Untangling Dead Hand Rule: within the Argent Library
We’ve covered the plans, we’ve covered the recap, and we’ve covered our relatively self-contained stories. Now comes the time to enter the Argent Library for the real fight.
There are still major spoilers, that should really go without saying. Also, I slightly lost control over the quotes. They are many and they are long.
I won’t be doing a FULL recap this time, but I do love a list so here’s a quick reminder of how our characters got here:
Jax used Mal as bait to get Dawn to the Hidden Schools
He also arranged for vampires to kidnap Kai so she could attack Dawn via the market
Tara wasn’t part of the plan, but figured out where Dawn was going and went to stop her
Kai is not actually in the Argent Library, but her story is integral to what’s going on there so she is included in this essay. In fact, we’re going to start with her.
What happens to Kai Pohala?
Kai, you will hopefully recall, has Grimwald’s ghost in her head. She has been made the heir to Grimwald Holdings, and Eberhardt Jax was keen to use her and the power held in Grimwald Holdings to take down Dawn. She rejected him, rightly.
Unfortunately, she ended up unconscious in hospital, from where she was easily kidnapped by our least favourite vampire Clarity on Jax’s orders.
She briefly wakes up on Jax’s yacht (though we only find that out later) to find herself being plugged into a market terminal.
I confess, I’ve often had difficulty visualising the market magic of the Craft Sequence and tend to skate past those descriptions. The description here, however, is far clearer, so let’s have a quote to illustrate what poor Kai is dealing with:
“And so Kai woke indeed—to drowning, to joy, to a cascade of market data. Somewhere a heart monitor beeped. When she tried to move, she rustled cords and needles and medical tape.
“She is weak.”
“Desperation concentrates the mind, unlocks the gates of the soul. Put her into the terminal. She will be needed soon.”
Cold arms circled her, raised her, then lowered her into water. A pale, blurred figure was in the water with her, beside her—mouth open. A sharp pain stung her neck, and she began to go away. There was a numb light, and nothing wrong in all the world. She tumbled into grey.
…
Her teeth closed on a slick tube in her mouth. From that tube issued warmth and glory, sweetness and sin. It pulsed in heartbeat rhythm. Some distant thing of meat she barely recognised as her body swallowed.
The gates of her soul creaked, strained, burst.
…
In her training Kai had dreamed of the order flow—not the market, that shadow of mismatched desires, but the numinous truth the market reflected: all that was needed anywhere, and all there was to meet that need. Her dream had not approached reality.
Around her great things swam. Call them gods or nations or Concerns. They were accumulations of want and plenty. There passed the great squids of Iskar, there the remnant deities of Southern Kath, and all around the hollowed-out rotting forms the Craftsmen had made their own: a world built of corpses.
On Kavekana, they kept these powers far away. ”
Firstly, the market terminal. I’m not sure how many people, if any, are directly plugged into a market terminal. Jax seems to think Kai would be one of the best in the world at this job, and she struggles. It seems more likely that most people work through Craft-y intermediaries, whether they be the nightmare telegraph dreamers we saw in Last First Snow, or perhaps golems, or simply Craft versions of computer terminals.
Kai is in a tank. Is this a requirement, I wonder, or replicating the pool in the caldera at Kavekana? The market is described as an ocean in which things swim; but is this how everyone would interpret it, or the way Kai’s mind processes the data because of her experiences in the pool?
She has wires and monitors and IV lines attached to her - to check her vitals and ensure she is on the brink of death but not dead yet, I imagine, rather than that being the terminal itself. We can ignore the sharp pain in her neck, as that is the vampire preparing to eat Dawn and Ajaia through Kai rather than the market terminal.
The key part of being plugged into the terminal appears to be the “slick tube in her mouth [that] issued warmth and glory, sweetness and sin.” It’s once she swallows that she fully falls into the market.
