanity extinct on Earth.

John admits that he wishes Harrow had been his daughter. This enrages Harrow, who confesses her sins to John in a fit of passion. She confesses that she trespassed in the Locked Tomb as a child and that is why her parents killed themselves. John completely absolves her of her sins, though he doesn’t believe that she truly saw inside the Locked Tomb; the final ward can only be opened with his blood and there is no way to bypass it. When John touches Harrow’s face, he realizes that her brain has been tampered with. Harrow, not understanding her actions, flees when John asks who tampered with her brain.

The Body disappears and Harrow begins to doubt if she had ever existed. Harrow begins to slip in her daily routine, including forgetting her sacramental death’s head face paint. She finds Cytherea’s body underneath her bed and runs off to get Ianthe. Ianthe sees nothing underneath her bed and questions Harrow’s mental health before leaving. After Ianthe leaves, Harrow looks under the bed and finds that the body was never there.

On the last day before the Resurrection Beast attacks, Duty tries to kill Harrow again. Harrow confronts him and asks why he is so intent on killing her. Duty explains that he has been trying to kill her to prevent her suffering. Duty cryptically tells her that somebody else had the idea that he should kill her, though he won’t explain who. Duty walks away without trying to kill her in earnest.

The Heralds arrive, announcing the Resurrection Beast’s presence. Fear hits Harrow as the insect-like aliens land on the Mithraeum. The narrative ties back into the events of the Prologue: Ianthe tries to talk Harrow out of entering the River, but she refuses; when Harrow tries to enter the River, she wakes up in the hallway impaled on her own rapier.

The Epiparados returns to the actual Canaan House shortly after the events of Gideon the Ninth. Harrow has written her letters for her future self and talks Ianthe through “the procedure.” Ianthe helps Harrow through conducting brain surgery on herself as she molds her brain to erase Gideon Nav from her memory entirely. Harrow chooses Ianthe to help her because she believes that Ianthe understands being “fractured” (344).

It is not made clear, but during this process, Harrow installs fail-safes, such as papering over any instance of “Gideon” with “Ortus” (thus leading to “Gideon the First” being “Ortus the First” in Harrow’s mind). Harrow rigs her brain to hemorrhage any time something occurs that might jog her memory about Gideon. By forgetting Gideon, she ensures that the Lyctoral process cannot be completed; her soul cannot devour Gideon’s soul entirely. Harrow hopes to save Gideon at some point in the far future.