Perfruar Otio

HYPOTHESIS: the Venus de Milo is in Canaan House

REASONING: John is keen on decoration (the rest of Canaan House, the Mithraeum, his fancy baby-bone crown). John has strong opinions on preserving things he considers ‘worthy’ (the earth, his friends, Shakespeare). Why not famous art? Canaan House is filled with old and rotting portraits - they can’t ALL be of Cyrus and Valancy.

EVIDENCE:

There was a single statue at the end of the corridor where it turned left. It must have once been a person, but the head and arms had been lopped off, leaving only a torso with beseeching stumps. - GtN p130-1 (when Gideon is looking for Harrow)

beseeching stumps?? It’s simply got to be the Venus de Milo. No stumps plead more tenderly:

But she has a head! I hear you protest.

Aha! Now we come to Palamedes and Camilla doing psychometry to figure out the age of Canaan House:

"Fiat lux! If you want to talk improbable, let's talk about this"-a scrape of stone on stone-"being three thousand and some years older than this." A heavy clunk.

About 3000 years older than another part of Canaan House? Hmm! And what’s that Camilla is holding?

“Standing next to him holding a big wedge of broken sculpture and the flashlight was a tall, equally grey-wrapped figure with a scabbard outlined at her hip.”

“The cavalier narrowed her hooded eyes, fidgets gone and absolutely still; then she exploded into action. She dropped the wedge of sculpture with a clonk, drew her sword from its shabby scabbard before the wedge had bounced once, and advanced.”

SCULPTURE!

CONCLUSION: the Venus de Milo IS in Canaan House! However, it was decapitated by known practical thinker and simp Camilla Hect so that Palamedes Sextus could do his carbon dating easier without tiring out his necromancer noodle arms

(copied from twitter)

"kiriona" is the māori version of "gideon" in the te reo māori translation of the bible, and is the name john gives gideon.

i am not a te reo speaker but i love phonology and this is my best stab at analysis!

te reo māori has ten consonants, way fewer than most languages (canadian english has 24!) and a strict syllable structure of CV (most of the time), meaning each syllable must start with a consonant and end with a vowel.

when transforming words from other languages into te reo, the te reo consonants with the closest place of articulation in the mouth are used to replace the foreign sounds, and vowels are added to complete the syllables.

for example, "merry christmas" becomes meri kirihimete.

matching the sounds of "gideon" – IPA transcription of the english pronunciation is /ɡɪdɪən/ – to the closest te reo consonants & vowels, we get: /kiɾiona/ or /kiɾiɔnɐ/

🗝 voiced velar stop /ɡ/ → voiceless velar stop /k/

🗝 near-close near-front unrounded /ɪ/→ close front unrounded /i/ (as in "meme")

🗝 voiced alveolar stop /d/ → alveolar flap /ɾ/

🗝 dipthong /ɪə/ with central mid unrounded schwa (the vowel in canadian english in almost every unstressed syllable) → /i/ and /o/ with mid back rounded o (as in "bone"), or mid back rounded ɔ (as in british accent "not"). "io" is not a diphthong here; thank you to @SageAnastasi on twitter for pointing this out!

🗝 /n/ with no vowel → /na/ with open front/central unrounded /a/ (similar to "bat" in canadian english) or open central unrounded /ɐ/ (not in canadian english but it's close to the vowel in "cuff")

according to google translate, "kiriona" also means lion! update, no it does not! see replies for more info!