She floats, drowning and dying for a time - until Jax arrives in the Argent Library. Tara says she hears a click like a button, and then Dawn screams. At that point, from Kai’s point of view, it felt like she was behind impenetrable glass and then, with that same click, a wall came down.
“Beneath them, before them, lay a vast body. Roots and fronds and drifting strands of green wove into a woman. There, exposed by shifting currents, her verdant throbbing heart.
This was Ajaia of the Green. What was left of her. Kai smelled the sweet loam of her soul, and the metal tang of something else.
Our enemy, said the ghost.
Kai was so hungry. She was almost gone, and the goddess had life to spare.
No, she said. Wait. Stop. This is wrong.
But the ghost did not hesitate. They unhinged their jaw, bit into Ajaia’s heart, and drank.
…
The goddess withered as Kai drank. She was greengold and honey, cut with bitter iron. There was more of her than Kai expected, and less. More in that the goddess was just one part of a network that extended far beyond her frame, into the iron systems of Craftwork and theology. Less, in that she was stretched too thin and died too fast. A goddess ought to have reserves of living faith, contingencies, trusted lines of credit. None remained to Ajaia”
As Kai and the Grimwald ghost drink soul from Ajaia, Dawn’s army begins to fail. This was precisely Jax’s plan. He may have asked Kai to sell him Grimwald Holdings, but Plan B was always kidnapping her, let’s be real.
So, Dawn is convulsing and her army is failing. But what is actually happening? Jax is hardly going to let Kai and Grimwald keep the power they’re taking. No, the vampire in the tank with her is drinking the soulstuff through Kai’s blood.
Jax wanted the best market trader in the world for his plan. In his arrogance, he didn’t seem to realise that the best in the world might be able to thwart him. What a twat. Sure, Kai is bound by the vampire, by the fact that she’s kinda dying, by the fact that Grimwald’s ghost is trying to drive her body. But it’s Kai. If anyone can get out of this, it’s Kai.
Thus we come to Mal’s prayer. I love this moment, reflecting Elayne’s own sort-of-prayer in Last First Snow, answered by the being that became Sybil and Dawn. Kai is brought back to herself, argues with Grimwald, and answers Mal’s prayer. This next quote is long, but shorter than me trying to explain it myself:
“/Let me save her/
In the market depths beneath the world, Kai heard the prayer.
It drew her into time. The room of skulls became clearer now, and so did Tara, and Dawn, and Jax with his blade drifting down. And Mal, praying.
…
All right, kid, said the ghost. Good luck.
And she was herself again. Drowning. But she had drowned before—so many times. She had practice.
The trap was a balancing act. Kai drew power from Ajaia, and the vampires drained her before she could do anything with it. She had to break the balance. In that moment of crisis, she might even have a chance to escape.
She needed to starve herself—to send Ajaia’s power somewhere off-books, somewhere she couldn’t claw it back when she began to die.
People around the world thought Kavekanese faith-banking was the province of embezzlers and organised criminals. She’d spent much of her career fighting that impression. Time and again, she had insisted, pilgrims may steal, but that doesn’t have anything to do with us. She had been advised not to say the next part: if we wanted to embezzle, we’d be so muich better at it.
She hoped the Oversight Board never found out about this.
Where could she hide Ajaia’s power? Not within the goddess herself. Any hiding place there would have been raided already. But…
/Let me save her/
Mal had been part of Dawn’s body—so, part of Ajaia. She had cut herself off—but had Dawn? Look closer—there, the slimmest thread: a niche within the body of the goddess, preserved for Mal’s return. A candle burning in a bedroom window. This might kill her. Kai was moving too much power for a single person to hold without burning from the nerves out. Only a saint could manage it. A saint, or a knight.”
Kai funnels Ajaia’s power into Mal (her section is coming up) and, well. She and the Grimwald ghost start dying for real. But this is part of Kai’s plan. She tells the Grimwald to pay attention, that they only have one shot - and she lets go of Ajaia.
