Untangling Dead Hand Rule: what happens to Caleb, Izza, Temoc, and the King in Red?
In the first ‘Untangling Dead Hand’ essay, we set the scene for the endgame by looking at the plans of Dawn, Jax, and the vampires, and a bit about the setting of the Argent Library. In the next couple of essays, we will be untangling the stories of specific characters as best we can. Today we’re going to look at Caleb, Izza, Temoc, and the King in Red, as they have relatively short or standalone stories.
Once again, major spoilers for Dead Hand Rule, obviously.
Recap of characters and the fight
Before we get into the specifics of each character’s story and actions, let’s recap the broad strokes of the final battle. This might be helpful to refer back to when we go to each character as I’m going to try not to repeat myself too much, or jump between characters, as I would just be replicating the book itself rather than clarifying matters.
Firstly, our characters right before final fight:
Kai has been kidnapped from hospital by Clarity the creepy culty vampire
Caleb has been locked up in the Hidden Schools after his scars are shown to be a weapon against the skazzerai
Mal is still locked up too, but separately than Caleb
Dawn is on the run in Alt Coulumb, and was saved from an attack by Izza
Izza has been underground meeting with lower level Conclave delegates, saved Dawn’s life and was grievously injured (now healed), and had a meeting with Kos Himself that the reader was not privy to.
Temoc is leading an assault on the Hidden Schools
The King in Red is a major player in the defense of the Hidden Schools
Elayne is fighting alongside her bestie Belladonna Albrecht in said defense
Tara is questioning everything, thinks Dawn is her sole responsibility, and is debating whether or not to use the knowledge concealed in Denovo’s skull to learn how he captured Sybil and what he learned from torturing her
Jax has been enigmatic and suspicious (see his plan in the previous essay)
I think that’s all the key players for this finale. Again, sorry to miss out Donnie and Gav but they’re just not super relevant right now.
So, what actually happens in the final fight? There’s a lot here, but this is as simple as I could make it. We will be going over everything below in more detail throughout the next couple of essays, but this is here for your reference.
Caleb is freed by his face-changing pal Ran, and frees Mal in turn.
They are attacked by skazzerai-metal-grey-men. Caleb disappears from the narrative, while Mal is moved to the Argent Library.
Temoc leads an assault against the Hidden Schools to give Dawn cover as she works her way through the entrance exams. He starts fighting the King in Red.
Tara realises what Dawn is doing, and decides to use Denovo’s skull to try and stop her. She is semi-taken over by Denovo’s memory, and fights Dawn.
Dawn finds her way to the Capital Chamber at the heart of the Argent Library, where Mal is tied up waiting for her.
Tara breaks free of Denovo’s control just in time for Jax to walk in and villain-monologue.
Jax has arranged for Kai to be forced to attack Dawn through the markets.
He also attacks Dawn’s physical body while Mal and Tara try to fight him and his grey men.
Dawn’s army begins to fail through this attack.
Kai manages to break free from the vampire holding her in place and finds herself in Jax’s yacht. Izza, Raz, and Shale show up to help her.
Sybil jumps from Dawn to Jax, seemingly to save Dawn and try to kill Jax.
Jax seems to gain control, and blasts skazzerai metal at the archive crystal (which connects all Craft, and the entire world kinda).
Dawn’s army becomes skazzerai metal chains, and they infect everything around them.
A legit space spider punches through the sky, its leg landing in the Capital Chamber seeking a sort of translator.
The skazzerai tests Jax, Mal, and Tara then goes for Denovo’s skull, creepily recreating him out of skazzerai metal.
Skazzerai!Denovo (or, as I have taken to calling him Denofaux) taunts Tara and calls down a whole bunch of skazzerai legs.
Everyone and everything becomes gears and chains. Some attempt to fight back, unsuccessfully.
Temoc has managed to genuinely injure the King in Red, who is now trying to help save him from the chains.
Denofaux is about to attack Tara when Deus Ex Machina Elayne Kevarian shows up and hits him with lightning.
While Elayne fights Denofaux, Abelard helps Tara, Dawn, and Mal escape from the Hidden Schools to a glacier very far away.
