Untangling Dead Hand Rule: what happens AFTER the skazzerai arrives
We’ve gone through everything that got us to the point of the actual ancient space spider showing up - but what happens next?
Join me for space spiders, Elayne Kevarian, Abelard, and a digression on geography in this final installment of the ‘Untangling Dead Hand Rule’ miniseries.
So, SO many spoilers for Dead Hand Rule.
What do we know about how space spiders work?
Although this skazzerai is the first proper one to rock up to the Domain in the series, we conveniently have visions and memories to show us more about how they work.
I have a whole essay about Tara’s visions in the edge storm in Dead Country, and another essay about Grimwald and the skazzerai the last time they showed up. Here’s the essentials for Dead Hand Rule, including a few new insights provided by Grimwald’s ghost.
The skazzerai are made up of “black spears,” and within each spear is the remains of an organic being, fossilized “by machines not minerals.” People seemed to choose to join with the skazzerai, hearing an offer to surrender all and gain all. If people were removed from the skazzerai whilst still alive, they desperately tried to return (Dead Country, page 196).
We hear that the skazzerai are “hungry” but not for flesh; they eat desire. Specifically, the kind of desire that is never satiated (Wicked Problems page 367). They don’t want to kill people, but death is an ending to that desire. We read that new skazzerai “learn to play the passions of the beings from which they’re born, to stoke rage and strangle need like a body feeds and starves its organs” (WP 367), and that an old skazzerai coming to a new planet seeks “a herald, a translator—a mind that knows our world and rhymes with their grasping hunger, their emptiness” (Dead Hand Rule page 19).
That last bit is new information from Grimwald’s ghost, and is integral to what happens next.
What’s the deal with Denovo?
Ah Denovo. My eternal enemy. I confess I was a little disappointed when he seemed to show back up in the Craft Wars quartet, but I must bow down to Gladstone’s writing skill because now it makes so much sense.
It had to be Denovo.
Alexander Denovo was killed by Elayne Kevarian at the end of Three Parts Dead (the moment that made me go from wow I like this character to ELAYNE IS EVERYTHING). Death could be nothing more than an inconvenience for a necromancer, but Four Roads Cross opens with Tara ensuring that can’t happen, methodically taking apart his body in a way that ensures Craftsfolk stay dead.
His ally Madeline Ramp attempted to steal his skull, believing it to be the key to all sorts of knowledge and experimentation he never shared with his collaborators. Tara thwarted her, then kept the skull as a paperweight.
She learned in Dead Country that he had captured the being that became Sybil, a proto-skazzerai. He tortured her for years, decades, but she survived him - and escaped via Dawn.
We hadn’t heard the term herald before Dead Hand Rule, but it seems that Dawn acted in that way for Sybil. Sybil wanted to eat everything she came across, but Dawn held her back (…after the Tara incident). Sybil’s power was channelled through Dawn’s moral compass.
There’s an essay to come on that outwith this miniseries, so I shall leave it at that for now.
Back to Denovo.
As we went over in the last essay, Tara made the inadvisable decision to take Denovo’s skull up to the Hidden Schools, where he took subtle control of her mind. Tara was able to break free at the last moment, just before Jax appeared to villain monologue.
“The skull hit the stone floor. It bounced. Rolled.
The whispers vanished”
But there the skull stayed throughout the confrontation with Jax, as he absorbed Sybil, and as he called down the space spider. Tara forgets about it, as do we. Until that skazzerai leg comes seeking a herald.
And what exactly is a skazzerai looking for in a herald? “A mind that knows our world and rhymes with their grasping hunger.”
This could have been Jax; Jax seems to have assumed it would be, and that he would win in a mental battle against it. It doesn’t sound much like Tara, or Mal, or even Dawn. It sounds a hell of a lot like Alexander Denovo - whose skull, with all its memories and personality of the dead man, is conveniently lying only a few metres away.
“Black iron filaments wreathed the skull and rippled down. They wrought themselves bone and muscle, mimicked organs, teeth, flesh, tweed. A brown beard. Spectacles.
…
Behind the spectacles, his eyes were not eyes—only cutouts in that too-familiar face where the night beyond the whole in the sky shone through.”
