The Locked Tomb is a series of books - a wonderful series of books, might I say, and currently an infuriating series of books because Alecto the Ninth still isn't out and we all want to know what happens next, Tamsyn, please, my son, he sick - revolving (to date) about three characters:

Camilla Hect, Palamedes Sextus, and Colum Asht

What, you thought I meant someone else?

(Spoilers for The Locked Tomb, proceed at your own risk, don't say I didn't warn you)

(If you haven't read the books, you really should)

(They're good)

(Read the short fiction too, it's also good and fills in a bunch of stuff)

(Oh yeah and I'm still alive and haven't forgotten this exists, I've just been dealing with stuff)

So, obviously, Gideon the Ninth, Harrowhark the Ninth, and Nona the Ninth are our protagonists, our viewpoint characters, occasionally even the heroes of the story. But the story is only sort of about them; the modern fannish idea of a story being about its characters and its setting, as if they were real people and real places, really cooks off the value of any story. These aren't real people, they're not real situations, why do I care about any of it? Who gives a fuck if the fake curtains are blue if there isn't anything deeper? And, of course, the reason I care, the reason anyone should care, is because it is deeper, because the story is saying something.

So what is The Locked Tomb saying? Well, it says a lot of things. Each of the three books has a pithy, overarching theme: Gideon's is "sacrifice", Harrow's is "grief", Nona's is "love". Fantastic, job done.

Yeah, that doesn't really tell us anything. One thing that makes The Locked Tomb great is that it's simple with its themes, but it's not simplistic. You can get, "sacrifice is sometimes necessary but never good," from Gideon, and that's fine. Or, you can drill into the nuances of the story and its different conceptions of sacrifice and how they complicate and color that: Silas using Colum and what Colum is willing to sacrifice versus what he isn't (more on that later), the Ninth's sacrifice to create Harrowhark as a monstrous offense and how that affects Harrowhark and the Ninth House as a whole, Gideon's sacrifice to save Harrow and how Harrow does and doesn't accept it. You can see how the thread of each theme runs through all of the books, each getting its turn in the light without being dropped on the floor once it's used up. Most interestingly, I think, and what I want to focus on, is how each major duo of characters refracts the various ideas in the books and what that tells us.

The Locked Tomb does a lot with parallelism, pretty explicitly. The first book sets the rules of the game: Each necromancer has a cavalier and they are bonded in (mostly literal) blood. This is both implicit in the story and stated explicitly as a major religious and ideological idea throughout the Houses. This setup lets each of the major duos demonstrate, play with or refute some of the ideas being presented, and the most obvious way to read it is that each pair demonstrates some parallels with Gideon and Harrow, but they also parallel each other, and speak to the story's themes in their own ways. Outside Gideon and Harrow, the two pairs that speak most strongly are Camilla Hect and Palamedes Sextus, the Sixth, maybe the most consistently present - even more than our protagonists - characters in all three books, and Silas Octakiseron and Colum Asht, the Eighth, who are, somehow very visibly, the least.

The parallels between the Sixth and the Ninth are, again, made pretty explicit. Harrowhark and Palamedes compare themselves to each other repeatedly and very quickly set up a competition to see which of the two is the Very Cleverest Boy Indeed (Very Clever Boy Indeed being, of course, gender-neutral). Gideon and Camilla are set up as parallels of each other in the most obvious way possible: Fighting. They fight each other, they act as each other's proxies, they fight side by side. You can also look at how the Sixth and Ninth are parallel in terms of characterization: Harrowhark and Palamedes are both young leaders of their houses, they both grew up with close relationships with their cavaliers from an early age. Gideon and Camilla are both hard fighters, "real cavaliers," in Jeannemary the Fourth's words. They both prefer unconventional weapons and only go rapier-and-offhand as the done thing. And in the long term, both pairs wade through death and back again to stay together.