Then she wakes up, still dying.
“Kai sank into her body, into darkness and pain. Wires led to her arms and wrists and temples, and out from the great arteries of her legs. She was braided with limbs she had not chosen.
Nor had she chosen the fangs in her throat.
Her lungs were full of dark water. Her eyes stung. She thrashed through the weight of fluid, and struck the glass walls of the tank where they had kept her. Wires popped and pulled. The arms around her clung tight. If there had been air to breathe, she would have been choking, but there was no air. Only ecstasy.
She felt so weak. Soul and body gone. A shell of a body clutched by twin ghosts. She had been down here before. Half a world and half her life away—but all dark waters were in some respects the same. You came up different, if you came up at all.
In the darkness of her soul, she found a silver grin. It played upon her lips. The vampiric curse was a kind of miracle. And she could use miracles.
The vampire drew back too late. Tried to swim away.
There was no struggle. Just a darting motion in the water and a flash of teeth. He spasmed once, was still. Kai drank, and grew strong.
Her first blow against the reinforced glass cracked a knuckle. Her second shattered a hole the size of an office chair. She slipped out in a rush of sticky fluid and lay panting on the tile floor of the red-lit lab.”
KAI. You are so amazing. Truly incredible.
The next section is written like a horror movie script, and I desperately need someone to draw it animatic style please. Kai staggers out of the lab and has to fight a guard infected by skazzerai metal. She’s about to lose, when Raz Pelham stabs the skazzerai man and rips his head off.
He has come to save her, along with Izza and Shale. Beautiful. For the last little part of her story, check out the last essay and Izza Jalai’s section. Kai is there, but this is the end of her story for now.
What happens to Dawn?
It was hard to know who to start with in the Argent Library itself. It was going to be Tara for a while, but I think we need her to end this essay and set up the next. So, let’s take a look at Dawn.
Dawn is absent from a significant portion of Dead Hand Rule, but the book is entirely about her and the threat she represents. Sure, there’s the worry about the stars being wrong and ancient space skazzerai showing up, but Dawn is here now and has just wreaked havoc across the world and its markets.
I haven’t always been particularly sympathetic to Dawn in the past. She felt two dimensional in a way unusual for Gladstone’s characters. I think it was a major misstep on Gladstone’s part not to give her POV pages in Dead Country (surprise surprise, I will be writing at length about that soon). So on my rereads I’ve been trying to give her a bit more grace, and I’m finding myself giving her more grace.
Let’s look Dawn briefly before we get to the Argent Library.
We don’t have a specific age, but it seems that’s she’s in her late teens or very early twenties, and had a hard yet sheltered upbringing on the road with her father. Dirt poor, surrounded by superstition and suspicion, seemingly terrified of the power she had inside her. Then she finally finds a mentor, a saviour in Tara Abernathy—and Tara nearly dies. So Dawn does whatever she can to save the woman who saved her by merging with Sybil, becoming a new being with new strange instincts, far too much power, and no idea how to exist in the world. Tara, the woman she almost died to save, turns on her. Sybil, the Craft-god who has spent her entire existence being tortured by Denovo, lashes back.
And then Dawn’s on the run. She has nobody except Sybil, and no idea what to do except somehow try to save a world that she knows is irreparably broken, a world that has done nothing but hurt her and Sybil. She finds a new family, which becomes woven into her very soul by belief and love and trust. Foremost in this group is Mal—who is then taken from her by someone who will probably want to torture and kill her.
Dawn enters Dead Hand Rule with only one priority: finding Mal. Sure, she has longer term plans to tear up the economic-political system of the world, but that’s not on the table right now. She wants Mal, and will do anything—including attacking the Conclave and the Hidden Schools—to get her back.
“She had not wanted this. Her plan had been simple. Draw attention. Scare people. While they’re scared, get Mal. She’d said that to Sybil over and over again. We’re not ready for the library, not yet. It’s Mal I’m here for. I won’t let them have her. I won’t let them use her. She’s been used too often.”
