Two young women in black robes with skull-painted faces wait under floodlights in a vast stone pit at the bottom of a shaft, the red-haired one in mirrored sunglasses sitting on a battered trunk with a slim rapier at her hip, the small black-haired one standing apart in a cage of ivory ribs.
Gideon Nav and Harrowhark Nonagesimus in the Ninth House’s shuttle pit, about to leave it together, each wishing the other were anyone else.

Tamsyn Muir · 2019–2022 · an illustrated series walk

The Locked Tomb

Lesbian necromancers, a ruined palace in space, an undying Emperor, and a tomb at the bottom of the darkest House that must never be opened.

AN ILLUSTRATED SERIES WALK

Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb is a gothic novel that happens to be set in space, or a space opera that happens to be set in a crypt: nine resurrected planets of bone, nuns and decaying palaces, ruled for ten thousand years by an undying Emperor, and also full of shuttles, autodoors, Cohort ranks and dirty magazines. Three novels are out — Gideon the Ninth (2019), Harrow the Ninth (2020) and Nona the Ninth (2022) — with four pieces of short fiction around them, and a fourth and final novel, Alecto the Ninth, is announced and still has no date.

This is an unofficial reader’s companion to all of it: each novel summarized by its movements and walked in painted frames, in the manner of a 1980s science-fantasy paperback cover, with a page for the short fiction and a cast of the people who fill them. It spoils everything, from who is really in the Locked Tomb to the last line of Nona the Ninth.

Nothing from the Locked Tomb has reached the screen, and nothing has been announced; in place of film and television pages this walk has , which also sorts the rumours from the record.

1

The Series in One Page

Ten thousand years ago a man brought nine dead planets back to life, relit their sun and named it Dominicus. He tells Harrow so himself, in the second book:

“A myriad ago, I resurrected nine planets”

The nine worlds are the Nine Houses, each with its own school of necromancy and its own temperament, and he is their Emperor, the Necrolord Prime, worshipped as God. Necromancy runs on death; each House sends a necromancer heir to the Emperor’s call, and with every heir goes a cavalier primary, a sworn sword who stands in front of them. Behind the Emperor stand his saints, the Lyctors, immortal and near-limitless, and fewer than there used to be. Out beyond the Houses are worlds the Empire has used up, an insurgency called Blood of Eden, and the Resurrection Beasts, the souls of dead planets come back as monsters that hunt the living.

At the bottom of all of it, in the Ninth House, is a tomb. The Ninth is a monastery dug down a shaft into a small cold planet, its nuns painted as skulls, its fields worked by skeletons, its people dying out; it exists to keep the Locked Tomb shut, and prays every day that the rock is never rolled away. What is inside is the oldest secret in the series, and each book opens the door a little further.

The other Houses are drawn as sharply as the Ninth. The Second is the army, the Cohort, all ranks and scarlet uniforms. The Third is glamour, gossip and flesh magic, ruled by twin princesses. The Fourth sends its children first into battle; the Fifth is old courtly money that talks to the dead; the Sixth keeps the Library; the Seventh prizes beauty and is dying of its own blood; the Eighth is white-robed templars who can drain the life out of a person. The First is the Emperor’s own drowned world, with a palace rotting on it. People are named for their Houses’ numbers — Deuteros, Tridentarius, Sextus, Nonagesimus — and the books expect the reader to keep up.

The books are Tamsyn Muir’s, a New Zealander born in Australia in 1985 who now lives in Oxford. Each novel is told in a different voice and a different shape — a locked-house murder mystery, a second-person puzzle about a mind that has edited itself, five days of a six-month-old’s life in a city under siege — and each is about the same few people and the same unbearable bond. Muir has called it “not just a love story; it’s a story about being enmeshed.” All three were Hugo finalists, and so was the series; Gideon won the Locus Award for Best First Novel and the Crawford Award. They are also very funny, which is not the least of what they do.

