I had a surprisingly hard time finding some good Halloween reads for October. Then I remembered I had yet to read this sequel to the absolutely fabulous Gideon the Ninth, so I went ahead and got the audiobook from my library.
This review has all the spoilers for both Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, so consider yourself warned.
I’m not actually sure I should have listened to this one on audio. There’s so much going on, and a lot of jumping back and forth between the present and an alternate version of the events of Gideon the Ninth that I had a hard time keeping track of what was going on.
The book picks up right after the end of Gideon the Ninth, but Harrow has cast a spell on herself to forget all about Gideon. The goal is to keep Gideon’s spirit alive within herself until she can find a way to resurrect her.
The result is that she cannot achieve full Lyctorhood without using Gideon’s soul as a battery. This also means her body is more vulnerable than the average Lyctor’s body, which is a big problem, given that there’s a revenant out there hunting down all the Lyctors.
To try and slow down the revenant, Harrow and Ianthe have been sent off on a spaceship to kill a bunch of planets so the revenant can’t use them as an energy source on its way to killing Lyctors.
There is also a plot to kill the Emperor, which Harrow is trying to stop, although she doesn’t know all the details of where the threat is coming from.
Throughout the book, some chapters start with a countdown to the murder of the Emperor, which I found pretty confusing, since he’s supposed to be “The King Undying.”
To make things more difficult, one of the first Lyctors, called the Saint of Duty, keeps trying to kill Harrow for no apparent reason.
The Emperor does nothing to stop this, but he does stop Harrow when she tries to kill Duty.
Harrow is understandably frustrated and confused by this, but Duty is sufficiently impressed by her attempt on his life that he gives her a tip on protecting herself from him. But he refuses to stop trying to kill her.
Making all of this more confusing is that Duty’s name is Gideon. But Harrow has erased Gideon from her mind and trained her mind to hear “Ortus” any time she hears “Gideon.”
Also, the book is going back and forth in time from the events of Harrow the Ninth to the events of Gideon the Ninth, but the latter don’t match up with the events of the first book.
To prevent herself from remembering Gideon, Harrow instead remembers the guy who was supposed to be her first cavalier, Ortus, as coming to the First House with her.
So when she said things like “Ortus is trying to kill me,” I was really confused.
Throughout the book, we do get more insight into Harrow’s childhood. In Gideon the Ninth, we learned her parents killed themselves after learning Harrow had made her way into the Locked Tomb, which is not only forbidden, but so booby trapped it should have been impossible for Harrow to get in.
In this book we learn Harrow took on the challenge assuming the booby traps would kill her. It was a suicide mission gone wrong.
When Harrow tells the Emperor about her transgression, he assures her that she can’t possibly have broken through his wards, but she is adamant that she did. He insists she must have been led into a kind of decoy tomb by the protections laid on his tomb.
Much to everyone’s surprise, it’s not Duty who kills Harrow but Mercy, one of the other original Lyctors. She stabs Harrow right as the revenant attacks, sending Harrow’s spirit into the River of Death.
At this point Gideon takes over Harrow’s body, and that was when I really enjoyed this book again because Gideon was my favorite character from the first book. I love her snark!
So she’s fighting her way through the big battle while trying not to hurt Harrow’s body too much, and also being rightfully angry that Harrow made her death meaningless by both refusing to remember her and refusing to use her spirit as a battery to gain full Lyctorhood, which was the whole reason Gideon sacrificed herself.
So they fight their way through the big battle and they end up capturing Cytherea, who turns out to be inhabited by the spirit of Wake, a rebel who set out to kill the Emperor. Turns out she is Gideon’s mom and the Emperor is Gideon’s dad.
Because the wards on the Locked Tomb require the Emperor’s blood to unlock the Tomb, Wake was going to use Gideon to get into the tomb, but she ended up having to abandon that plan. It certainly explains how Gideon survived the extermination of all the other children of the Ninth House.
Duty’s cavalier takes over his body and kills Cytherea, releasing her soul, so we have no idea if or where it will turn up next.
Also in this conversation we learn that the body in the Locked Tomb is that of Alecto/A.L./Annabelle Leigh, the Emperor’s first cavalier. Turns out there is a way to achieve Lyctorhood without sacrificing your first cavalier and all the Lyctors are understandably upset to learn the Emperor lied to them about that.
So Mercy tries to kill the Emperor, but he is the Emperor Undying, so that doesn’t go her way. He ends up killing her for her betrayal.
Then Duty tries to drag the Emperor into the River of Death, but when Ianthe has a chance to save one of them, she ends up saving the Emperor and leaving Duty to die.
Meanwhile, Harrow has teamed up with her dead friends to try and defeat the revenant. They succeed for the moment, leaving the question of whether she should take over her body again, which would destroy Gideon’s soul for good, or if they should just leave Gideon to die in Harrow’s body on her own.
Gideon is also faced with a few different options that all involve dying. Not being very good at dying, she chooses to break a window to get out of the space ship and swim for it.
Now I have to read the third book to find out what happens next.