Two young women in black robes stand on a rock ledge in a vast dark shaft lit by candle-lit windows; both with painted skull faces; the small one raises her hands as skeletons climb up out of the grit, while the tall red-haired one holds a longsword ready in front of her. — The Ninth House in miniature: a necromancer who builds with bone, and the cavalier sworn to stand in front of her.

The Locked Tomb · The world

The Nine Houses

Nine resurrected planets round a reignited star, an Emperor worshipped as God for ten thousand years, and the necromancers and swordsmen who serve him in pairs

Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb is a space opera built out of a gothic novel, or the other way round: nine planets of bone, ritual 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) — and a fourth, Alecto the Ninth, is announced with no date.

This page gathers the furniture in one place: the Emperor and his Resurrection, the Nine Houses, how necromancy and cavaliers work, the immortal Lyctors, the Resurrection Beasts and the River, Blood of Eden and the Cohort, and the state of the books on screen (there is none). The books spend a great deal of their energy revealing who people really are; this page leaves those reveals to the book pages and says only that the books reveal more.

The Emperor and the Resurrection

At the centre of everything is a man the Houses call the Necrolord Prime. The Gideon dramatis personae gives the full style — “Necromancer Divine, King of the Nine Renewals, our Resurrector” — and the greeting exchanged on Canaan House’s dock is “Hail to the King Undying”, answered with “Hail to the Lord Over the River”. He is worshipped as God, and in Harrow the Ninth the characters simply call him that.

The founding act of the Empire is his. Ten thousand years ago — a “myriad”, in the Empire’s count — he brought nine dead planets back to life and relit their sun. He tells Harrow so himself:

“A myriad ago, I resurrected nine planets”

He named the star Dominicus, “as a reminder”, glossing it with the opening of Psalm 27, Dominus illuminatio mea: God is my light. The nine resurrected worlds are the Nine Houses; the system is the Dominicus system; the Empire spreads outward from it to other worlds.

For a god he is strikingly ordinary to look at. When a reader first meets him, at the very end of Gideon, he is a man with a tablet and loose sheets of flimsy, and his sclera are “black as space”. Harrow the Ninth adds the long, square, urbane face and the ink-smudged nails, and the thought that he might pass for utterly nondescript, but for the divinity that clings to him. He no longer lives at Canaan House, the palace on his own drowned planet; he rules from a ship and from a station far out in the dark. Who he was before the Resurrection, and what the Resurrection actually cost, is the slow-burning subject of the whole series — Nona the Ninth answers a great deal of it — and the book pages take it up there.

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. — **1 The Emperor at Rest** The god of the Nine Houses, as readers first meet him at the end of *Gideon the Ninth*: a man with a tablet and a pile of flimsy, eyes black where the whites should be. *Harrow the Ninth* adds the long square face and the ink-smudged nails. Necrolord Prime, King of the Nine Renewals, worshipped for ten thousand years, and ordinary-looking enough to pass for nondescript. The books reveal much more about who he is.

A small fierce white star burns in black space above a pale airless world of white spired buildings, its light catching a few distant planets as faint crescents. — **2 The Reignited Star** “A myriad ago, I resurrected nine planets,” the Emperor tells Harrow in *Harrow the Ninth*: he brought a dead system back, relit its star and named it Dominicus, “as a reminder” — after the psalm, *God is my light*. The nine worlds became the Nine Houses, and the Empire has counted its years from that day.

The Nine Houses

Each planet is a House, each House has its own school of necromancy, its own capital and its own temperament, and each sends a necromancer heir and a sworn swordsman, the cavalier primary, when the Emperor calls. Names follow the numbers: Deuteros for the Second, Tridentarius for the Third, Tettares, Pent and Quinn, Sextus, Septimus, Octakiseron, Nonagesimus. A verse printed after the Gideon dramatis personae gives each House from the Second to the Ninth a line — “Two is for discipline”, and Nine “for the Tomb”.