Kos, through Abelard, fights Denofaux. The skazzerai claims His people.
The Blue Lady saves Kos’ people, allowing Kos and Abelard to battle Denofaux directly.
Caleb wakes up being flown somewhere by Clarity.
I have done enough note taking and rereading for this miniseries that I was able to do that from memory. Well done me.
Now that’s done, let’s take a look at a couple of the relatively self-contained stories. ‘Relatively’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, of course, but you see my meaning. To that end, we will be looking at Caleb, Izza, Temoc, and the King in Red.
What happens to Caleb Altemoc?
Poor Caleb is knocked out for most of the finale. He appears to have kept his shirt on, for once, which is quite the achievement for Mr Altemoc.
Let’s go back to point one in the plot summary: Caleb is freed by his old pal Ran. As Ran can change their appearance, they take Caleb’s place while he casually wanders the Hidden Schools as Dawn’s armies attack. He makes his way to Mal’s prison.
They do their standard flirt banter, and Caleb breaks the surveillance in the wall; stealing its power, he punches the demonglass cell’s walls and frees Mal. But why? He’s an idiot for Mal, sure, but he’s not against the idea of her being imprisoned in general.
Because Caleb, our gambler, can figure out a play when he sees one.
“Why do you think you’re here?”
“Your boss arrested me.”
“I mean, in the Schools. Accessible.”
“I’m in a cell.”
“In the middle of campus. Don’t you get it? You’re bait.”
Mal blanched. … “I’m listening.”
“She’s here to save you. This whole thing, you, the Kettles, maybe the Conclave—I think it’s all a trap for her. I don’t know who set it, but I mean to spring it first. And to see who shows up when it’s sprung.”
He is, of course, right. The trap is Jax’s, as we learned in the previous essay. Caleb doesn’t get to discover this just yet, however, as he and Mal are intercepted by a pair of his lackies - the grey men. More on them in this essay here, but for our purposes just recall they are churning chains of skazzerai metal barely contained within the skin of pale, thin man-shaped bodies wearing grey suits.
Mal attacks, as she is wont to do, and the fight becomes “a tide of chains.” Caleb is running low on soulstuff, drowning in the chains. Time for a Hail Mary (…Hail Seril?).
“Mal,” he croaked. She was close. Fighting, too. Bleeding. “Do you trust me?”
He asked it in High Quechal, in the language of their fathers, in which—the holy sages taught—it was impossible to lie. He’d tried when he was four, and of course he’d discovered that was bullshit, you could lie in any language, you could even lie in math. But you had to be careful with High Quechal. Your words had a way of coming true.
“Do you trust me?”
She looked at him, for what felt like the first time. Her lips framed a word in the same language.
“Yes.”
With the last of his strength, he kissed her. Power flowed into her. She gasped green light.
Then the chains tore him away and pressed him down, down, into the dark.”
What the hells was that?
Well, we discover later in the book that Caleb has knighted Mal. He knows that the plan to lure Dawn requires her, but doesn’t require him. He also knows that only an Eagle Knight can make another Eagle Knight, and he’s recently learned along with everyone else that channelling power through his scars can hurt the skazzerai unlike anything else. I’m not sure if Mal has the specific traditional scarring that Caleb and Temoc have, but she definitely has religious scars from her bloodletting over the years so maybe that works - or maybe you don’t actually require scars at all. Either way, Caleb has given her the power to channel Applied Theology and the Craft.
And then Caleb disappears for a hundred pages, while we get the battle proper. He reappears in the epilogue, “[drifting] back to the surface of his own mind, beneath a sunset sky.”
He can’t move. He can’t talk. But he can see Clarity, our vampire cult leader, who told Mal he was “a beautiful grail” and now says to Caleb, “The work is not accomplished. We have so much to do. And you will aid us.” All while seemingly drinking his blood to knock him out and then flying…somewhere.
Not ominous at all.
What happens to Izza Jalai?
Izza is also relatively absent for the final fight, not being up in the Hidden Schools herself. We learn that, off-page, she has been searching for Kai since Kai disappeared from the hospital. She’s been working with Raz and Shale, who she presumably met via Cat, the Rafferty sisters, or after her meeting with Kos.