I believe that this is her only goal here, and I’m not sure I would have felt that way after Wicked Problems, let alone Dead Country.
Dawn is scared—she knows this could be a trap, and that the location is a danger to her. But she goes in anyway to seek out Mal, the first of her believers.
And she is hunted by Tara.
We see this from both Dawn and Tara’s points of view, and it’s quite terrifying. The Argent Library itself is fighting back against Dawn, and Tara is driven with a single minded purpose that really is not her.
I mean that literally. It’s Denovo. But we’ll get to that later.
Dawn runs from Tara through the physical and mental maze of the Argent Library,
“Dawn could have escaped, if escape was what she wanted. There were so many paths away. Only one led forward.
She found herself in a chamber with no entrance. For exit it had three doors: of brass, of ivory, of stone. Which was her path?
…
All these doors were wrong. That was the Craft all over: offer false choices. Build structures of argument so every path leads to your victory.
She plunged into the stone between the doors, and through.
She landed, sprawled, on a staircase made of bookshelves. To her left and right were still more bookshelf-staircases, perpendicular to hers, and between them still other perpendicular to those, yet not parallel to the first, and others along proliferating dimensions. As she ran the staircases fanned out, melding and recombining like kaleidoscope jewels.
...
A claw of shadow tore the stairs out from underneath her.
Tara stood on the shattered stair above. There was an amber glint to her eye.
Dawn said, “I won’t let you stop me.”
The books were made from paper, some of them, and the paper, some of it, from trees—Ajaia’s bailiwick. They sprouted, surged, spread roots that drank the supernova soulstuff of the inner library. Vines thickened to trunks in a thunderclap of growth and caged Tara inside them.
Tara’s laugh spread rot through green wood. “You have no power here to permit, or stay.”
Sybil urged her, “Run,” but she could not. “Kill her, then. Eat her. Don’t let her speak.”
“I don’t want to fight you, Tara. We’re on the same side.”
Tara’s hand burst free in a shower of dust—the hand that held the skull. “What side is that? The side that kidnaps my friends? That devours coastline, breaks prisons, burns down cities, carves the Serpents open? … You’re being used, Dawn. That thing from the cave is using you.” As she spoke, the rot spread.
“That’s not true.” And yet Tara sounded so certain. Someone would have seen it, would;t they? Mal? Or Temoc? Ms Kevarian? Izza?
“The Argent Library is one heart of the Craft. All Court libraries everywhere connect to this one. This is the high ground. The parasite drove you here so it could spawn.”
As a reader doubting Dawn, I was tempted to believe Tara here—as Dawn herself does, in fact. We’ve seen Dawn’s POV but not Sybil’s. Could Sybil be, for lack of a better word, evil? Could she be manipulating Dawn? In this very moment Sybil urges Dawn to kill Tara, to eat her.
But Tara herself is being manipulated, and Dawn realises who is controlling her.
“Why couldn’t she hear Sybil? She could hear Tara, and the subtle Craft beneath her voice. His knife was fine and gentle, Sybil had said. It could cut you away from yourself. No.
“You want to talk about being used? I know whose skull that is. I know better than you, or you would never have picked it up.”
“You don’t know anything. I will use whatever weapon I have to, if it will save this world from you.”
“It’s your plan I’m following. Our world I’m trying to save. … I hurt you. I’m sorry. Sybil—what she was before—she hurt you. She’s sorry. We’ve been weak and scared, stupid, vicious. But you were a good teacher. And I’ve tried to be a good student. Even when I lost the way.”
Tara burst free in a shower of rot and sap and ash, radiant with death. … In that instant, Tara’s eyes were almost her own again.
Almost.
Her lip curled into a sneer. He glyphs flared golden. “Nice try.”
