“The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex” (Tor.com, 2020): two cousins and a locked room

Spoils nothing in the novels, except that Palamedes is gone by the time Camilla tells it.

Camilla Hect tells it years afterwards: she was thirteen and nine months, her second cousin Palamedes Sextus thirteen and six, then only a Scholar, though she calls him the Warden throughout. “I count that as the first time we surprised them,” he would say. It began in her shuck, a curtained sleeping cubby in the Library’s dormitories that they have nearly outgrown. She is rereading a letter “To my dearest pals” from a sick friend writing from “PRISON”, a house on a mountain far out of Cypris. Camilla has kept every letter; Palamedes never needed to, because he remembers everything he sees. Readers take the writer for Dulcinea Septimus.

Archivist Juno Zeta of Data Collections raps on the curtain with a blue unsealing form and takes them along; Palamedes signs by bloodying his thumb on the clipboard’s spike. Doctor Donald Sex, hallowed for post-Resurrection psychometry, lies in a copper coffin in the Copper Garden; his study has been sealed for 460 years, and two centuries ago a Fifth House ambassador, refused entry, could only try to question his ghost. Past children watching paste-coated skeleton servitors on umbilicals clean the Library’s exterior, they go almost to its base, and Zeta cuts the tape on a door marked D. SEX.

Inside, among dusty shelves, a desk holds a keypad drawer hanging open, a jointed wooden sphere with one bar not yet pushed home, and two skeletal hands, which Palamedes politely enters “for record”. By psychometry the hands read about two hundred years old, not 460. The team quarrels over which colour of form applies and goes to fetch one. By Camilla’s pocket torch the cousins find a jagged break at the wrist, a construct’s pin among the bones, an orange stain that rubs off, and finger bones eaten into honeycomb. Palamedes spots a grille camouflaged in the ceiling; Zeta’s map shows a service tunnel above it, linked to an exhaust outside. She makes him stake his reputation on it. He is certain.

Zeta is claustrophobic and Palamedes would sneeze, so Camilla crawls the forty metres of tunnel herself, lit by a green luminescent strip. Behind the grille a skull faces her, part of a crumpled skeleton servitor: pinned, coated orange, its right arm wedged through the bars, a perfectly round white mark on its brow. She measures the bars with her hands; ever after, she carries a measuring tape. Archaeology confirms the room was sealed with its only key, and that Sex died days after a fall, asking to be moved back to his study.

“It was Doctor Sex himself, of course.” The Fifth House summoning gave the ghost enough hold to become a revenant. It jumped from its copper coffin into a cleaning servitor, slipped out with the maintenance skeletons, crawled in by the exhaust, and snapped off its hands through the grille. The cousins prove it together: the pins, the paste, the umbilicus mark, fingertips eaten by the acid used on copper, and a drawer only the passcode-cagey Doctor could open. The team votes Palamedes leave to touch one thing. Gloved, he says “Thank you, Doctor” and pushes the sphere’s last bar home, and a lid opens on fragile white paper. Zeta later confirms it: the tunnel skeleton bore a two-hundred-year-old AWOL tag from Copper Garden duty, and the exhumed Doctor’s finger bones were worn from trying to open the box from inside. She tells Palamedes the committee might give him one extra grade point and ruffles his hair (“Like mother, like son”). Alone, the cousins high-five and laugh until it hurts.

The paper was taken away before he saw more than a scrap: the opening of a love letter to a girl who would become a Lyctor the next day. The story does not say who wrote it or to whom. The cousins burned their transcript. The last lines turn comedy into grief: “Palamedes remembers everything: That was his problem.” And: “I always remember him. That’s mine.”

“As Yet Unsent” (Harrow paperback, 2021): Captain Deuteros’s report

Spoils who died at Canaan House and who lived, in Gideon the Ninth.

Captain Judith Deuteros of the Second House keeps a coded report in a subdermal implant, for the Cohort to find if her body is ever recovered. Five months into captivity she, Camilla Hect and Coronabeth Tridentarius are prisoners of Blood of Eden, moved from a ship to a temperate camp under a ringed planet that hangs in the daytime sky. Her gut was destroyed at Canaan House, and Edenite surgeons have moved its work into apparatus outside her body; Camilla talked them into leaving her awake to join an implant to her oesophagus by necromancy. “The corpse has still failed to rot”: the body of the Ninth House cavalier travels with them, left out in changing weather, and animals will not touch it.