More interesting is where they differ. Whereas Camilla and Palamedes are a strong, dedicated team - the very form of, "one flesh, one end" - from the very beginning, Gideon and Harrow start out at each other's throats, and this colors the entire story. In fighting Ianthe and Cytherea, Palamedes, the necromancer, dies, with a plan to come back to Camilla come hell or high water, while on the other side it is Gideon, the cavalier, who falls for Harrow, with the expectation and demand that she be devoured by Harrow to save her and the rest of the survivors. This sets up a pattern through all three books: Camilla and Palamedes have, in many ways, a very traditionally heroic storyline, while our protagonists are an abject mess.

If Gideon and Harrowhark were heroes in a more typical vein, they would be Camilla and Palamedes, or would become them after overcoming exactly one (1) set of appropriate hardships. But they aren't, and they don't. And yet, the storyline of the Sixth gives us a key, or at least a compass, for following that of the Ninth.

Palamedes and Camilla gain understanding of the Lyctor process, just as Harrow and Gideon do, but without having to hurt themselves doing it. Camilla carries Palamedes in his bone fragments in the same way Harrow carries Gideon sealed off in her damaged brain, but without having to hurt herself doing it. Palamedes stashes himself in a bubble by the River, just as Harrow does, but without having to hurt himself doing it. Camilla and Palamedes share a mind for a good bit of time, but without having to hurt themselves - much - doing it.

They fight against death itself to stay together. That one does hurt the Sixth as much as it hurt the Ninth, but in different ways.

“I can, and it scares me,” he said heavily. “Look. How long have I been dead, Nonagesimus?”

“Eight months,” you said, “give or take.”

It's not that they're better, or that Sex Pal is smarter than Harrow, or that Camilla is a better fighter than Gideon. None of that is true. What is true is that they got off to a better start, they were set up for success in exactly the way the Ninth weren't. They make many of the same steps, but those of the Sixth are legible in ways the Ninth just... aren't a lot of the time.

Camilla raised her chin. She looked at the dead face. She said quietly— “Yes, Warden, I will always know you.”

Their foreheads touched.

On the other hand, we have Silas and Colum, the Eighth. Any parallels with Gideon and Harrow's story seem superficial at best. Almost everything about the duo puts them at odds with our protagonists, and notably, of all the necro-cav pairs that went to Canaan House, they have the least visible presence, both implicitly - they're fairly disengaged from the Lyctor shenanigans, at least as far as we see - and explicitly, Silas as much as telling both Harrow and the reader to go fuck ourselves in his brief appearance in Harrow the Ninth.

Now, there is also another story in The Locked Tomb, and it also shoots through all three books. It's the story of the world itself, of the Dominicus system, of the Empire's history and present, of the Resurrection, and of John Gaius, a dipshit Twitch streamer who got too much power. Silas and Colum don't so much resemble Harrowhark and Gideon, but it's not hard to see how they mirror John and Alecto, his abused cavalier/enslaved death god/badly exploited Tier 3 subscriber.

Jod's entire motivation is grievance. To hear him tell it - so take that for what it's worth - he started out purely interested in saving the human race, giving the Earth a chance to restore itself from total climate failure, and only through a gauntlet of other people committing hanging offenses like "not listening to him" and "having their own ideas about things" and "being afraid of a murderous necromancer" - and, admittedly, "being predatory capitalist filth who used the world up and then fucked off to start a new slave empire on a habitable planet orbiting Tau Ceti" - was he forced into the unenviable - burdensome, really! - position of murdering the entire solar system and reshaping it to his sponsored by Helix Sleep whims. He was given the power to do so by the genius loci of the entire Earth, who believed his motivation enough (and was desperate enough) to turn him into Felix Biederman, Necrolord, and in return he swallowed half of her soul, slam-dunked the rest into a life-sized Hollywood Hair Barbie made of puke, and proceeded to murder everyone everywhere. Cheerful stuff!