As a quick reminder, Izza and Cat reunited earlier in the book, then Cat allowed Izza and Dawn to escape when she found them in the subway tunnels. Izza describes Raz to Kai as “A friend. One of our faithful, after a fashion.” She is referring here, of course, to the crucial connection between the Blue Lady and Seril, her goddess and the goddess who granted Raz asylum respectively. Cat handily summarised this connection in lay person’s language for us:
“There was, Tara had tried many times to explain, a crosswise relationship between the Blue Lady worshipped by thieves and down-low folk, and Seril, whose grace drove Justice. The Blue Lady had grown like a pearl around a stolen piece of the Lady of the Moon, until she woke up and started answering alley kids’ beat-down prayers. That made the Blue Lady Seril’s kid, or cousin, or something, sort of, as gods reckoned things.”
Shale was the one who tracked Kai when even Izza couldn’t. He’s a spy with heightened senses, you’ll recall. He wasn’t able to come to save Kai immediately “without a warrant for deep-water operation, and there are treaties, and things.” As Izza says, that’s the problem with cop-gods.
He could, however, respond to a break-in, which Izza and Raz provided.
I confess, I’m not entirely sure why they needed Shale to respond rather than just… break in and get Kai themselves, as they are eminently qualified to do. Perhaps they needed a third fighter for back-up? You could say they needed a getaway winged vehicle, but Shale heads off without them soon enough so I think this was partly to give Shale something to do and partly because cool.
But, back to Izza’s story.
Once the space spider shows up, things get very bad for the people of Alt Coulumb - and their gods. As well as the skazzerai turning everyone to chains, Clarity’s vampire cult emerges from the water to attack people and thus keep Seril and Kos from joining the fray against the skazzerai.
Yet, as we know, Kos ultimately goes head to head with the Denofaux skazzerai. He has trapped Denofaux within the Sanctum’s ward, to which Denofaux responds “The ward will only last while you have power to hold it. Your faithful are trapped in here with me.” Kos, however, was prepared for this.
A couple of days prior, He made a deal with Izza and the Blue Lady. He may not have known exactly what was coming, but He had decided He would face it - more on that in our next essay. To protect His people, the Blue Lady would offer them asylum - possible via the Seril connection, and the strange interweaving of their theologies. We read that:
“Kai touched her skin, and prayed, and saw the realm of gods and of the market. The riot of faith and pattern and soul into which the vampires had thrust her would have been a still lagoon beside this hurricane of colours: the fires of Kos, the strangling night of the spider, Seril-silver, and all through them, subtle and intricate and massive in aggregate force, the Lady’s blue.
…
The Blue Lady worked well alongside Seril of the Moon Road. She was, in a sense, Her child. She had become so much more, since. But still they fit together—enough, at least, for this.”
Whilst we don’t know the specifics of the Applied Theology in question, it appears that this gambit only works because Seril is an intermediary between Kos’ people and the Blue Lady.
This is the last time we see Izza, clutching Kai’s hand as she experiences the transfer of people and power between Kos and the Blue Lady.
What happens to Temoc Almotil and the King in Red?
Before we start, I need to share my main reaction after taking all my notes: if we had a bigger fandom, there would for sure be a significant Temoc/King in Red enemies-to-lovers contingent. Not my personal ship, but I reckon I could be convinced by a good fanfic.
Right, back to Dead Hand Rule.
Kopil is fairly integral to the entire book, as one of the leading Deathless Kings at the Conclave. He is, surprisingly, one of the more measured of his ilk, willing to build alliances and make compromises. He also bonds with Abelard, which is one of my absolute favourite things to read and deserves its own essay.
…and probably its own shippers in a bigger fandom, let’s be real.
Temoc, on the other hand, doesn’t show up until quite far through the book. He shows up to lead the assault on the Hidden Schools, in this brilliant description:
“He stood on the shoulders of dread Ixzayotl’s corpse before the rainbow walls of the Hidden Schools. Around him in the sky were the armies of revenge, the armies of Dawn. He had walked beside her as she woke them, in their many-mouthed horror.”