To distinguish between real (dead) Denovo and this skazzerai resurrected version, I choose to name this one Denofaux. Yes, I amuse myself.
Is Denofaux technically Denovo, resurrected in iron flesh? Possibly. This is a series about necromancers, and there are many forms of death and undeath. But I do think it’s useful to distinguish between Denovo-that-was, and this new one. They are connected but not the same. Denofaux in fact says to Tara “I know this form concerns you” - that’s the skazzerai talking, not Denovo. But there remains enough of Denovo for some very key plot developments later.
Denofaux calls down more skazzerai legs and the battle turns to iron and gears. He smirks about his own genius, as one would expect, and creepily tells Tara “We’ll learn you.” Gross.
And then he is struck by lightning from his first murderer, Elayne Kevarian. Hell yeah, Elayne.
There’s more on their battle in the next section; for now, I want to jump to the end. You’ll recall, I hope, that Kos takes on Denofaux in what is essentially single combat. The Blue Lady rescues His people while He fights.
This shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t be possibly to hold a skazzerai in this way. So why does it work?
It works because the skazzerai chose Denovo.
We are reminded in Dead Hand Rule of the ward around the Sanctum of Kos. Tara tells Caleb all about it early in the book, a handy reminder for those who haven’t read the series in a while:
“There’s Craft to it: a containment circle. It was built to keep gods out. One in specific. It was made by—let’s call them heretics—back in the Wars, when most people thought Seril was dead. The people who knew she wasn’t hired an old teacher of mine to keep what was left of her away. With her gone, they made themselves princes of the Church.”
…
“If this containment circle was so bad, why doesn’t He tear it out? Why doesn’t She?”
“I never asked.”
Have I mentioned recently how much I love the way Gladstone so effortlessly scatters breadcrumb trails of clues and foreshadowing? Because I love it a LOT.
Because we are given an answer to this very question during the fight against Denofaux. Denofaux taunts Kos and Abelard that “Even now I am in your citadel. Even now I claim your priests, there relics. You fight me here—but in moments I will eat your world” (DHR 411).
In Kos’s citadel, you say? The place surrounded by a containment circle built by a Craftsman and engineer priests?
“Many wondered why we did not remove it when Seril returned, this crime, this binding power. It was a memorial, some said, a memory of past wrongs—as if we might forget.
“Not so. You see, we’re builders here. We are shapers and makers. And a builder throws out nothing that might one day be of use.”
Below, the intricate paths and hedgerows that ringed the Sacred Precinct leapt with fire. The binding circle blazed.
“I had to tweak it a little,” he said. “To keep something in, instead of out. But it should hold, don’t you think?”
Chains threaded the sky, launched across the sea—and, when they reached the city’s edge, they stopped. They bounced off empty air with the final clunk of a bird striking a plate-glass window. Once more they tried, straining against emptiness—and the air itself burned them back. They writhed in a shell of molten light.”
Denofaux claims he will break it - and this is where the real writing magic comes in. As we’ve discussed before, magic in the Craft Sequence is built through arguments and belief. It is Denovo’s own argument that created the magic that powers the circle. In the Craft, you can’t just back down from old arguments, and you can’t contradict yourself. Take Tara in Dead Country as an example here:
Against the Raiders, Tara’s argument was that she knew and claimed the town
However, she had some Raider curse within her, and so if she was part of the town, so was the curse
When she tried to back down, arguing that she in fact didn’t belong in Edgemont, the Seer fought back by saying Tara instead should come into the desert with the Raiders
While this didn’t entirely break her Craft or lose the battle, it made Tara defend herself instead, moving focus away from defending Edgemont, and weakening its defenses
Denofaux is in a similar position, as Abelard points out:
“/I will break it, of course./
“You might. Though—the core argument is yours, at least to the extent that you’re Alexander Denovo. If you’re not Alexander Denovo, of course, then you’re just some alien god-machine using his voice and an echo of his mind—and such a thing has no claim to the Craft, or to our world. You have to be him for your claim to stand. It’s pretty hard, isn’t it, for a Craftsman to go against his own long-standing claims? At least that’s what Tara taught me.”