Silas Octakiseron and Colum Asht. Okay. Silas... is a jerk. He's a jerk. He's a jerk who does A Thing - soul siphoning - that even people who do fucked up things with bones and blood and corpses and enjoy a fun night out grave-robbing think is extremely and unnecessarily fucked. And he feels like he's never there, because, in many ways, he isn't. Even when he is present, and he is present at every major turn in Gideon the Ninth, he's disconnected from the rest of the characters, standing aloof and doing his own thing, except when an opportunity arises to take something from someone else by force. And that someone is usually Colum, even when it's also someone else.

Silas is motivated by grievance. In some ways, much more immediate and human grievance than Jod's, and in some ways vastly pettier. The existence of the Ninth House disgusts him... Because he thinks they have favor from the Emperor that should be the Eighth's. The path of Lyctorhood disgusts him... Even though he tears out Colum's soul on the regular and ends up killing him horribly to use him in a more violent way than Lyctoral consumption. People playing fast and loose with the Imperial religion disgust him... Even though Jod himself has condemned siphoning. And, of course, people not being honest and upright disgust him... And he tries to take the only thing Colum has, his honor, away too, for no better purpose than to rob Gideon.

Colum Asht is not a "real" person in the same way Alecto is not a "real" person: He was manufactured as Silas's cavalier, engineered before birth. He was created as basically nothing more than a battery, just as Jod "made" Alecto.

There she was; John had made her so ugly, so unbearably ugly. The terrible face, with the terrible arms and legs and the terrible middle part, and the terrible hair, and the terrible ears: the nose too short, the ears too brief.

And unlike Silas, in the few scenes where he stands up as his own person, he fills the room. He's an upstanding man, of many good qualities, with the misfortune of being slowly eaten by his own master.

Colum follows Silas's every command without complaint, even when it hurts him, even when it ends up killing him. The one place he stands up for himself is when Silas tries to force him to betray his own word of honor.

I was engineered into a man who doesn't—pick and choose his decencies!

And just like John and Alecto, when Colum shows that he can't be controlled completely, that he has his own mind, Silas decides to impose himself on his cavalier in a way that can't be fought, by exploiting his basic drive to please his abuser.

“Stop fighting me,” said Silas, without opening his eyes.

Colum said gruffly: “Don’t do it. Don’t put me under. Not this time.”

“Brother Asht,” said his necromancer, “if you cannot believe, then for God’s sake obey.”

In Alecto's case, she's lured to the Locked Tomb and imprisoned for - as far as Jod cares - eternity. In Colum's case, he dies horribly, his soul replaced by devils.

Just like Alecto, Colum is by far the more human of the pair.

In this manner, these four (yeah I know I left Silas out at the start but he's an ass) give us a Rosetta Stone to the story, at least to date.

The Sixth let us understand what our protagonists are doing and going through - their love is clearer and less muddied than that of the Ninth, Camilla's grief for Palamedes - and Paul's, for the short moment we see them, for Nona - is more human than Harrow's insane gambit, and their sacrifices - for the survivors of Canaan House, for Nona, for themselves - are far more vindicated than the broken attempts Gideon and Harrowhark make to destroy themselves for each other. They give us a lens to read the larger themes of the books through.

Colum, in turn, is a legend.

ahem

Colum, in turn, is a legend to help us read the warped map we have so far to Alecto and to the world. What Jod did and does to his tamed Resurrection Beast, and to the people he rules, Silas does to Colum, writ small. Colum's brief moments of resistance then let us read back through Jod's deceptive bullshit, and Mercy and Augustine's invective, to see who Alecto might have been, beyond the snippets from Nona, and what her "crimes" might have been that demanded Jod imprison her in the Tomb.

I don't think The Locked Tomb is a puzzle, exactly. As I said before, its themes are simple and understandable. They're also mystery books, and can be approached that way, and especially the first time you read them the ways they unfold themselves are a treat. But they're not trying to be more clever than you, and the ways they try to trick you are the tricks of a magician, or a truly excellent stage performance. Everything you need is there, and if you need a hand, the Sixth and the Eighth are there to offer it to you, while the Ninth (and the First) are engaged in some extremely fun sleight-of-hand.

Can you tell I like these books a lot?