Camilla wears a shock anklet. When an official tried to take the Warden’s bones from the pouch at her neck, the shock put her in hospital for a week. She has begun listening to the masked commander We Suffer, who claims old contact with the Sixth House. Coronabeth, Judith reports flatly, has already been radicalised, and Judith blames her own failures of leadership at Canaan House. Their talks on the Edenites’ grievances, planets made uninhabitable and peoples moved, keep ending: “We had an argument.” Corona offers to kill an animal, or hurt herself, so that Judith can heal on the death; she is learning to shoot. On the Edenites’ hatred of necromancers, she is still fighting herself.

Then Judith is blindfolded, cuffed to a gurney and wheeled aboard a captured Gorgon-class Cohort ship with a stele in it, the device that anchors a ship through deep space. At the sight of it she tries to rise on old reflex and nearly falls. When they put a gun to Camilla’s head, she explains that a stele needs thanergy-rich blood from at least three adepts. Their blood makes it splutter. Now she knows why they kept her alive, and she would rather die than run it against her Houses. She asks her companions to kill her. “Camilla said no. The princess said she would think about it.”

While Camilla treats her sores, Judith talks about her cavalier Marta Dyas, five years older, and the books Judith claimed to know better than she did. “That’s the first human thing you’ve ever told me about yourself,” Camilla says. Judith admits that at seventeen she propositioned Dyas and was turned down, kindly and rightly, then turns the confession into a lecture: Camilla’s obsession with those bones will kill her. Camilla answers that when the Warden acts as though he knows everything, he generally does.

An internal infection sets in. The Edenites argue over letting Judith die; only We Suffer wants her kept alive. In her fever Corona visits. She recalls a fall at eight, when she pretended to be hurt far worse than she was so that nine-year-old Judith would hold her hand, and how she spent her one birthday invitation on Judith every year. Judith remembers the folded-paper flowers that came for every promotion. “Jody, you can’t die on me. I’m so alone now.” Corona hunts for antibiotics, wets Judith’s lips with damp wadding, and is taken away.

Judith wakes blindfolded to a shrill voice berating the Edenites about handcuffs. Someone opens her belly with clean thanergetic unstitching and remakes her insides in one bloom, so that she can hold a field for the stele. The voice gives co-ordinates for an anchor in no registry, says it promised them a stele twenty years ago, and demands to see the body, whose story it does not believe. The text never names her; readers take her for Mercymorn.

In the last entry the stele is live and Judith sits in its control seat. She tells Camilla it was a Lyctor; Camilla says she and the Warden know Lyctors can die like anyone else. At the two-starred dusk, one sun set, Judith walks a circuit of the camp with Corona, one ankle cuffed. On a plex table, in an unzipped canvas bag, lies the dead cavalier, pristine, her face clean of paint; Camilla persuaded the Edenites to take her along, for “some business about a note”. Corona smooths the red hair and says she kept the dead girl’s rapier. She looks, Judith says, like someone who died fighting. Then Corona takes her hands and asks to be her cavalier: bind me to you, or who knows where I will go? Judith thanks her, “but not in this life or in any other”. To the file she confesses that she has desired Coronabeth for twelve years. FILE ENDS HERE.

“Blood of Eden Memorandum for Record” (Harrow paperback, 2021): the other side’s field manual

Spoils nothing; read with “As Yet Unsent”, it shows Blood of Eden from inside before Nona does.

This part rests on secondary sources. The memo has never been posted online and this walk could not read it; what follows is the Locked Tomb fan wiki’s summary, its outline confirmed by a Daily Kos group read.

It is an in-world appendix addressed to Blood of Eden’s Tartessus, Merv and Suva Wings. Its two objectives are to do the Houses the most long-term damage and to lose as few Edenites as possible. Find out first whether a necromancer is present; kill or maim a lone one with a headshot before engaging anyone else; split up several, or strike the whole area with explosives. Never fight a long action near an active necromancer, because every casualty makes it stronger. The group read sums up the standing order: when in doubt, don’t engage.