He provides some much needed exposition about Dawn’s plan (see the previous essay), and is surprised to find his siege going quite well. Yet, something is missing.
“So why did he feel empty? Why did his arm rise joylessly and fall as if cutting through a thicket? What, of all his childhood golden dream, was missing?
As he was asking himself that question, he almost died.
The air caught fire and wept blood. A great hand seized him and crushed him. His scars flared; power moved through the link to blunt the strike and drink from it, and feed it into him, sweet and cold as spring water.
He turned, still alive, to face the King in Red.
The Craftsman strode toward him across the sky. His teeth were rainbow-slick with the blood of Gods.
“We have got to stop meeting like this,” he said.
Ah, Temoc thought. Yes. That was it.”
See what I mean about the shipping potential?
The two do battle. We get this more or less entirely from Temoc’s point of view, with a little from Abelard later on. It happens over the course of several chapters, and I recommend going back through - there were a lot of great quotes I could have used, but I am trying to keep this essay more streamlined than is my instinct. Despite this, there are more quotes in this section than previous ones, because I would need just as many words to explain what is going on so may as well just quote it.
Let’s start with this brilliant exchange because I think it sums up a lot about their dynamic and some of the forces at play throughout the whole Conclave (and therefore, the book):
“You will lose,” Temoc shouted at him from across the sky. “Your walls crumble. Your curses shatter. The stars are wrong. Your way of life draws to its end.”
“What a relief,” the King in Red replied. “Here I thought we were going to do this whole thing in grim miserable silence. I mean: where’s the fun in that?”
“Your own power turns against you!”
“Good! Honestly, Temoc. Do you think I’ve enjoyed the last few days? Furtive conversations, insinuations, twisting arms and pulling ears just to get people in the same room, and half of them are only there to score points on the other half. And that’s setting aside the kids ... I’ll be the first to admit the modern world has its share of absurdities and injustices, but most of these kids have never had to deal with anyone who really wanted to kill them for being a witch. Now they have! So, thank you! If we all survive today—and I think many of us will—you’ve built my alliance for me, and provided an invaluable educational experience in the bargain. Where should I send the check?”
…
He was supposed to give Dawn time. He was not here to win, no matter how ancient and justified his grudge. But that sneer, that laugh…
He could do both.”
It’s after this point that things get properly interesting. In close quarters, Temoc is able to see something in the King in Red that he’s never seen before - and I mean that quite literally. He sees “Something like woven smoke surged and twisted in the hollows between his bones,” and stabs it. For the first time since Kopil went full skeleton, he can be physically hurt. As Temoc thinks, “He was not laughing now. In all their battles, Temoc had never seen him bleed.”
There has been quite a lot of talk in this book about Deathless Kings ‘hiding their deaths’ in Kavekana and the similar soul havens, and now this. I do wonder if we’re going to see the end of Deathless Kings in the final book. Something to ponder.
In the Temoc-King in Red battle, tides quickly change. As Dawn is attacked, her army (including Temoc) loses power. The army “lay ruined in the sky” and Temoc “began to die.” He keeps fighting, as he has done his whole life, but he is barely able to stand, barely able to track Kopil’s movements in the fight. The only reason he is able to even somewhat fight is that his gods provide some small strength while Dawn’s fails.
And then he is overtaken by skazzerai chains. He can barely recall his own name. The King in Red knows something is wrong right before it happens, sounding almost concerned as he says “Temoc? This isn’t like you.”
We read that Temoc “tried to speak, but only chains came out,” and then he isn’t really Temoc any more.
He keeps fighting the King in Red, but it’s different. We see this part of the battle from Abelard’s perspective on the ground:
“And in the heart of all, Temoc fought the King in Red.
…
Temoc had fought him bravely, before. When the rest of the army writhed in agony, he struggled on. Kopil was wounded. At any moment, Abelard could have made the difference. Let the fire in his blood surge forth. Turn on blade aside, or drive another home.
