Act One

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

Gideon rises in the dark of her cell, unlocks her security cuff with a stolen key and leaves it on her pillow. It is her eighty-seventh escape attempt. She has forged herself a place on a shuttle to the Cohort, the Emperor’s army, and it is due in under two hours. She climbs twenty-two flights to the shuttle pit and waits on a heap of rubble under the floodlights. The First Bell rings twenty times for a muster; the one-eyed Marshal Crux comes to fetch her, and she stares him down. Her sword-master, Captain Aiglamene, tells her the muster is real House business, and back-hands her when she insults the Lady.

Gideon’s history is a short horror story. Eighteen years ago her mother drifted down the shaft on a dragchute in a dead hazard suit and landed brain-dead, with a day-old baby in a bio-container; her ghost screamed only Gideon’s name. The Ninth kept the child as a bondswoman, its 201st child among two hundred. Less than two years later only three children were left alive: Gideon, an older boy and the infant heir.

The heir arrives. Harrowhark Nonagesimus is seventeen, small, painted like a skull, and robed in black with a real rib cage clasped round her torso; Muir introduces her as having “pretty much cornered the market on wearing black and sneering.” Gideon threatens to tell the Cohort what she knows about the House. Harrow offers her a real commission if she will come to the muster, then strips off her bones and proposes a fair fight for it, signed in her own blood. It is not a fair fight. Harrow has spent the night burying bones in the field; skeletons erupt from the grit, bury Gideon, and Harrow kicks her in the face. The shuttle lands while Gideon is losing a tooth.

At the muster in the long green-dusted church, Gideon sees what only four people know: the Reverend Mother and Father have been dead for years, and Harrow keeps them seated and silent. Harrow reads the Emperor’s summons. Every House is to send its heir and cavalier primary to the First House, to train as Lyctors, the Emperor’s immortal saints. Then she tells Gideon that Ortus, her own dull, poetic cavalier, has fled with his mother on Gideon’s shuttle. Years ago, it was Gideon who found Harrow’s parents after they killed themselves.

A week later Harrow lets herself into Gideon’s cell (a bone earring grows a hand through the peephole) and takes her down to the catacomb where Aiglamene is sorting old swords. The deal: be Harrow’s cavalier, and afterwards go free. Aiglamene makes Harrow swear to it. Then Harrow paints Gideon’s face as a skull (Gideon is allergic) and lays down the rules: keep every Ninth tradition, and keep quiet about the dying House and its dead lords. Aiglamene spends three months turning a longsword fighter into a rapier duellist; Gideon smuggles her longsword under a false bottom in her trunk.

The First House is a planet of glaring water. Canaan House is a white palace of gold-veined stone rotting on the sea, kept by three priests, of whom the cheerful old man called Teacher is chief. The last two Houses land late: the Seventh’s shuttle lets out a fainting young woman in bloodstained seafoam frills, Gideon catches her, and the Seventh’s huge cavalier puts his sword to Gideon’s neck until the woman, who calls herself Dulcinea Septimus, calls him off. In the dry, broken atrium Teacher hands each cavalier an iron ring of keys and gives the House’s one rule: “never open a locked door unless you have permission.” That night Gideon watches skeleton servants push every shuttle off the dock into the sea.

Act Two

Harrow takes the keys and vanishes into the House, leaving notes: talk to no one, paint your face. Gideon, under a pretended vow of silence, meets everyone else. Magnus Quinn of the Fifth is kind and terminally jolly; his wife Abigail Pent is a historian. The Fourth House are teenagers, Isaac Tettares and his fourteen-year-old cavalier Jeannemary Chatur. The Third are the golden twin princesses Coronabeth and Ianthe Tridentarius and their sulky cavalier Naberius Tern. The Eighth’s heir, sixteen-year-old Silas Octakiseron, has his older nephew and cavalier, Colum Asht, ask the silent Ninth cultist to leave the dining hall. On a garden terrace the woman calling herself Dulcinea asks Gideon to take off her sunglasses, admires her eyes, and notices she holds a rapier like someone used to something heavier.

At the cavaliers’ sparring in the pool room Gideon beats Magnus in three moves, is disarmed by Naberius, and punches him anyway. Harrow watches from the shadows. When Harrow does not come home for two nights, Gideon breaks her silence for the Sixth House, the spectacled scholar Palamedes Sextus and his cavalier Camilla Hect. Palamedes opens a hatch into the Facility, a dead laboratory complex under the House, and they follow blood to Harrow, alive in a grey cocoon of her own bone. Gideon carries her out.

Harrow explains: she has counted 765 doors in the House, only six of them locked, and the laboratories below the hatch hold trials. In one, a bone construct with sword-arms and green lights for eyes has destroyed 163 of her skeletons. The labs are lessons in how to become a Lyctor, and the first lesson is that the necromancer can see through the cavalier’s eyes. Harrow cages her hand in a black-glass pedestal and watches through Gideon as Gideon fights the thing. The first try fails. From the middle of Abigail and Magnus’s eleventh-anniversary dinner, Harrow drags Gideon back, and this time they work as one; the construct comes apart into sand and leaves a key in a black box. Harrow pays her a stiff compliment. At the foot of the ladder out of the Facility they find the broken bodies of Abigail and Magnus.

Act Three

The necromancers spend the night failing to raise the Fifth’s ghosts. Ianthe eats Naberius’s hair and nail parings for power; Silas siphons his cavalier Colum’s life to work on the body, the lights die, and Teacher, frightened, orders everyone upstairs. Judith Deuteros, the Second House’s Cohort captain, demands to call in the army; Teacher will not let any word leave the House. Gideon speaks her first words to Jeannemary: she is sorry.