At the bottom of a long stair cut into black rock, a great round stone sits across a doorway, lit by a few low braziers in the dark.

1 The Locked Tomb The tomb the series is named for, at the bottom of the Ninth House: sealed, booby-trapped and never to be opened, prayed over daily by nuns who hope the rock is never rolled away. Harrow went in at ten; she tells Gideon in book I that inside lies “the corpse of a girl”, frozen, a sword on her breast. Who that girl is takes three books to tell.

2

I · Gideon the Ninth (2019)

“Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines”

Gideon Nav is eighteen, a foundling indentured to the Ninth House, a two-handed swordswoman with red hair and mirrored sunglasses, and she is making her eighty-seventh escape attempt. Harrowhark Nonagesimus, seventeen, the House’s heir and a bone adept of frightening talent, stops it with a field of skeletons. Then she makes Gideon an offer. The Emperor has summoned every House’s heir and cavalier to the First House to train as new Lyctors; Harrow’s own cavalier has fled; if Gideon will go as her cavalier, painted and silent and pretending to be a Ninth House faithful, she can go free afterwards.

Canaan House is a white palace rotting on a planet of glaring water, kept by three priests and a staff of skeletons, with one rule: never open a locked door without permission. Eight Houses’ pairs arrive — the Cohort captain of the Second, the golden twin princesses of the Third, two teenagers of the Fourth, a historian and her husband of the Fifth, the spectacled Master Warden of the Sixth and his cavalier, a dying duchess of the Seventh, the templars of the Eighth — and the heirs scatter into the laboratories under the house, where the trials teach, a lesson at a time, how a Lyctor is made. Then people start to die: a husband and wife at the foot of a ladder, a boy of the Fourth, ashes in an incinerator, a cavalier who has been a puppet all along. Harrow orders Gideon into a pretended vow of silence; Gideon breaks it to ask for help and makes friends anyway. Harrow vanishes into the House and is found in the laboratories, alive in a cocoon of her own bone. Gideon and Harrow learn to fight as one and to trust each other, and Gideon gives Harrow the cavalier’s vow:

“One flesh, one end.”

The answer to the trials is that a Lyctor eats her cavalier’s soul. The woman calling herself Dulcinea is Cytherea the First, an original Lyctor, come home to kill the Emperor; she killed the real Dulcinea and the Fifth House pair, and other guests have been killing each other. In the last fight Gideon throws herself onto the spikes of the garden fence so that Harrow can take her soul and win. Harrow wakes on the Emperor’s ship, a Lyctor with Gideon’s gold eyes in her face, and agrees to be his Hand. The walks it Act by Act.

In a six-sided metal tunnel a red-haired young woman with a skull-painted face lunges with a slim rapier at a towering construct of pale bone with blade arms and small green eye-lights, while behind her a small black-haired young woman in a skull face stands with one gloved hand thrust into a black glass pedestal, eyes closed.

2 The First Trial Gideon the Ninth, Act Two. In the dead laboratories under Canaan House a bone construct has destroyed 163 of Harrow’s skeletons, and the trial is the first lesson of Lyctorhood: the necromancer can see through the cavalier’s eyes. Harrow cages her hand in the pedestal and watches through Gideon as Gideon fights. The first try fails; the second, they work as one, and the thing comes apart into sand.

3

II · Harrow the Ninth (2020)

The second book is the strangest, and it spends half its length telling the reader the first one never happened. Harrow, a new saint on the Emperor’s flagship and then his station, the Mithraeum, is sick at the sight of a great two-handed sword she cannot account for, carries a stack of letters from a past self, and cannot remember that Gideon Nav ever existed. The chapters about her are in the second person, and they count down to “the Emperor’s murder”; between them runs a third-person Canaan House in which Harrow’s cavalier was Ortus all along and Gideon is nowhere. That Canaan House is false, a refuge Harrow’s mind has built in the River of the dead, and the book eventually says so.