If the skazzerai had not claimed Denovo’s skull, this argument wouldn’t hold so well. But it did, and so it does. Did the skazzerai sow the seeds of its own destruction through its choice of herald?
We don’t know how long the ward will last, or how long Kos can stand against Denofaux - especially as gods exist outwith our concepts of time. But we end the book with Denofaux trapped within his own containment circle, facing off against Kos Everburning and Saint Abelard.
What happens to Elayne Kevarian?
This will be a fairly short section, but I felt it needed to come after Denofaux rather than before.
Elayne is spending her battle saving people. First, she chases after Belladonna Albrecht to fight by her side. Then, she intervenes between Temoc and Abelard, saving Abelard just in time to get him to the Argent Library for the final showdown. And now, she saves Tara.
Just as Denofaux is about to “learn” Tara, he is struck by a bolt of lightning.
“Elayne,” he said. “Such a pleasure to see you again.”
She stood over Tara, her hair white as a flame. The glyph pinstripes of her suit flexed and danced, and starlight crackled between her long thin fingers. She looked on him as she would a split worm in a spadeful of dirt.
“I have nothing more to say to you, Alexander. I believe we covered all outstanding business at our last meeting.”
What a woman.
This section could just be me quoting every line and saying how cool Elayne Kevarian is, but I shall restrain myself. She scorns Denofaux, which is both excellent and plot-useful. Because, as I said, Denofaux is at its heart Alexander Denovo. And nobody knows Denovo as well as Elayne. She knows exactly which buttons to press to ensure Denofaux targets her and not Tara - who is being led to her escape by Abelard, with information Elayne gave him.
She’s using herself as a sacrifice to give them time to get out. I doubt she knows Kos and the Blue Lady’s plans to fight Denofaux and save Kos’ people, but she is willing to go one-on-one with a legit outer space SKAZZERAI wearing the face of the man who abused and tortured her. I would call her a goddess, but I don’t think she would consider that a compliment.
And, much like when she held her own briefly about the Temoc-skazzerai-metal thing, she manages to do something to Denofaux. She won’t last long - but she doesn’t have to. Just long enough.
Tara describes what she sees before Abelard leads her to safety:
“His hands were in his pockets, his face placid, calm. It distorted, in an instant, to a mask of fury. Chains lashed for her from every direction at once.
They missed.
She had turned, through an exercise of Craft Tara could barely detect against the blinding sorcerous firestorm that filled the chamber, on an axis that did not strictly speaking exist. She raised one hand, wet with shadows.
The floors, Tara realised then, were limestone. Which was to say, generally speaking, they were made of bone.
They took their ancient forms as they reached for him, shells and the skeletons of fish, the ghosts of coral, knit to needles and claws. They pierced him, breaking on the chains beneath his flesh—and the battle was joined. ”
Elayne consistently uses Craft in new and fascinating ways. I will document them all, one day.
We don’t see much of their battle, but when Abelard returns he says:
“Alexander Denovo stood beneath the dome of skulls.
Half his skin had been melted away, and one arm, and the right side of his body. Jelly ran from the hollow of his left eye, and most of his inhumanly long and sharp teeth were broke. There were no lungs or organs of any kind beneath that seeming-skin, but still his shoulders and what remained of his chest rose and fell with remembered need.
Before him hung a cocoon of chains. Abelard could just make out the figure of Elayne Kevarian inside.”
Sure, Denofaux has ‘won’ this battle - but Elayne gave him a good kicking before she was overwhelmed by chains. I don’t think anybody has managed this against even the skazzerai metal that isn’t supported by the space spider’s intelligence.
I say again: what a woman.
What happens to Abelard?
Okay, we’ve kind of seen what happened to Abelard across other sections, but he deserves his own bit too. And I have additional things to say, so you should read it too.
Quick recap (I love a recap in this essay series):
Abelard saves the King in Red from Michel and Temoc
Temoc (or what used to be Temoc) turns on him, but Elayne throws up a magical barrier
The King in Red pulls Temoc away and tells Abelard to “fix this if you can”
Elayne and Abelard enter the Argent Library; Elayne distracts Denofaux, and Abelard helps Tara, Dawn, and Mal escape
He then returns to Denofaux and Kos joins the fight
Abelard has had an interesting introspective arc for the past couple of books. Far more self-assured than his younger self, and steadfast in his belief in Kos, he was shaken when confronting the Serpent fires in Dresediel Lex. He has been forced to confront what his peaceful god may look like in a battle, and wrestle with a new side of his faith.