The First is the Emperor’s own, a glittering world almost entirely under water, with Canaan House decaying on its island, kept by three priests and a staff of white-robed skeletons. The Second is “the Emperor’s Strength”, the House of the Cohort, all ranks and uniforms: its heir Judith Deuteros joined the junior Cohort at eleven and was commissioned at fourteen. The Third, “Mouth of the Emperor”, is glamour, gossip and flesh magic, ruled from Ida, which sends its twin princesses, Coronabeth and Ianthe. The Fourth, “the Emperor’s Sword”, sends its children first into battle; its pair at Canaan House are young teenagers, the cavalier fourteen. The Fifth, “Heart of the Emperor, Watchers over the River”, is old courtly money and spirit magic: Lady Abigail Pent is a famous historian who talks to the dead, and her cavalier is her husband.

The Sixth, “the Emperor’s Reason”, keeps the Library and lives on scholarship and psychometry; Palamedes Sextus is its Master Warden. The Seventh, “Joy of the Emperor, the Rose Unblown”, prizes beauty and the preserved body, and is riddled with a hereditary blood cancer; at Canaan House it is represented by the frail, charming Duchess of Rhodes. The Eighth, “the Forgiving House”, is white-robed templars and scripture, and its necromancers can draw the life out of others.

And the Ninth — “House of the Sewn Tongue, the Black Vestals” — is a monastery dug down a shaft into a small cold planet: Drearburh, its nuns in rusty black with their faces painted as skulls, its fields worked by skeletons, its people dwindling and old. The Ninth keeps the Locked Tomb, a sealed tomb at the bottom of the world, and prays daily that it stays shut. Its heir is Harrowhark Nonagesimus, seventeen, a bone adept of frightening talent; its cavalier, in the first book, is Gideon Nav, eighteen, a foundling indentured to the House who is about to make her eighty-seventh escape attempt.

A huge crumbling palace of white stone and greenish glass domes spreads across a rocky island in a grey-green sea under a glaring pale sky, its towers broken and its terraced gardens dead. — **3 Canaan House** The First House is the Emperor’s own drowned world, almost all water, and Canaan House sits on it like a shipwreck: white stone veined with gold, dead terraced gardens, broken glass roofs, and skeleton servants in white. The Emperor no longer lives here. In *Gideon the Ninth* his priests open it to the Houses’ heirs, with one rule: never open a locked door without permission.

Two women in scarlet-and-white military uniforms stand at attention on the left of a sunlit marble stair, while on the right two blonde women in violet robes, one radiant with golden curls and one pale and straight-haired, look down at them. — **4 Soldiers and Princesses** The Second House is the Cohort’s: Captain Judith Deuteros, commissioned at fourteen, and her cavalier Marta Dyas, in officers’ scarlet and white. The Third is glamour, gossip and flesh magic: the twin princesses of Ida, golden Coronabeth and pale Ianthe, who, the Cohort’s dossier notes, has never performed necromancy without her sister. The Third’s House colours, violet and gold, come from the fan wiki rather than the books.

A skinny orange-haired teenage boy in navy robes and a fierce curly-haired teenage girl in a navy tunic stand together in a dusty marble hall, while a neat brown-haired woman in dark blue robes and her cheerful curly-haired husband in a fine dark blue coat stand smiling beside them. — **5 The Sword and the Heart** The Fourth, “the Emperor’s Sword”, sends its young first into battle: Isaac Tettares, Baron of Tisis, and Jeannemary Chatur, fourteen, both in the navy the books give the Fourth. The Fifth, “Heart of the Emperor, Watchers over the River”, is old courtly spirit magic: Lady Abigail Pent, historian and medium, and Magnus Quinn, her husband and cavalier — a spouse as cavalier being, the dossiers note, a very Fifth House custom.

A tall young man in thick spectacles and grey robes reads beside a dark-haired young woman in close grey robes, while across the hall a frail curly-haired woman in a frilled sea-green gown leans on her enormous silent cavalier in a dark green coat. — **6 The Library and the Rose** The Sixth keeps the Library: Palamedes Sextus, Master Warden, all spectacles and theory, and Camilla Hect, his Hand, grey-wrapped and restless as a bird. The Seventh, “the Rose Unblown”, prizes beauty and a body that will not decay, and is dying of its own blood. At Canaan House it is the Duchess of Rhodes, fainting into the hall in seafoam frills, with a huge, silent cavalier at her back.

