Sir Thursday

[sawyl]

Onwards to the fourth of Garth Nix' Keys to the Kingdom books in the shape of Sir Thursday. Having Duke of of the Border Sea, Lord of the Far Reaches and Master of the Lower House thanks to his victories over the first three days, Arthur Penhaligon now finds himself up against Thursday, the commander of the Armies of the Architect.

Just as Arthur and his friend Leaf all set to return to Earth, Arthur is stopped by Dame Primus, his steward and the incarnation of the first three parts of the will of the Great Architect. After Leaf leaves, Old Primey insists on holding a council of war to discuss their next move, during which Arthur finds a coin has magically appeared in his glass of juice. He has been pressed into the army. Unable to avoid his duty, he surrenders the third key to Dame Primus and heads off to the Great Maze with the recruiting sergeant.

Arriving at boot camp, Arthur finds himself sharing a barracks room with a group of denizens drawn from all over the house. As with most lower-level denizens, they struggle to adapt themselves to anything new leading to Arthur and Fred Initial Numbers Gold, a Piper's Child from the Upper House, becoming their de facto leaders. Just as well, because they are only partway through their initial training when they have to repel a substantial force of Nithlings, creatures created from the Nothing that surrounds the House, who have been allowed to enter the maze in much greater numbers than normal as part of one of Thursday's training exercises. But unlike all previous Nithlings allowed into the house, this group of Newniths seem to be trained and and organised and in possession of something that looks a whole lot like a battle plan.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Leaf finds herself transported back to the hospital she and Arthur were in when Drowned Wednesday's wave carried them off to the house. Finding the hospital in lockdown after yet another plague scare, Leaf sets about tracking down Arthur's doppelgänger, a Nithling who has taken to calling himself Skinless Boy, who's mind-control mould she suspects may be responsible for the quarantine.

Following the battle against the Newniths, Arthur and Fred find themselves summoned to Thursday's headquarters as part of a general recall of all Piper's Children. Progressing across the maze, whose vast tiles change ever evening to break up Nithling troop formations, they arrive just in time to witness the Newnith's deploy a weapon which locks the maze into its current shape. On the orders of the furious Sir Thursday, whose casual brutality and appalling temper can be seen on the bruised faces of his three marshalls, Dawn, Noon, and Dusk, Arthur is promoted and assigned to accompany Thursday on a mission to the centre tile of the maze.

The plot of Sir Thursday is slightly more complicated than the previous books, split as it is between Arthur becoming a soldier in the Great Maze of the House and Leaf back on Earth trying to defeat the body-snatching skinless boy. As might be expected of a boy pressed into military service, Arthur does a lot of growing up in the book, becoming stronger, more confident and more assertive as a result of his training and his responsibilities.

The book also adds a couple of important facets to the on-going story arc of Arthur's struggle against the Days and his constant desire to return home. At the opening conference Dame Primus tells Arthur that some mysterious faction has assassinated both Monday and Tuesday — Wednesday chose to vanish at the end of her reign — and uses this to try to encourage him to go up against the three remaining Days.

At the same council Dr Scamandros, a skilled sorcerer from the Upper House and now Dusk of the Border Sea, gives Arthur a crocodile ring containing ten segments, each of which will gradually go gold as he becomes more contaminated by Houes magic. When Arthur puts on the ring he is horrified to find that he is already over four parts denizen, putting him worryingly close to the 60 per cent at which Scamandros suspects his transformation will become irreversible. This imposes a cunning limit on Arthur's desire to do anything with magic — because what he wants more than anything is to return home to his family — forcing him to do most things the old fashioned way.

Having finally vanquished Thursday and come up with a partial solution to Nithling situation, Arthur ends the book on a positive note. Leaf, however, wakes in a nursing home where she has been sent to recover from the aftereffects of the Skinless Boy's mind-control fungus to discover that it is a new day and she's on one of Doctor Friday's wards...