A happy Feast of Saint Katharine to you all.
I recently finished reading Short Sun, and as I went along I found myself encountering a lot of puzzles, and also possibly seeing some solutions to existing puzzles, so I thought it would be useful to post some comments here. I plan to do so intermittently in coming weeks. As is my wont, I think that quite a lot is reasonably clear, and it’s possible to grasp the broad outline of the story without solving all the mysteries, but an amazing amount is not clear — about Neighbours, about inhumi, about gods, about trees, about the Rajan’s identity (it’s obvious who two of him are, but, given what he says about the pen-case, who is the third?) and so on.
I think I may have spotted Silk’s father. (Not Typhon. And I don’t just mean Tussah.)
Anyhow: a while ago we were discussing the Mucor/Pike/Oreb scene in
Long Sun, and I raised the question whether Mucor may have the power to summon ghosts (as Silk later suggests) and whether she may be able to communicate to others her power of out-of-body travel.
As to the first: I think she has. In RTTW, at Blood’s mansion, Pig meets Mucor, but then enters Hyacinth’s suite and apparently meets Hyacinth — he smells her perfume and she kisses him. It seems quite likely that the beautiful woman whom Pig met earlier when exploring the mansion was also Hyacinth; the Rajan doesn’t realise this at the time, because he only knows the story of the mansion being haunted by an ugly woman, i.e. Mucor; but Pig insists the woman was beautiful, and it’s not clear why he would think of Mucor as such. So I think it’s likely Mucor has summoned the ghost of Hyacinth, as she earlier did the ghost of Pike.
As to the second; this is less clear. One possible indication is that it’s said Remora sent the “crazy” woman away because she was driving other people crazy. But the main evidence has to do with Mora and Fava and their power of possession. It seems quite likely that Mucor is the source of this. It’s the same kind of possession she does, and not at all like the standard inhumi form of astral travel. When the Rajan meets them possessing Vadsig, he initially thinks that the possessor is Mucor, but when he says it can’t be, because “Mucor would be alone, I think”, Vadsig giggles — suggesting that Mucor is around somewhere and the possessors do know her. Earlier, Hide has a dream involving two little girls (Mora and Fava) and a wooden doll (which, on the basis of something the Rajan works out later, would seem to be Mucor). Finally on reaching Mucor’s island, the Rajan says to his companions “you’re wrong when you say that Mucor does not know you. She knows all of you almost as well as she knows me”, which suggests she has been, in some form, with the party on their travels. (Though how Mucor contacted Mora in the first place remains a mystery.)