…
Temoc fought—but he was not Temoc anymore. Before, he had seemed a thing of high purpose, an instrument of Gods. Now he was a mass of chains.
The King in Red parried. Not fast enough. Chains wreathed him, pierced him. He roared like the Serpents roared when they had torn the spirecliffs apart. He bled light. He staggered, tried to free himself. He was many things in an instant, prism-split: skeleton and being of smoke, nest of wires, giant, pinned and stitched shadow of a man. None of them could escape.”
At this key moment, Iskari annoyance Michel attempts to kill the King in Red by throwing a blade at his moment of weakness, and Abelard sends Kos’s flame to intercept it and save Kopil.
Perspective again shifts to Temoc, and we get an unnerving description about what it feels like to be overtaken by the skazzerai metal:
“Temoc was lost in the chains.
They lashed from his mouth to cut and carve. They could not speak, though they answered his will surer than any god. He felt them vast and uncomprehending and hungry, felt them run before his desires, to ends he had not imagined.
The King in Red fought him like a fish fights a line. There were chains in him, too, sprouting. They tore the smoke of his body as they wormed out. He reared, but the chains held him. He raised barriers and wards, invoked demonic bargains, and one by one all his defenses melted away. For all the ages of the modern world, Temoc had wished justice upon this man. Here it found him, and it was made of iron.
The power scared some tiny remnant shred of Temoc—the power and the ease with which it came.”
At the moment Abelard blocks Michel’s spear with the flames, Temoc is enraged - who dares save his enemy? He turns upon Abelard and we get this truly horrific visual:
“The fire had answered Abelard, in wonder and praise. Was it the fire of his God? Yes, and the fire of his blood, the fire that burned within his eyes.
Then the creature that had been Temoc Almotil revolved to face him, in a writhing of metal, and he thought, I am about to die.
…
Temoc filled the sky above him, the man’s torn flesh the heart of a mandala of iron, his mouth saw-toothed and wide. ”
Ooft. I am a squeamish reader, so this is extremely not nice for me.
Luckily for Abelard, he is saved by everyone’s favourite deus ex machina, Elayne Kevarian. What a badass. She is nearly taken down by the skazzerai chains - but the King in Red saves her in turn, seizing Temoc from behind. Abelard hears Kopil’s voice: Fix this. If you can.
We will return to Abelard in the next essay, but let’s finish off Temoc and Kopil’s story now.
The pair continue to fight. Kopil tries to get through to Temoc through the chains, roaring that “This isn’t you. Can’t you feel it?” This could be his enemy’s end, but it’s the wrong end. Temoc deserves more than this, dying a puppet of hungry metal spiders from beyond the stars.
Temoc pummels the King in Red with chains; the King in Red screams. We have seen Kopil yell, and roar, and bellow before, but never scream. This power is something else entirely.
It would be Kopil’s end. But Temoc, mind full of metal, realises he cannot hear his gods. Realises that it isn’t their power flowing through him. Realises it’s something terrible and rotten using him and his desires.
The stars are wrong.
And then Temoc Almotil comes back to himself, at the last moment where it could do any good. He finds where the chains catch within him and he pulls with the little strength he has left.
It isn’t enough - until Kopil helps him.
“His scar-light flickered and dimmed. He felt so weak.
A skeletal hand closed around his wrist. “You have to pull harder, old man.”
Power rolled into him, dread and anathema, searing his flesh with cold, tainting his scars and filling his limbs with might. He bled. He screamed. He was not the only one.
The chains shattered.
They fell together, senseless, to the bay.”
That’s the last we see of the two of them.
Do they end the book alive? It’s hard to say. I think either outcome could be revealed in the next book and I would believe it. Perhaps they have died, but as themselves, not overtaken by the skazzerai. Perhaps they are alive down in the bay, injured beyond anything they have experienced before, but holding onto a spark of life.
I tend towards the latter. I’m not sure either of them will survive the series as a whole, but I can see Gladstone having the pair fight side by side for the first time before that happens.
With that, at over 4000 words, let me draw this essay to a close. This was supposed to be a short one, y’all.
Next time, we’ll look at the various characters within the Argent Library itself. Stay tuned.
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