In the real strand Harrow learns to kill planets, survives more than a dozen attempts on her life by the Saint of Duty, cooks a soup with her own marrow in it, builds Ianthe a bone arm and waits for the seventh Resurrection Beast. Asked by the Emperor not to be in such a hurry to die, she answers:

“I have always lived.”

Then the explanations arrive. Harrow had her own brain operated on so that she could not perceive Gideon, and so could never finish consuming her. The voice telling Harrow her own story has been Gideon’s. Gideon wakes in Harrow’s body and announces herself as the Emperor’s daughter; the Body in the Tomb turns out to have been the Emperor’s cavalier; Mercymorn blows the Emperor apart into a red mist, and he re-forms and kills her; Augustine drops the station into the River. Six months later, in a city at war, a woman who does not know who she is lives thirty storeys up with Camilla Hect. The marks every chapter real or false.

A small black-haired young woman with a painted skull face and a big sad heavy-set man in black robes and skull paint stand side by side on a sunlit dock before a huge decaying white palace on the sea, the man holding a thick bound book.

3 The Wrong Cavalier The version of Gideon the Ninth that Harrow the Ninth keeps telling: Harrowhark arrives at Canaan House with Ortus Nigenad, her dull, kind, poetic first cavalier, reciting his endless epic. It is wrong. In book I Ortus fled and died, and Gideon went in his place. This Canaan House is a refuge Harrow’s mind has built in the River, where she cannot see the name Gideon at all.

An ordinary-looking dark-haired man with black whites to his eyes sits in a plain chair in a pale cabin, reading a tablet, loose papers and a crown of pale shimmering leaves on the table beside him.

4 The Emperor The god of the Nine Houses, met at the end of Gideon the Ninth as a man with a tablet and a pile of flimsy, his eyes black where the whites should be. In Harrow the Ninth he is “Teacher” to his saints, kind to Harrow and evasive about Alecto; in Nona the Ninth his dreams name him John and say what he did to make himself God.

4

III · Nona the Ninth (2022)

Nona the Ninth was never meant to be a book. It was the first act of Alecto the Ninth, until it ran so long that Muir’s editor made her publish it on its own; “Nona sprang from the planned first act of Alecto,” she told Vox. It is five days in the besieged city of New Rho, under a monstrous blue sphere in the sky, beside Nona, six months old in Harrow’s body, who works as a teacher’s aide, loves a six-legged dog and wants a birthday party. Her keepers are Camilla, Palamedes, who surfaces in Camilla’s body on a timer, and Pyrrha Dve, living in the body of her dead necromancer. Her friends at school are a gang of refugee children led by a burn-scarred girl called Hot Sauce, who will turn out to be harder than anyone. Blood of Eden, split between negotiators and a wing that burns necromancers in cages, wants a Lyctor; the Cohort holds out in its barracks; and a broadcast presents the Emperor’s only daughter, Kiriona Gaia — Gideon, dead and raised.

Between the days run dream chapters titled after verses of the Gospel of John, in which a man called John tells Harrow how our own world ended: a necromancer, a dying Earth, trillionaires fleeing in ships, and a man who killed billions and became a god. He built a body for the planet’s soul he could not hold, and that body is Alecto, the girl in the Tomb.

Camilla and Palamedes become one Lyctor, Paul, who gets them all through the River to the Ninth, where the Tomb is opened at last, and Nona — Alecto’s own soul, all along — goes back into her body. Alecto wakes, Harrow wakes, and Alecto carries Harrow to the Emperor’s ship and drives an iron sword into his heart. At which he wakes, and says:

Annabel, good morning.

The follows the five days and the dreams.

A young woman with a long black braid and gold eyes walks a small shaggy white six-legged dog on a lead down a hot dusty street of concrete tower blocks, a vast glowing blue sphere hanging low over the city behind her.