Dawn gets away by leaping off a multidimensional staircase to land in a room of god skulls, and the bone crystal that connects all of the Craft, everywhere and at all times. Bound to the crystal by writhing skazzerai metal chains, is Mal.
Seeing this breaks the mind control over Tara, and she tells Dawn to go with Mal. Unfortunately, this is when Craft!Elon Musk shows up in the form of Eberhardt Jax. We hear a button, Kai is released into the market, and Dawn collapses with a scream.
We’ve seen what happens from Kai’s perspective. But what’s going on? I’ll let Jax villain-monologue at us. It’s fairly long, sorry not sorry:
“The girl is unharmed, so far. She is suffering an all-out attack through the markets—paralysis by margin call. It’s costing fortunes to hold her, billions of thaums a minute. Fortunately I have souls to burn: fortunes stashed in shipping containers, ready for this moment—to hold this newborn skazzerai long enough to do what’s necessary. Even this would have been impossible without the model of the girl’s structure we obtained during the conflict in Dresediel Lex. I do believe she is in quite a lot of pain, but it will pass, and you will accomplish nothing by further struggle save to prolong her suffering. And, for that matter, Ms Pohala’s.”
Jax bent once more to Dawn. How long could he hold her? Billions of thaums a minute, he’d said. … [B]ut if she could keep him talking… “Such a noble and altruistic mission. Such an obviously good idea. No wonder you had to do it all in secret.”
He looked up, annoyed. “You’ve seen exactly what would have happened if I tried to warn people, to make this a group project. I would have spent years we don’t have petitioning one grim self-interested potentate after another to take necessary action, and made zero headway.” He made a careful adjustment to the iron at his temple. “There was so much to do. For all our progress, we were groping in the dark.”
That’s right. Get him into a rhythm. “Until the spirecliffs.”
“Exactly. A functional piece of spider-iron. I don’t know how it survived—but when I realised what it was, I had to have it. Though I couldn’t take it myself. Not with the Ajaian priesthood looking on, and Grimwald Holdings—an enemy that I could not, at the time, even name—and many others.”
Dawn still wasn’t moving. “So you hired Mal.”
“I had been making use of her services—through proxies—for years. Ms Kekapania’s social convictions made her an ideal weapon against my rivals, or against Concerns that seemed too close to my own insights on the matter.”
…
“So you sent Mal to steal the spirecliff shard, but Dawn got in the way. And then your idea weapon found something real to fight for. You had to move fast.”
“The girl’s arrival forced my hand on many matters. With the Grimwald, for example. And with the Iskari, though that was really my colleagues’ overreach. The Serpents, though, they were necessary.”
“But why? If you want to beat the skazzerai—” Fuck. “You don’t want to beat them. You want to join them.”
“Not exactly. I want to consume the juvenile skazzerai and become its heart, its motivating intelligence—join it with my fortunes and understanding. That way, when the old monsters in the sky show up, they won’t face some random kid. They will face a united world.”
“Under your control.”
Jax is about to deal this random kid the final blow when Mal prays to Kai. Kai channels Ajaia’s power to Mal, who is then able to fight (see Mal’s section below). But still, Jax cuts at Dawn, who screams in pain. Tara fights Jax with the Craft to save the girl she saved and trained. It does just enough to bring Dawn back to herself for a moment.
And then it isn’t Dawn, but Sybil who makes the next move.
“There was a knife in her chest. There were chains in her heart. She strained against them, but only tore herself. Those chains carved Sybil as they drew her up—and Dawn felt that pull, too, dragging her into the thresher mouth.
She was being torn apart. Tara’s argument wrapped her in an embrace of light, but she had taken the iron into herself, made it hers—and like called to like. When she fought, she used the same power Jax called upon to claim her. As she drew away, she reached for him. Soon they would slip together into the maw that was his heart.
She had been here before—torn on the wire web, waking only to die.
No, she thought—Sybil thought. Not now. Not again. Not if I have anything to say about it.