Throughout Dead Hand Rule, Abelard bonded with the King in Red of all people, and had discussions with friend and foe about Kos and his own role as a saint. Let’s take more of a look at that latter point.
Abelard became a saint at the end of the first book, and struggled with what this meant in Four Roads Cross. He has since accepted this role and his personal connection to Kos.
But what actually is a saint in the world of the Craft? We’ve come across a few, mostly in the Church of Kos and the Iskari pantheon (RIP Saint Tiffany). Izza Jalai is referred to as a terrorist saint in this very book. But we haven’t really confronted their role in this world of gods and necromancers.
“Why did you come to me?” Abelard asked. “I’m no cardinal. I’m not even a preacher.”
The King in Red cocked his skull to one side, studying Abelard as he might a machine that had just made an odd sound. “Abelard. What do you think a saint it?”
He tried to remember his practical theology. “A person blessed to serve as the instrument of grace.”
Kopil waved the definition off. “Crust and obfuscation. A god is beyond time. Not outside—beyond altogether. Their existence vibrates through ages as their faithful come to new understandings. A nomadic tribesman’s god does not become the god of empires—he remains himself while the world changes. But there are moments in time, as we perceive it, that introduce contradiction, that require change. These moments matter to a god as blood clots in the brain matter to a mortal. Gods, beyond time, cannot see these moments directly, cannot conceive of them or act to resolve them. A saint is a means through which a god chooses—works out what they always will have chosen. That is why a saint is dangerous. And valuable.”
A saint is a means through which a god chooses.
First of all, having just written the Denofaux section, this sounds suspiciously like a skazzerai herald. Secondly, oh Abelard is the perfect saint for Kos in this moment.
Throughout Dead Hand Rule we see Abelard choosing kindness, choosing to help, choosing to support. We hear of Tara getting frustrated that he didn’t understand the trolley problems she threw at him in the early days of their friendship. Initiate Feltan leans on him in their distress. Caleb ponders how easy it seems to be for Abelard to do the right thing. The King in Red is blindsided by Abelard as a concept.
Kos has been faced with difficult choices before. In the God Wars, he chose neutrality despite Seril flying to the front. He became a symbol of the modern age, of Craft and gods working together. He could have attempted to seek neutrality once again (though we know that wouldn’t work too well against the skazzerai). Or he could have chosen to go in fires blazing on the battlefield, burning anything in his sight.
But He understands the world through Saint Abelard. Abelard the Kind. Abelard the Understanding. Abelard the Good. Abelard Who Was Willing to Sacrifice Himself for a City He Didn’t Even Know. Of course the Kos whose saint is Abelard would find a way to both help his people by allying with the Blue Lady AND keep the enemy distracted so others could find a way to win.
Denofaux taunts Abelard, telling Kos that Abelard’s “fear is in you as a poison.” And Abelard is indeed afraid. He says as much. Courage is the overcoming of fear, not the lack of it. And Abelard believes he and his god can fight Denofaux.
“How long, the spider said through its apostle, do you think you can hold us?
How long? He stared up into the end of all worlds, and felt a quiet crystal hope. He remembered smoke in his lungs. He remembered hearing footsteps across the gravel of the temple parking lot. Still, after all this time, he had faith in Tara Abernathy.
“Long enough,” he said, and spread his wings of flame.”
Shivers down my spine as I reread that. Abelard, I desperately hope you survive this.
Where do Tara, Dawn, and Mal end up?
Let’s reverse a little bit again. The Craft Sequence is out of chronological order, so I can be too.
We know that Elayne entered the fight intending to be a distraction, and gave Abelard the information and time he needed to get Tara, Dawn, and Mal to safety.
“Abelard led them to a boar-shaped skull. He tapped one of the tusks just so, and its jaw gaped to reveal a hallway beyond, where rows of glyphwork machines on racks all blinked red. He ushered them in. The air beyond was glacial.
