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    Gideon the Ninth 

Chapter 11

  • Gideon's sparring bouts with the other cavaliers. Especially considering that, instead of the two-handed sword she's fought with her whole life, here Gideon's using a weapon she's far less experienced and skilled with—the rapier, which she's only received three months worth of training for—and still manages to intimidate the other Houses with her ability.
    • First she faces off against Magnus; while he by his own admission has no great skill with the blade, Gideon shows where she got her reputation as the finest swordfighter the Ninth House has produced in millenia by almost effortlessly beating him in three moves.
    • Next is Naberius; he gives Gideon far more trouble, but she manages to keep pace with him, and while he technically wins the match, she proves that she'd be a match for him in a real fight by promptly knocking him ass-over-teakettle following the winning blow.

Chapter 12

  • Palamedes intervenes and stops the fight before it gets far, but Gideon fights Camilla for long enough to have a healthy respect for her. When forced to drop her dagger, Camilla instantly crouches, kicks the dagger back into her hand, and does a handspring backwards down the stairs.

Chapter 23

  • Judith pushes for her cavalier Marta to duel the Sixth cav, Camilla, out of the belief that the Sixth are all just librarians, smart but with minimal combat ability - some of the others present protest that this is bullying and the Sixth are unable to fight back (unlike Gideon, who's fought Camilla and knows that she's no pushover). Camilla asks her necro how to play it, and he tells her "Go loud." Marta does not shame herself and scores a good hit, but loses definitively to Camilla, who (as the text says) hits her like a hurricane. During the fight, Camilla manages to disarm Marta's dagger, push her to the end of the table they're fighting on top of, and after taking a wound to the arm, drops her rapier and dislocates Marta's arm, forcing Judith to call mercy.
    There was silence, except for Camilla's ragged breathing and the lieutenant's tiny, half-amazed gasps. Then Jeannemary said, "Hot dog."

Chapter 35

  • Palamedes' Final Speech right before his Heroic Suicide.
    Cytherea: "Young Warden of the Sixth House, what have you done?"
    Palamedes: "Tied the noose. You gave me the rope. You have severe blood cancer ... just as Dulcinea did. Advanced, as hers was when she died. Static, because the Lyctor process begins radical cell renewal at the point of absorption. 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 is nothing to what your own body is 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 ... This is for the Fifth and the Fourth—for everyone who's died, directly or indirectly, due to you—and most personally, this is for Dulcinea Septimus."
    Cytherea: "Oh, it's going to take a great deal more than that. You know what I am ... and you know what I can do."
    Palamdes: "Yes. I also know you must have studied radical thanergetic fission, so you know what happens when a necromancer dispereses their entire reserve of thanergy very, very quickly."
    Cytherea: "What?"
    Palamedes: "Gideon! Tell Camilla—"
    Palamedes: "Oh, never mind. She knows what to do."
    The sickroom exploded into white fire, and the bonds pinning Gideon snapped. She fell hard against the wall and spun, drunkenly, lurching back down the corridor as Palamedes Sextus made everything burn. There was no heat, but Gideon sprinted away from that cold white death without bothering to spare a glance behind as though flames were licking at her heels. [...] She ran for her life down the long corridors, past ancient portraits and crumbling statues, the grave goods of the tomb of Canaan House, the mechanics of this feeble shitty machine crumbling as Palamedes Sextus became a god-killing star.
    • After the sequel explains the concept of Lyctoral privacy , this retroactively becomes even more awesome—the short version is that it's almost impossible to use necromancy on a Lyctor, even for other Lyctors (Mercymorn the First can only do it because of her encyclopedic knowledge of the human body). That means Palamedes, who while brilliant is still human to Cytherea's immortal super-lich, did this nigh-unachievable thing with sheer knowledge and willpower.

Chapter 36

  • Gideon and Harrow finally fighting together rather than with each other gets a long introduction that shows off just how far both of them have come, and Gideon's long awaited reunion with her lost love:
    "A necromancer alone can't bring that down, Griddle. That's regenerating bone."
    "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. [...]
    "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. Stinging flails of bone met her blade and exploded into grey foam as she stood her ground and pummeled them with great, swinging arcs of good cold Ninth House steel.
    With Harrow there, suddenly it was easy, and her horror of the monster turned to the ferocious joy of vengeance.

    Harrow the Ninth 

Chapter 7

  • Though it didn't go as planned, Harrow being able to use necromancy in any capacity during her first trip through the River absolutely flabbergasts her mentors. Later God confirms that Cassiopeia was the only other necromancer to perform theorems in the river her first time.

Chapter 25

  • Harrow's first attempt to kill Gideon the First. After he breaks all of her wards and very nearly kills her, she is too terrified to sleep, and, at the Emperor's request, starts making soup to steady her nerves. When several days later, he asks her to prepare a meal for the First, she does so with trepidation, barely able to think straight after six days without sleep, but enacts her plan, boiling down marrow to make the soup and recreating a full skeleton inside the Saint of Duty's body, only to be held back from the killing blow by the Emperor, who is calmly and politely shocked until Harrow reveals how she did so:
    "Harrowhark," he said, "you cannot have perceived foreign bone marrow within the body of a Lyctor. I'm not sure Mercy could perceive it with her arms draped around Ortus the whole time."
    "The cells weren't foreign."
    "What?"
    "I sectioned my tibia for the soup," you said.