Then it corrects House propaganda. Necromancers do not arrive in black with skeleton escorts; they look like any soldier, and regrown limbs and death rays are fiction. They can be hurt and killed; they raise corpses but resurrect no one; they heal, tire slowly near violent death, and turn organic matter into weapons. A necromancer can sense how a nearby person died and where the killer is, and strike back down that link. A fallen comrade seen walking again is not alive, and can only be avenged. Lyctors are few, rarely seen, immortal and nearly limitless: avoid them at all costs and report up the chain.

“The Unwanted Guest” (Nona paperback, 2023): a play inside a Lyctor’s head

Spoils Palamedes in Camilla’s body, Ianthe in Naberius’s, and Dulcinea’s fate, from Nona the Ninth.

A one-act play in six scenes, set in a handful of real seconds that feel, inside, like a week. Palamedes, dead since Canaan House and in Camilla’s body for months, is wrestling Ianthe for Naberius Tern’s body, and this is that fight as it plays out inside her head. Ianthe has run Camilla through, and the Voice chides him for “jumping into her pet body”: this is the duel late in Nona.

Scene One is a funeral: seven coffins, the front one heaped with fake gold and violet flowers. Last of the masked mourners comes Palamedes, his plain wooden mask shattered and taped. He reaches into the coffin, and the corpse grabs his arm and sits up. It is Ianthe, her face covered in bloody kisses. “You’re fucked, my lad.”

In Scene Two she is a butler, then a French maid. He has come, in a ruined grey suit and purple tie, to see the lady of the house, again; his calling card is a whole skeletal hand. The coffins are stood on end around a chaise longue, and Ianthe drapes herself on it in an unbuttoned shirt, leather trousers and a Lyctor’s rainbow robe: “Oh—Inspector.” She offers a game. Her cavalier’s body is in one of the coffins. He may ask five questions, none about the coffins; guess wrong, and he is out, door bolted. He wastes the first asking whether she will play fair. Between scenes an unseen Voice at the back of the auditorium coaches him: this is psychology, not logic; get Ianthe to expose herself.

Scene Three is a mock-Platonic dialogue on couches, Ianthe in an ivy crown. Does she believe the soul is permeable? No: it cannot be diminished, and that is the whole theory of Lyctorhood. “I have eaten one soul. You have eaten no souls.” In Scene Four he asks whether she regrets murdering Naberius Tern. The attendants slap the coffin lids, and later so does he, without knowing why. Naberius was assigned to her at birth, she says, trained into the perfect cavalier, a profoundly boring soul. Regret? After a pause, “No.” Downstage Palamedes takes a cigarette from a tin and smokes it, though he never has, and the Voice notices.

In Scene Five he asks what she made of Gideon Nav. Ianthe duels a line of attendants inside a ring of coffins, disqualifying each almost without looking, and dismisses Gideon as a dope who swung her sword like a racquet and died a dope. Downstage the Voice is revealed as Dulcinea Septimus, dead again and outside the River. She says the two cousins were her best friends. “I loved real, ugly, unfinished things.” He asks to see her, for the first time and the last. A light finds him, dazzled, reciting a vision of a body like chrysolite and a face like lightning. Was she cute? “You’re perfect.”

In Scene Six, over cards, he asks whether she would have used Coronabeth if Naberius had died early. Even pressed, she says “No” and will not say why. Out of questions, he stakes his life on one more: does she know where Naberius Tern’s body is? The coffins are opened one by one, each empty, while he lays out his case: the purple tie; cigarettes, which do not exist on the Sixth; “racquet”, a sportsman’s word from a duel Ianthe never saw. Naberius is talking through her. Souls are permeable, he says; they bleed into each other, and after months in Camilla’s body he remembers things he never saw. Lyctorhood is not a swallowed diamond but a graft. He raps on the last closed coffin, number 3, tells her to open it if Tern is inside, and walks away up the aisle: “There’s no body left to find, Ianthe.” Or, as they call her now, Ianthe Naberius. She stands with one hand on the closed lid as the curtain falls.

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