“Server facility in the Skeld glacier,” he said. “[Elayne] told me how it works. The Craft’s connected to itself, everywhere. Which means he can eat it all before anyone stops him. We have to slow things down. Buy you time.”
On first read, I thought “buy you time” was referring solely to getting out of the Hidden Schools. Now, I think it is an example of Elayne and Abelard’s trust in Tara. They believe in her. They believe she can solve this omnishambolic clusterfuck of an apocalypse if they can just give her enough time.
As beautiful as that is, Tara does not appreciate it. When she realises Abelard isn’t going with her, she tries to lunge out of the hallway - but Mal pulls her back.
So, the three women are in the Skeld glacier. Sadly, we don’t have a map of the Domain (though it’s on my to-do list!), so we don’t know exactly where this is. We do have a few references to ‘Skeld’ and ‘Skeldic’, however, including seven in this book alone. I posit that it’s supposed to be Scandinavia.
We see “the farthest frozen reaches of Skeld” on page 13, and “a classic Skeldic beauty, blond and pale and tall” on page 166. There’s another reference to Skeldic ship-folk being “pale-skinned” on page 262. Whilst the ethno-geography of the Domain isn’t a one-to-one for our world, it IS very closely based on our world, and this sounds like Vikings to me.
THAT BEING SAID. In Three Parts Dead and short story Man in the Middle, we hear of “the Skeld Archipelago” in reference being a “god-haven” and having “Iskari colonies”, or being connected to “Kavekanese beachcombers” respectively. Denovo claims to have been in “the Skeld Archipelago” prior to arriving in Alt Coulumb. The Skeld Archipelago is also mentioned in Two Serpents Rise but can’t be connected specifically to the archipelago Kavekana is part of. Last First Snow mentions the Skeld Archipelago as running subsidiary warding idols, and also mentions “tales of ice-locked Skeldic ships back in the ages of polar expedition.”
Skeld comes up in Four Roads Cross as having “small gods and sunken cities,” and Skeld rugs are mentioned here, in Three Parts Dead and in Ruin of Angels. Yet, other than the language reference, Skeld is not mentioned in Kai’s POV or on Kavekana at all.
I think this is probably one of Gladstone’s minor retcons that nobody other than me would notice. I think it was originally intended to be the Archipelago where you find Kavekana - see god-haven, warding idols, Iskari colonies, and the reference to Kavekana. The lack of any reference to Skeld in Full Fathom Five and the abrupt change to connecting ice with Skeld makes me think that Gladstone either forgot how he used the term originally, or decided it didn’t work with the Hawaiian inspired culture of Kavekana.
Yet we still have a Skeld Archipelago, and they are apparently making idols or small gods!
I have two solutions. Either we have two completely unrelated archipelagos that both happen to make idols, or the archipelago is so massive that these references are for the same place.
We know from Gladstone’s recent AMAs that the Craft equivalent of the Atlantic Ocean is dotted with islands, which made travel across the ocean easier historically; immigration patterns to the New World are thus very different than ours. Could all of these islands be part of the Skeld Archipelago, stretching from the equator to the poles? This would be the most satisfying solution for me, but does mean the reference to pale Skeldic beauties and ship-folk seems odd as Skeldic would refer to a huge range of ethnicities.
I digress.
Either way, Tara and pals are in the frozen north of the Domain, fairly far away from Alt Coulumb and the epicentre of the skazzerai invasion. Mal and Dawn are unconscious, so Tara finds a cave, deals with a cave bear, and makes a fire for the three of them.
They seem isolated, but this is a world with communication via nightmare, flight via gods or magic, and a tunnel between a flying university and a glacier, so they could reunite with allies quickly if needed. I am inclined, however, to think that Gladstone has sent them so far away for a reason. What that reason is, I have no idea.
And here we end this series untangling the finale of Dead Hand Rule. I hope you enjoyed, and that it helped make sense of all the pieces at play. Writing this has made me even more excited for the next - and final - Craft Wars book. For now, however, I’m going to start Dead Hand Rule all over again, and see what new things I can discover.
Thank you for reading.
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