Dulcinea quoted Shakespeare (Hamlet specifically) and implied she knew what it was from.
Palamedes saw the form of Dulcinea and was stricken, quoting something from the Bible about seeing a vision of an angel, a classic “be not afraid” encounter.
Whenever Muir normally quotes classics, the bible, and literature, she weaves it in as regular vernacular. These were direct quotes.
Dulcinea has done something, and she is out of the River, and she has meta knowledge now.
Abigail Pent literally brought her husband, and look where that got her!
Oh, I can’t be normal about this…
Ianthe is saying all of the quiet parts out loud about cavaliership in the Nine Houses:
She says “the cavalier’s job is to die for the necromancer” (Palamedes tries to gloss this to “protect the necromancer”, but concedes that “if this entails their own death, then they’re expected to accept that”). She talks about Naberius as a commodity, procured at birth, raised for a purpose, modifiable and disposable at will.
She wants to make it clear that she was terribly clever and has no regrets. Which is obviously why she’s been thinking about two people she deems “dull and stupid” to the extent that they’re her main touchpoint for explaining her position and that she name checks both of them, separately, during her responses… (poor Magnus).
Because the Fifth represent the opposite of how things turned out for the Third: an incidental cavaliership to a relationship of two equals who chose each other (against social currents, quite possibly on several counts). Ianthe made a choice at Canaan House. And Abigail made choices eleven and five years before that. And Ianthe has been thinking about those choices.
So Abigail Pent brought her husband on a research jolly to the First instead of bringing a slave to the killing fields (to paraphrase Harrow). And where did that get her?
Well, The Unwanted Guest rather confirms Abigail’s heretical speculations about the River: it is not the end, but a purgatorial passing point through which one can travel lightly to the further shore, or sink down to the horrors at the bottom. Abigail may not have gained ultimate power and posters of her face, but she did end HTN going off to cross the River to what, in the implied cosmology of TLT, sounds rather like heaven.
And as for Ianthe? Jod’s “indelible sin” may not be the most reliable account of Lyctoral River theology, but Lyctors do not seem to travel lightly in the River…and the Stoma did try to grab Ianthe back in HTN. The newly created Paul offers Ianthe - and Naberius - a second chance and she rejects it.
And now the Death of God has been released, Ianthe has bet on God, God is having a mid-dismyriad crisis, and the girl Abigail Pent risked a second and total death to help knows the truth and is off to harrow hell.
Ianthe Naberius used her cavalier for the rotten true purpose of cavaliers, and look where that got her.
Periodically, I remember how absolutely fucked up the necromancers in TLT are meant to look. Like, necromancy does an absolute number on people physically.
Harrow is “rather small and feeble”.
Necromantic Ianthe is “the starved shadow” of her non-necromantic twin.
Our first description of Palamedes is “a rangy, underfed young man” who is “gaunt”.
Silas is “knife-faced…He had a necromancer build.”
Ianthe parodies make-over scenes in House novels with “if the hero’s a necromancer it’ll be described like, ‘His frailty made his unearthly handsomeness all the more ephemeral’”
Jod acknowledges to Wake that even small children with aptitude would look odd to non-House eyes: ““I have access to any number of cute pictures of necromantic toddlers with their first bone. They don’t make for fat-cheeked roly-poly babies, but they’ve got a certain something.”
In As Yet Unsent, Judith brags about her previous physical fitness: “I could run a kilometre in ten minutes, which was among the fastest for my adept group in the junior reserves.” Which is about double the time you might expect for a physically fit woman her age.
In non-necromancer-friendly New Rho, Harrow’s body is mistaken for a child’s and has to be explained as a result of starvation and trauma to seem plausible: “Pyrrha explained without missing a beat that what with everything Nona had gone through she had been ill and still didn’t eat very much, which was why she was so knobbly and undergrown. The nice lady said that yes, many of the children had problems like that, but it was still hard to imagine Nona was anywhere over fourteen, wasn’t it?”