The Facility key opens a door Gideon found behind a tapestry, marked with a horned skull. Room X-203 is a sealed study left by an ancient necromancer and cavalier: lab benches, chalked theory, two rapiers on a rack, beds and abandoned tea. Harrow finds the theorem of transference on a stone tablet. Gideon pockets a scrap of note with her own name on it, and Harrow, awkwardly, asks to be trusted.

The woman calling herself Dulcinea, now on crutches, asks the Ninth to partner her in a trial she is too weak to pass alone: a field beyond a yellow-and-black line that decays anything crossing it. The only way through is siphoning, so Harrow draws on Gideon’s soul to cross. Gideon nearly dies; Dulcinea talks her through it; and when she comes back, Harrow calls her by her name instead of “Griddle”.

Keys are scarce now and the Houses start taking them from each other. Old ashes turn up in the terrace incinerator, two people’s worth. Protesilaus misses a duel and does not come back; Gideon finds Dulcinea collapsed and soaked from the rain. The Second’s cavalier Marta Dyas duels Camilla for the Sixth’s keys and loses. Harrow puts Gideon up as Camilla’s proxy in the next challenge, and the duelling breaks up; when the Ninth split up to search for Protesilaus, Harrow hands Gideon their keys, and Gideon sweeps her up in a hug. Harrow goes limp and flees.

Gideon takes Isaac and Jeannemary into the Facility to look for Protesilaus. A construct of spider legs and toothed tentacles kills Isaac, and later, while Gideon sleeps beside her in X-203, Jeannemary is killed too.

Act Four

Gideon is found with Jeannemary’s body. In her sickroom the woman calling herself Dulcinea holds Gideon’s hand, and Gideon admits she never took a cavalier’s vows. Harrow forbids Gideon to see Dulcinea and will not release her from service; they fight. Over tea, Silas tells Gideon what Sister Glaurica’s ghost has told him: Ortus’s shuttle exploded, and the Ninth’s children did not die of flu. Colum, who swore she would come to no harm, gives her back her weapons. Then, searching Harrow’s wardrobe, Gideon finds a box holding the head of Protesilaus.

She takes it to Palamedes, who gives her tea. She tells him what she has never told anyone: as a child she told Harrow’s parents that Harrow had gone into the Locked Tomb, and then opened their door to find them hanged and Harrow holding an unused rope. He tells her it was not her fault. In Dulcinea’s sickroom Palamedes shows that Protesilaus has been dead all along, worked like a puppet, and Dulcinea admits it.

Harrow tells Gideon everything that night in the salt water of the pool, with skeletons guarding the doors. The two hundred children were killed so that her mother could bear a necromancer able to open the Tomb; Gideon was poisoned too, and lived. At ten Harrow went into the Tomb, and her parents hanged themselves, meaning her to die with them; she chose not to, and Gideon saw. Harrow asks Gideon to kill her. Gideon holds her instead and gives her the cavalier’s vow: “One flesh, one end.” Inside the Tomb, Harrow says, she found a girl’s body frozen in ice, and loved her. Later, in bed, she tells Gideon that Crux bombed the shuttle.

The end comes fast. A fire alarm sets the sprinklers off and every skeleton servant collapses into a heap of bones. All three priests are dead, Marta too, and Judith is dying: she defied Teacher to send an SOS, he killed Marta and wounded her, and the only ship to answer is the Emperor’s own. Abigail’s body has been cut open for a key. In a muralled study Ianthe, soaked in blood, has done what the labs were teaching: she has killed Naberius and is eating his soul, and that is what a Lyctor is. Coronabeth, it turns out, was never a necromancer at all. Silas siphons Colum to fight Ianthe; Colum, possessed, kills Silas, and Ianthe breaks Colum’s neck.

Camilla tells Gideon that Palamedes has loved Dulcinea through a dozen years of letters. He has also found the truth: the woman in the sickroom killed the real Dulcinea and Protesilaus (the incinerator’s two bodies) and the Fifth. Palamedes spends all his power in one explosion to push her cancer past recovery, and dies. She walks out of the rubble burned and wrapped in a sheet, and names herself Cytherea the First, the Emperor’s seventh saint:

I have come back home to kill the Emperor and burn his Houses.

Camilla attacks with two knives. Harrow buries Cytherea in skeletons and brings Gideon her longsword. Cytherea raises the construct that killed Isaac, and the two Ninth girls fight it in perfect step; Ianthe returns and runs Cytherea through, and Cytherea siphons her and cuts off her arm. Outside in the garden, Gideon’s blows bounce off. Harrow holds up a shield of bone and refuses to siphon Gideon after what happened to Colum. They say the vow one more time. Gideon cries “For the Ninth!” and throws herself onto the iron spikes of the garden fence, so that Harrow can take her soul and become a Lyctor.

Act Five

Harrow comes through screaming, with Gideon’s voice in her head telling her to fight now and cry later, and Gideon’s gold eyes in her own face. With Gideon’s sword and Gideon’s skill she cuts down the construct, finishes Palamedes’s work on Cytherea’s sickness, and stabs her through the heart. Then she lifts Gideon’s body off the spikes and lies down with her in the grass under the blue sky.

Epilogue

Harrow wakes on a gurney aboard a sterile ship. The man with wholly black eyes is the Emperor. She begs him to give Gideon back; he cannot, because their souls cannot now be parted without destroying both. “The Empire is dying,” he tells her. Ianthe lives; Camilla, Coronabeth, Judith’s body and Gideon’s body are all missing. He tells her who Cytherea was, promises to restore the Ninth, and asks her, without forcing her, to come with him as his Hand. Harrowhark the First says yes.

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