5 The Blue Sky Nona the Ninth. Nona is six months old and lives in Harrowhark’s body without knowing it; she cleans whiteboards at a refugee school, minds Noodle, the science teacher’s six-legged dog, and wants a birthday party. Over New Rho hangs Varun the Eater, the seventh Resurrection Beast, a blue sphere that drives the city’s necromancers mad. Nona alone can hear it sing.

A giant outdoor screen above a hot dusty square shows a tall pallid red-haired young woman in a white uniform with silver frogging and a wreath of small white bones and blossoms, a crowd of dim shapes far below.

6 The Emperor’s Daughter Nona the Ninth, Day Three. At a broadcast in New Rho, Ianthe, working the corpse of her cavalier, offers the Emperor’s amnesty and presents his only daughter, Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia: Gideon Nav, dead and raised, red hair wreathed in fingerbones and blossoms. Nona, watching from a traffic-light crossbar, knows the face from her dreams. Harrow the Ninth has already said whose daughter Gideon is.

5

The Short Fiction

Four short works sit beside the novels. “The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex” (Tor.com, 2020) is a locked-room mystery solved by Palamedes and Camilla at thirteen, in the Sixth House Library, years before Gideon; it is funny, and it ends on grief. “As Yet Unsent”, added to the Harrow the Ninth paperback in 2021 and posted free in 2022, is Captain Judith Deuteros’s coded report from captivity with Camilla and Coronabeth among Blood of Eden, between Gideon and Nona; the same paperback added the “Blood of Eden Memorandum for Record”, the insurgents’ field orders for fighting necromancers. “The Unwanted Guest” (the Nona paperback, 2023) is a one-act play set inside Ianthe’s head, where Palamedes contests Naberius’s body with her during their duel in Nona. Muir has said “As Yet Unsent” is not required reading, but it introduces names that come back in Nona. The takes all four.

A lean dark-haired young woman in a plain sand-coloured shirt stands among drab tents in a temperate clearing, one hand closed around a small leather pouch at her throat and a dark band on her ankle, a huge pale ringed planet hanging in the daytime sky.

7 The Warden’s Bones “As Yet Unsent”, the Captain’s coded report from captivity. Camilla Hect, prisoner of Blood of Eden in a camp under a ringed planet, wears a shock anklet and keeps the Warden’s bones in a pouch at her neck; when an official tried to take them, the shock put her in hospital for a week. Judith tells her the obsession will kill her. Camilla says the Warden generally knows what he is doing. Nona proves her right.

6

Alecto the Ninth, and the Wait

The series was planned as a trilogy, Gideon, Harrow, Alecto. When Tor announced Nona in July 2021 it promised Alecto for fall 2023; that did not happen. As of October 2026 Muir’s own site says only that the series “concludes with Alecto the Ninth (forthcoming)”: no date, no cover. Muir has said Alecto begins where Nona leaves off, and, in 2020, that there is a heist in it. Dates that circulate online, including an October 2026 one, come from fans, not from the publisher. Until it arrives the story stands at the Emperor’s waking, with Alecto and Harrow both awake and the Tomb open.

In a black cavern of ice and rock a tall frost-pale woman with long pale-gold hair and amber eyes, in a plain white shift, stands with a broken chain hanging from her wrist, looking down at a thin black-haired young woman in black robes who is sitting up on the rock and staring back at her.

8 Alecto Wakes The end of Nona the Ninth, and the beginning of Alecto the Ninth. The rock made meat wakes in a body: Alecto breaks her chains, breaking her wrist with them, and Harrow wakes in her own body for the first time in a book and a half. Alecto, who swore once to Harrow’s ancestor Anastasia, swears to Harrow. Then she carries her to John’s ship, and takes up an iron sword.

7

Reading Order

Read them in publication order: Gideon, Harrow, Nona. Each book picks up where the last stops, and Harrow in particular makes no sense without Gideon. The short fiction slots in around them: “Doctor Sex” any time, though it lands hardest after Gideon; “As Yet Unsent” and the Memorandum after Harrow and before Nona; “The Unwanted Guest” after Nona, since it plays out a scene from late in that book. The can be read first; it keeps the books’ reveals for the book pages.