Tamsyn Muir’s descriptions of the Canaan House gang on Tumblr back this up: “Judith is somewhat less completely scrawny than other necromancers on the cast, though she should be less built than Marta is”, Palamedes is “seriously underfed” and “bony”, Harrow is “scrawny”.
And that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head - I’m sure there’s more.
Anyway, necromancers aren’t slender in a conventionally attractive way, they’re gaunt in a concerning way…and probably the only reason no one instantly clocked that Coronabeth wasn’t a necromancer was because they all just thought it was par for the course that a Third House princess would have had a lot of plastic surgery flesh magic.
And even though the cavs are better, they’re still not the sort of peak that you’d expect. Marta’s 1k time is fine for a reasonably athletic woman, not what you’d expect from the military elite that specifically trains for this sort of thing.
A few more rambling thoughts about necromantic/House health problems…
In the tags, @arithmonym pointed out about necromancers’ hearts not working as well, which is a reference to when Harrow can tell how many of the crew on the Erebos are necromancers:
a necromancer’s heart myocardium flexed differently to your ears, worked worse, squeezed more feebly.
And as I pointed out in my tags, necromancers also have some serious fertility issues. Some Houses, like the Sixth, have abandoned bodily conception and pregnancy altogether, except for research purposes. Others, like the Fourth, use both. A lack of access to magical fertility technology is one of the things that marks the Ninth out as being in dire straits:
At any point she could have asked for Cohort intervention, and they would have been there the next day with foetal care boxes, and volunteer penitents, and loans, and plant samples.
Access to fertility technology is on par with dealing with the financial crisis and diversifying the crop yields.
Why? Because necromancy appears to absolutely devastate fertility.
When Harrow describes the situation that led her parents to do a spot of genocidal sex magic, she says:
My mother needed to carry a child to term, and that child needed to be a necromancer to fill the role of true heir to the Locked Tomb. But as necromancers themselves, they found the process doubly difficult. We hardly had access to the foetal care technology that the other Houses do. She had tried and failed already. She was getting old. She had one chance, and she couldn’t afford chance.”
Being a necromancer is acknowledged as a specific impediment to carrying a child to term that often necessities the use of fertility technology.
When she tells Jod about her parents, she adds that:
“My mother miscarried multiple times before I was born; I don’t know how many.”
Although it’s not explicitly stated, it seems likely that Abigail Pent has also experienced multiple miscarriages. The Cohort Intelligence Files note that their infertility is due to "due to genetic failure of their chromosomes” which is a somewhat vague phrase, but which probably refers to the presence of the kind of genetic abnormalities that can result in either a failure to implant or a miscarriage, rather than an inability to become pregnant. This could, of course, simply be unfortunate and have nothing to do with necromancy at all (as the Glossary states, necromancy isn’t genetic), but it could also be evidence of the broader impact of life in a thanergetic system in human bodies, or the impact of necromancy on gametes (being in a body that’s regularly chugging large amounts of cell death energy can’t be great on that front…). And clearly there are limitations to what necromantic fertility tech can achieve.
Also, while we’re on the subject of the Glossary, here’s the full description of the physical aspect of necromancy:
There is no isolated genetic code associated with necromantic potential, nor the presence of any extra biological feature apart from heightened activity from organs we would otherwise mark as vestigial… A very common side effect is physical weakness and an inability to keep and form muscle mass.
Which…is probably mostly a build up for a very bad appendix pun, but is also rather intriguing…necromancy isn’t genetically encoded, but we know that necromancers are only born in the Dominicus system and that children born out of system need to be literally wrapped up in “grave dirt” from a planet in the system. The Glossary also notes that:
Thalergenic planets may be converted to be thanergy planets, i.e. dying planets, but almost never thanergenic (producing death energy but on a stable basis).
So the development of necromantic ability in an individual seems to be a result of the stable production of death energy by thanergetic planets. And it clearly also impacts the bodies of people without aptitude as well, as @kettacat points out.
(Also, it’s worth pointing out that when the Sixth defect, they’re not just rejecting Jod’s empire, they’re committing to the end of the fundamental basis of their society - one assumes this means no more necromancers will be born on the Sixth…)