    • God's reaction afterward really sells it, too. "Six days. No sleep. She still manages a full skeleton commencement from diluted marrow. What else have you failed to see, Mercymorn-?"
  • Also, Gideon the First tries to kill her while she's naked and unarmed in the bathtub and she still manages to fight back using her bare hands and a bit of necromancy.

Epiparados

  • Harrow, near-mad with grief over the loss of Gideon, conscripts Ianthe into a mad, desperate plan to keep herself from eating Gideon's soul and killing her forever. And, despite the side effects and the messy neurosurgery, it works. Gideon's soul is intact, and it seems that they've settled into a stable Mind Hive.

Chapter 44

  • After months and months of being dead, Gideon finally makes her appearance in Harrow's otherwise unconscious body. Then, despite Harrow's body having all the strength of spaghetti and her sword being pitted and dull from disuse, she manages to fight through a swarm of eldritch insectoids and fight a full Lyctor to a standstill. She's Back indeed.

Chapter 49

  • Abigail manages to summon the soul of Matthias Nonius into Harrow's Dream Land using nothing but passion.
    The flames guttered around Abigail Pent. She looked terrified, uplifted, and openly astonished; she looked faraway, as though she were no longer even truly with them. Her spectacles had slipped off her nose, and in that blazing blue corona her eyes were dark and liquid and—feral. The House of the Fifth always skinned itself over with such airs of civilisation, with so many manners and niceties, but they were spirit-talkers, and speakers to the dead. And the dead were savage.

    [...]

    "Ortus," Abigail said gravely. This was the first time Harrow had ever seen her even slightly disarrayed. Her hair, normally brushed to mirror smoothness, looked as though she had been dragged backward through the oss. She was wet with sweat. She kept rubbing her hands discreetly, and Harrow saw that they were singed. "Ortus, that should not have worked. We had no right to call the soul of Matthias Nonius. Your sword had no viable link to him—we had no thanergetic connection—we had nothing but the manuscript you gave me. [...] I find myself in the astonishing position of having created a revenant link through—well—sheer passion."
    • Basically, Ortus - dead Ortus - saved them all by writing fanfic.

  • The last we see of Matthias, Ortus, Marta, and Protesilaus, they're all riding to the rescue of Gideon the First against a Resurrection Beast. A monster that eats planets for breakfast, that's already killed a Lyctor and walked away, and they're ready to give up their afterlives in the name of slaying it. Especially noteworthy is the inclusion of Ortus in this little cavalry; he died in cowardice, never being much of a fighter. Now, he charges into battle alongside his hero.

     Nona the Ninth 

Chapter 9

  • The entirety of the beach fight serves as one for Camilla Hect. She faces off alone against six trained gunmen, with only her knives and a temporary access to necromancy that leaves her seriously wounded. Made all the more impressive in that we don't see the action itself, just the results.
    As Nona's eyes adjusted she saw Camilla, squatting on the sand. Everyone else was fanned out, lying down around her, as though they had all decided to take a schooltime nap... Each and every single person who wasn't Camilla was down on the ground. Their unholstered guns were still clutched in their hands or scattered loosely near them. The sand underneath each one was oily black. It hadn't been that hot, but wisps of steam curled up from the dark, wet sand.
    Camilla was crouched down, wiping her knives on one of their jackets. When she looked up, Nona was electrified. One of her eyes was a pale, pearlescent grey; the other one of her eyes was a deep, cool stone color. Nona understood in a sudden shiver what she was looking at.
  • Despite being seriously injured and in danger of going insane from using necromancy in proximity to a Resurrection Beast, Camilla manages to keep Nona calm, get the two of them back to their apartment without getting noticed, and talk Pyrrha out of telling Palamedes what happened, since she knows he'd be horrified by what she's putting herself through.

Chapter 23:

  • Ianthe, as the Saint of Awe and the actual necromancer in the family, is regarded by everyone as the more dangerous twin, and it seems like Corona has simply folded up the second they got back in the same room. Until Corona holds herself at gunpoint and masterfully manipulates Ianthe into accepting Camilla's challenge. She is not, in fact, just boobs and hair and talk.
    Corona: Just one fight...one last duel. You challenged her, you know, back on Canaan House. I didn’t do it. So follow through, for me. You always do things for me, don’t you? My heart’s own... my necromancer.
  • Then there's Camilla vs Ianthe:
    Camilla sprawled on the carpet. Her empty right hand was grasped around the Prince’s right wrist; the Prince’s right wrist turned into the Prince’s right hand and then into the Prince’s lovely thin sword, which ran all the way down into Camilla’s belly. The point was somewhere quite far inside Camilla, and Nona couldn’t see it any more.
    “You really don’t know when to throw those things, do you,” said the Prince, a little sadly.
    Camilla said, “Match to the Sixth.”
    Ianthe said, “What?”, and then her eyes rolled backwards in her head and she fell.

Chapter 24:

  • Palamedes kicks Ianthe out of her own cavalier's dead body, after a Year Inside, Hour Outside knock-down drag-out fight. On top of that, he's still holding her back, because he now respects her necromancy too much to actually destroy her mind.

Epilogue:

  • Alecto wakes up, and it's immediately clear why she's The Dreaded.
    Upon which the body which had been rock rose from the altar and struck the child who had offered violence [Ianthe] to her with one broken hand, forgetting the sword in the other, so that the child who offered violence was not slain, but was cast into the water like a detestable thing. And many skeletons emerged from the bones of the bier, and from the walls of the tomb, but when the sword was raised, they fled.


Alternative Title(s): Gideon The Ninth, Harrow The Ninth, Nona The Ninth

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