Dawn tried to feel that old arrogance, the pride from which Sybil asked, again and again throughout their travels, “Can I eat him?” But the pride was gone. In its place she felt conviction. All pathways foreseen. All analysis complete.
No, she prayed. Don’t leave me. You can’t leave me alone.
Sybil turned to her, bleeding. One of the serpent’s eyes flicked closed.
“Old categories, remember?” the serpent said. “Not helpful.” And, “See you around.”
And Sybil let go.
…
There followed a sickening crunch, and a moment of silence.
Jax’s eyes were unfocused. His chest heaved. The chains around Tara slackened, and she wriggled free. Heat from Jax’s body rippled the air as something inside him did an awful lot of work, awfully fast.”
It seems that Sybil has left Dawn somehow—didn’t know she could do that after the two of them merged. Does this mean that Dawn is no longer Craft-God-Proto-Skazzerai? Does she still have the connections to Mal and her army? What about Ajaia’s power, and the skazzerai shard Sybil ate at the end of Wicked Problems? Or is she just Dawn?
Sybil is clearly fighting at something within Jax. But is she winning? In the short term, at least, it seems maybe no. Because right after this, we get this horror:
“Jax’s eyes opened, and he laughed.
The chains about him trembled—released now from the shells of the grey men. They rose. Then they moved, fast as a blink, all at once.
…
They lashed the bone crystal at the Capital Chamber’s heart, and plunged inside—into the multidimensional archives beneath its surface—the reference and repository and the heart of Craft. The crystal flickered and blushed grey. Iron webs spread across its face.”
Dawn’s army falls to chains; we see this through Temoc in the last essay. It really looks like Jax (or perhaps the metal within him, if he had some) has defeated Sybil.
If this is, in fact, what happened, I think it’s temporary. Jax is not stronger than a skazzerai, even a junior one like Sybil, come on. But it can take a little while for Sybil to figure out the body she’s in—we saw this with Dawn, and Jax is very different than Dawn. I reckon Sybil is in there as a sort of sleeper agent, to be awoken at a useful time in Craft Wars #4.
What happens to Mal Kekapania?
We’ve seen how Caleb broke Mal out of her cell, and the two of them were attacked by grey men. Mal was then taken to the Argent Library and bound to the archive crystal, as seen in Dawn’s section. We also know that she prayed to be able to save Dawn, and Kai answered through the market, channelling power to her—though Kai fears it is too much power for a single person to hold, unless they are a saint, or perhaps a knight.
Funny she should say that.
What was it Caleb did before he fell unconscious, again? He asked Mal if she trusted him, then kissed her. Odd behaviour. Except…
“A voice answered from the omnipresent heights of prayer: That’s a bit much for a first date. But let’s see what we can do.
Something moved inside her soul. There was a click, agonising as a dislocated limb popping back into joint. When you passed a magnet over iron, what would the iron feel, as each of its most subtle parts shifted to face a new direction?
Pain washed through her, and more. She clenched her jaw to keep from screaming.
She remembered Caleb’s kiss.
…
Only a knight may ordain another knight.
Godsdammit, Altemoc. If we ever get out of this, I am going to—
She was on fire.
No.
She was kindling.”
Filled with green fire and power, Mal throws herself at Jax to fight him. From Tara’s point of view we see that Mal can cut through skazzerai metal chains with her arm of fire holding a radiant sword. Her scars burn. I asked in Caleb’s section last essay whether we thought Mal had Eagle Knight scarring; it seems unlikely, especially as she did train as a Craftswoman. Seems that the kind of scars don’t matter in this case.
Mal fights until she can’t any more, when Kai pulls back the power. Like Caleb, Mal can’t create power herself, only channel it. When Kai lets go, Mal loses her green fire.
I have a feeling we’ll see Mal’s flames again, however. She and Caleb can fight against the skazzerai, so they’ll both be needed—but Caleb is, of course, not here right now. And you know, I think Mal with her Eagle Knight power may be the one to find and save him in the next book.
