#illfuckthefuckoutofyou

[paradoxcase]

@illfuckthefuckoutofyou:

I took Judith to be writing in some kind of military code/encription for safekeeping.

But something like that would actually be way less likely to change than a natural language. If John wanted to change up all the codes it would be a nightmare trying to get the whole army up-to-date on this without letting any of the information on the new system get to BOE, probably

Also, as a comment on this, and also the idea of Harrow's super secret uncrackable crypt-script, any code that you can just write out like this without the injection of a random element like a one-time pad or a secret key is going to be pretty easily crackable if you have access to modern computers unless it's actually a whole-ass completely different language. But I don't care that much, I'm not actually here for the fantasy cryptography

[paradoxcase]

@longroadstonowhere:

i don't think ortus knew enough about the creche flu and everything to say anything to gideon about it, and he also seems like the type to go 'well, i have my suspicions, but knowing these things doesn't actually change our lives so why bother telling someone' (basically i think he'd be likely to avoid potential confrontation)

Oh, yeah, I didn't mean like I thought he felt guilty about not telling Gideon the truth, just that he felt guilty about letting Aiglamene and Crux convince Harrow to run the whole Weekend and Bernie's thing instead of doing something like getting help from another House, or maybe even just telling her that he knew what had happened and offering his help. I'd actually sort of been assuming that it was Harrow's idea in the first place, maybe because of the history given at the beginning of this book where Harrow lists the reasons she didn't want help from another House, but now that Ortus mentioned it, I feel like it's probably more likely that Aiglamene and Crux convinced 10-year-old Harrow of those things rather than Harrow having an opinion on them herself, and I'm guessing Ortus was probably too afraid of them to argue with them on this point

@wandering-minx:

There is a line in GTN where Harrow says "the ninth house is me" to Gideon implying her duty is to Harrow. So I read this line as Harrow's way of saying Gideon was loyal to her in a round about way that wouldn't invite delving into their relationship.

"You are sworn to the ninth house and the ninth house IS me" *

Oh, yeah, that could very well be it. That's kind of funny, if so, though, because then when she says that everything she did was for the Ninth it means something very different than when she says that everything Gideon did was for the Ninth

@wellhappybirthdaytomeiguess:

Pretty sure Colum never came back. The thing that was Colum was still all mouths for eyes when its neck was snapped. Abigal gets to a big question that hangs over these books: where is everyone else, since John obviously didn’t resurrect more than maybe a few million souls. Could something be getting ‘backed up’? Looking forward to seeing how this is explored…

@illfuckthefuckoutofyou:

Colum very likely had his soul completely destroyed. He's not in the River, and he either no longer exists, it's stuck in some other liminal dimension, or is in Hell.

I'm referring to this part:

It seems to indicate that he returned to his body and died there. But if he didn't return, I don't think there's any reason to believe his soul was destroyed, it's probably still in whatever place it went to when Mayonnaise Uncle siphoned him, which I think is likely not the River, but in this universe souls don't get destroyed just because they don't have a body to return to, and anyway, Colum's body was in no worse shape than, say, Magnus and Abigail's, and their souls are perfectly fine. And if Hell is at the bottom of the River, and Colum's soul never went to the River in the first place, I don't think it's possible for him to be there, either

Do we have any kind of accounting of how many souls are in the River, versus how many people have died in this universe? I would think that the number of people who died before the Resurrection and were never resurrected would probably be dwarfed by the number of people who have lived and died in the 10,000 years between the Resurrection and the start of the story, no? 10,000 years is a long time