Cast

The cast across three books

Gideon Nav

Cavalier of the Ninth · I; the voice of II’s “you” chapters; Kiriona Gaia in III
Eighteen, red-haired, gold-eyed, raised on a two-handed sword, a bondswoman of the Ninth House who has spent her life trying to escape it for the Cohort. She goes to Canaan House as Harrow’s cavalier and dies on the garden fence so Harrow can become a Lyctor. In Harrow she turns out to be the Emperor’s daughter by Wake; in Nona John has raised her body as Prince Kiriona Gaia.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus

Reverend Daughter of the Ninth; Harrowhark the First · I–III
Seventeen, black-eyed, skull-painted, a bone adept of frightening talent who has secretly kept her dead parents seated in the House’s church for years. She went into the Locked Tomb at ten and fell in love with the girl inside. A Lyctor by the end of book I, she spends book II unable to perceive the name Gideon, and most of book III asleep in the Tomb while Nona wears her body.

Nona

The girl in Harrow’s body · III
Six months old in herself, in a grown young woman’s body: a teacher’s aide, a member of a children’s gang, a lover of the six-legged dog Noodle and of everyone she meets, who cannot be hurt for long. She is Alecto’s own soul, and at the end of her book she goes home to her body.

The Emperor (John Gaius)

Necrolord Prime, God, “Teacher” to his saints · I (end)–III
An ordinary-looking man with black whites to his eyes who resurrected nine planets ten thousand years ago. Nona’s dream chapters tell his past on our own Earth, which he ended; he is Gideon’s father. Blown apart in Harrow, he re-forms; stabbed through the heart at the end of Nona, he wakes.

Alecto

The Body, the girl in the Locked Tomb · I–III; the title of IV
A frozen corpse in chains with a sword on her breast, whom Harrow loves and sees beside her through book II. She is the body John built for the soul of Earth he could not hold, and the Emperor’s own cavalier. At the end of Nona she wakes.

Ianthe Tridentarius

Princess of the Third; Ianthe the First · I–III, “The Unwanted Guest”
Pale, clever and ambitious, the twin who did the necromancy. She works out how Lyctors are made and kills her cavalier Naberius Tern to become one, losing her arm to Cytherea; in Harrow Harrow builds her a bone one. She swears fealty to the Emperor and, in Nona, works Naberius’s corpse as Prince Ianthe Naberius.

Coronabeth Tridentarius

Crown princess of the Third; “Crown” · I–III, “As Yet Unsent”
Golden, radiant and, it turns out, never a necromancer at all. Missing after Canaan House, she spends the next books with Blood of Eden, first as a captive and then, as “Crown”, on its side, at the shoulder of Judith Deuteros, who has wanted her for twelve years.

Palamedes Sextus

Master Warden of the Sixth · I–III, “Doctor Sex”, “The Unwanted Guest”
Spectacled, eidetic and kind, who hears Gideon’s confession at Canaan House, solves the murders and dies spending all his power on Cytherea. His soul holds on: in Nona he shares Camilla’s body on a timer, and with her he becomes the Lyctor Paul.

Camilla Hect

The Warden’s Hand, cavalier of the Sixth · I–III, the stories
Grey-wrapped, two-bladed and restless as a bird, Palamedes’s cousin and cavalier since they were children. She carries his bones out of Canaan House, talks her way through captivity with Blood of Eden, keeps Nona, and at the end of Nona burns into Paul with him.

Judith Deuteros

Captain of the Cohort, heir of the Second · I–III, “As Yet Unsent”
Disciplined, humourless and brave, commissioned at fourteen. She is left dying at Canaan House and turns up alive, a prisoner of Blood of Eden; her report is “As Yet Unsent”. In Nona she is “the Captain”, a sick prisoner through whom the Resurrection Beast speaks.