Which reminds me. I’m not going chronologically here, so I skipped over a scene after Caleb is kidnapped but before Dawn shows up in the Argent Library. Mal awakens tied to the archive crystal, and is greeted by Clarity, the creepy culty vampire.
“A hand closed over Mal’s mouth. She tried to bite, but the grip on her cheek and jaw was as strong as a steel muzzle. A rich alto voice whispered in her ear, “Hush.” Her breath smelled of lilac and iron.
Her captor looked like a woman, almost. Her skin was pale and perfect as a shell, her eyes as deep as the wrong space in the stars. Her lips were a bloody bow. She wore a gold disc at her throat.
“You miss your knight, your pair,” the pale woman said. “Truly you are twice blessed. First by those you would call master, the Serpents who made you twin grails to bear offering flame, and who in their folly so many thousand years ago shunned the Lords Beyond. Your master-worms hide now in the fires of their birth, in the world below the world, but their mark lingers on your heart. They will come when you call, when the sun goes out, and when you call them their blood will be the wine of rapture. So I call you twice-blessed, and this your second blessing: you and he are the cups of life, preparers of the way.” Those dark eyes were almost kind. “I wish we could take you with us. It pains me to loose you from my hand. But you are needed her, as he is not.”
…
“Do not fear, child. He is a beautiful grail. We will take excellent care of him. And when your purpose here’s accomplished, you will join us.”
I, um, don’t have much to say about that, except: what the fuck.
I need to do some research into grails, clearly.
What happens to Tara Abernathy?
Right. Let’s get to Tara. We’ve already seen quite a lot of her story through Dawn, but I think it’s worth following her specifically—even though this essay is now reaching a ridiculous length. Her bit doesn’t fit in essay 4, so it’s going here.
As we reach the Gladstone Maximum of Dead Hand Rule, Tara figures out Dawn’s plan to enter the Hidden Schools. The Hidden Schools are, after all, open to all, especially in war. That was how they originated, after all.
She makes the inadvisable yet understandable decision to take Denovo’s skull up to the Hidden Schools and try to learn from information left in the old lab she destroyed all those years ago.
“Tara did not look away. “Even if I wanted to…to trust Dawn—I can’t walk into that without a backup plan. You never would.”
…
“I lost, Elayne.” The words sounded so small. “She beat me. I have to win this time.”
...
“You could stop me,” Tara said. “Before I put one hand on that skull.”
Elayne wrapped her in her arms. Tara woke her warding glyphs by reflex, before she realised this was not an attack.
She could not breathe, or speak.
“I trust you,” Elayne said, and let go.
…
She grabbed Alexander Denovo’s skull and flew to the murder in the sky.”
Oh, Tara.
She’s spent the last two books blaming herself for everything going wrong and this seems to her like her only way to win. Denovo, for all his flaws, is the only person who might know what the hell is going on. Madeline Ramp sowed these seeds earlier in the book before her very timely yet gruesome death.
Unfortunately, Denovo long ago wove his way into her mind and left secret strings that he could easily pick back up to puppeteer her. Tara hunts for Dawn through the Argent Library, but she is driven by the memory of Denovo. She’s on a path she chose, sure, but she’s not in control any more. Dawn can tell the moment she sees Tara.
“From behind her, a familiar voice called her name.
“Run,” Sybil urged, but Dawn stopped instead, and turned.
There, below, on the bone steps, was Tara. Her suit was black. Her eyes were death. All trace of tenderness had burned away. In one hand she held her knife. In her other hand, a skull.”
Tara is absolutely convinced she is in control, even as the skull starts whispering to her. She even thinks “if she started talking to it, it might start talking back” WHILE IT IS TALKING TO HER. She manipulates Abelard’s mind in a way she never would have without Denovo’s influence, and thinks that the whispers are just memories presenting options to her, that they “belonged to her, now.” Girl, what?