Cytherea the First

The woman calling herself Dulcinea · I; her corpse in II
The frail, charming Duchess of the Seventh is really an original Lyctor who killed the real Dulcinea and came to Canaan House to kill the Emperor and burn his Houses. Harrow kills her. In Harrow her corpse walks the Emperor’s station with someone else inside it.

Wake

Commander of Blood of Eden; the Sleeper · II–III
Gideon’s mother, who came to the Ninth House carrying a child she had borne to open the Tomb. Her ghost haunts Harrow as the gas-masked Sleeper and rides into Cytherea’s corpse; she is shot down at the end of the book.

Pyrrha Dve

Cavalier of Gideon the First · II–III
Ten thousand years old, a gunwoman and an original cavalier. In Harrow the Saint of Duty, whom Harrow hears as “Ortus the First”, is her necromancer Gideon the First; he dies fighting the seventh Beast, and by the end it is Pyrrha inside his body. In Nona she braids Nona’s hair, cooks orange eggs and keeps everyone alive.

Mercymorn and Augustine

The Saints of Joy and of Patience · II
Two of the Emperor’s last original Lyctors, peach-coloured and grey, ten thousand years into getting on each other’s nerves. Both turn on him at the end of Harrow: Mercymorn dies for it, and Augustine is dragged into the River’s mouth.

Reading order

  • Publication order is reading order. I Gideon the Ninth (Tor.com Publishing, 10 September 2019, 448 pages); II Harrow the Ninth (Tordotcom, 4 August 2020, 512 pages); III Nona the Ninth (Tordotcom, 13 September 2022, 480 pages). Each picks up where the last stops.
  • IV Alecto the Ninth is announced as the last book; as of October 2026 it has no date or cover (“forthcoming”, on Muir’s site).
  • Before or after Gideon: “The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex” (Tor.com, 2020; free on Reactor), set years before the first book.
  • Between Harrow and Nona: “As Yet Unsent” and the “Blood of Eden Memorandum for Record”, both added to the Harrow the Ninth trade paperback and e-book (21 September 2021); the story is free on Reactor (2022), the memo is not online.
  • After Nona: “The Unwanted Guest”, a one-act play, in the Nona the Ninth trade paperback (12 September 2023); free on Reactor (2024).
  • Extras: each novel opens with a dramatis personae. The Gideon e-book ends with a glossary, Cohort dossiers on the heirs and cavaliers, and Muir’s “A Little Explanation of Naming Systems” with a pronunciation guide, which the trade paperback (14 July 2020) also carries; the Harrow e-book ends with a glossary and a pronunciation guide.
  • On audio: all three novels unabridged, read by Moira Quirk for Recorded Books, released the same days as the hardcovers. RBmedia’s catalogue lists a two-part dramatized Gideon the Ninth with no release date.

Notes

  • Tamsyn Muir was born in New South Wales in 1985, grew up in Howick outside Auckland, attended the Clarion workshop in 2010 and lives in Oxford. Her other books include the novella Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (2020), expanded into the novel Floralinda, due from Tor in July 2027.
  • Awards: Gideon the Ninth won the 2020 Locus Award for Best First Novel and the Crawford Award; each novel was a Hugo finalist for Best Novel (2020, 2021, 2023), and The Locked Tomb a finalist for Best Series in 2023. None has won a Hugo or a Nebula. Gideon and Nona each won Spain’s Ignotus Award for best foreign novel.
  • How it grew: the series was planned as three books; Nona was carved out of Alecto’s first act, which on its own ran to some 140,000 words, and announced in July 2021 with Alecto to follow in 2023.
  • On screen: none. Muir has written one episode each of Secret Level (2024) and Love, Death & Robots (2025), neither from her books; the claims of a Locked Tomb series or film have no primary source. The has the detail.

The whole walk: The Series · · · · ·