As we read in Dawn’s section above, Tara hunts Dawn through the Library like the Terminator. The whole time, Denovo is whispering to her. Dawn almost gets through to Tara more than once, but Denovo is stronger, his influence older. It isn’t until she follows Dawn into the Capital Chamber and Dawn begs Tara to let her leave with Mal, says that she won’t fight her, that Tara is able to break through Denovo’s control.
“Lies, the whispers said. She’s here for power. Do not let her near that crystal. Strike now, with all the power of this place, which we together may invoke. I will show you how.
Why did you take me up, if not to do my work?
…
“I won’t fight you, Tara. I just want to take her and go.”
…
But that voice was not hers. She hated it, and it was right, and she could not argue. She was back in the lab, wrong again, with the knife in her hand.
She had been so weak. Had failed them one by one. She could not fail again. She had to fix it. Be the hero.
“I trust you,” Elayne had said.
And then she let her go.
The skull hit the stone floor. It bounced. Rolled.
The whispers vanished. So did her knife.”
This is so important. Dawn’s pleas for herself didn’t make much of an impact, but pleading for Mal did. And then, Elayne. When Elayne said “I trust you” she didn’t just mean to make the right decision there and then. She meant that she trusted Tara in the long run, that even if she made a mistake, she would be able to correct it. She meant that she knew Tara was guided by good, and that she was stronger than her worst impulses, stronger than her doubts.
And she was right.
Unfortunately, this is when Jax shows up and sets Kai on Dawn. Most of this encounter has been seen above—Jax attacks Dawn, Mal prays, Kai answers and channels Ajaia’s power into her, Mal attacks Jax.
And Tara? Well, Tara is the one who gets Jax villain-monologuing so we, the reader, can understand his plan, but also so Mal can develop her plan for attack.
We get a bunch of useful monologuing and learn Jax’s plan (go to page 370 for the whole thing). but my absolute favourite bit is:
“She gathered all her scorn, and laughed.
“Is there something…funny about all this, Ms Abernathy?”
“You,” she said. “You’re not right, Jax. You’re not even particularly clever. Or else you’d see that you’re being used.”
…
She could— barely—see when Abernathy’s jab brought him up short.
“Used? Me? Really.”
“By Clarity.”
“I assure you,” Jax said, “I am the driving partner in that particular business relationship.”
“You’re arrogant enough to believe it, too. On the one side, a millennia-old cult in the service of powers that have been eating planets since prehistory. On the other, the visionary genius of Eberhardt Jax.””
Tara is good at many things, but there is little she is better at than bringing men down to size.
We then get the Eagle Knight Mal section, but of course Tara fights back too. She fights with the Craft, with argument. She claims Dawn as her apprentice, her student, admits she was afraid, forgives Dawn for the death of her father, and professes love and trust for the girl.
And it’s just enough to give Dawn back to herself. Sybil attacks Jax, and Jax sends skazzerai iron through the archive crystal.
This would all be, of course, bad enough. But you’ll recall the real threat our characters have been anticipating for the past few books—the ancient skazzerai from across the stars.
“The Capital Chamber shifted. There was no dome above Tara any longer—just skulls and the blue afternoon sky.
Jax’s grey-men servants had mostly dissolved, but a trace of their bodies remained: distended faces, columns of gears that had been spines. They turned like sunflowers toward an empty patch of sky.
Jax, too, turned, facing nothing. A patch of blue two fists’ distance above the horizon, east by northeast.
“Oh—are you ready, you old bastard? Come on. Let’s go.”
…
The patch of sky darkened to a bruise.
Then something struck it from behind.
…
Tara saw the sky split open and the leg come down. Long and rainbow, starlit and swift, it fell.”
Well, shit.
Next time, we’ll look at what happens after the skazzerai arrives—and what it has to do with Denovo.
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