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. — **7 The Locked Tomb** The Ninth House keeps the series’ namesake: a tomb sealed at the bottom of its world, booby-trapped and never to be entered. Every day its nuns pray that the tomb stays shut and the rock is never rolled away. What lies inside is the series’ oldest secret; *Gideon the Ninth* begins to tell it, and the later books keep going.

Necromancers and cavaliers

Necromancy runs on death. Every death and every decay releases thanergy, death energy, which necromancers draw on; thalergy is its opposite, the energy of the living, which some Houses — the Second, the Eighth — know how to take. Harrow puts the economics plainly:

“Give me a single death and I can go for ten minutes.”

The great schools are bone (the Ninth: skeletons raised whole from a buried femur, bone shields, bone constructs), flesh (the Third) and spirit (the Fifth), with the Sixth’s psychometry reading the thanergy left in objects, the Seventh’s art of keeping a body from dying, and the Eighth’s siphoning. Necromancers are strong among the dead and weak away from them; out in space, away from their worlds, most of them dwindle.

That is what the cavalier is for. A necromancer is a weapon with no armour, so each heir has a cavalier primary at their side, sworn to guard them with the sword — rapier and offhand, mostly, though Gideon Nav was raised on a two-handed longsword. The Gideon back matter calls necromancer and cavalier an “essential equation”:

“Both halves serve as sword and shield.”

The cavalier’s vow is “One flesh, one end”, and the series takes it far more literally than anyone swearing it expects.

A very pale white-haired youth in white robes and silver chain mail rests his hand on the shoulder of a big scarred man in white, the colour draining out of the older man’s face, in a dim stone room. — **8 The Forgiving House** Thanergy is death’s energy, thalergy the living’s, and the Eighth House’s necromancers can take the second straight out of a person. In *Gideon the Ninth* sixteen-year-old Silas Octakiseron, Master Templar of the White Glass, drinks it from his own cavalier — Colum Asht, his much older nephew — and Colum goes grey and stands for it. The Ninth works with the dead; the Eighth spends the living.

The Lyctors

Behind the Emperor stand his saints. At Canaan House the old priest explains them to his guests:

“The Lyctors were not born immortal. They were given eternal life”

They were the Emperor’s first companions, necromancers and their cavaliers from the Houses, who became his Hands — immortal, near-limitless in power, keeping their strength in space where ordinary necromancers fail. By the time of the books they are legends and also a dwindling handful, the last of the original eight. Harrow the Ninth introduces the survivors by title — Mercymorn the First, Saint of Joy; Augustine the First, Saint of Patience; and a Saint of Duty — on the Emperor’s station, the Mithraeum, where, after ten thousand years together, they still bicker.

The Emperor’s summons in Gideon is an offer: the Houses’ heirs, with their cavaliers, may come to Canaan House and train to become new Lyctors. The summons calls the Lyctors “the Emperor’s Hands”. How a Lyctor is made is the central discovery of the first book, worked out in stages through the palace’s locked laboratories, and the answer is not pretty; the book page tells it. What it costs to be one of them, ten thousand years on or ten months, is the subject of the second book.

A sharp-featured woman with long peach-coloured hair and a tall grey-haired aristocrat, both in long shimmering white robes, stand apart in a gothic chapel of dark stone and bone, a cross-shaped window full of stars behind them. — **9 Two Saints** The Lyctors were “given eternal life”, the priest at Canaan House says; ten thousand years later only a few remain. In *Harrow the Ninth* two of them hold the Emperor’s station: Mercymorn the First, Saint of Joy, and Augustine the First, Saint of Patience, who have had ten thousand years to get on each other’s nerves, and spend a good part of the book doing it.

The Resurrection Beasts and the River

The Empire has enemies the size of planets. The Harrow glossary explains the Resurrection Beasts: the souls of the original nine planets of the Dominicus system, turned into stellar revenants that hunt the living — “Unimaginatively referred to as Numbers One through Nine,” in order of discovery, and to the Lyctors simply “RBs”. They travel with swarms of Heralds, which the glossary calls “a mix of human body parts and ‘gross space bee.’” Number Seven is said to be over fifty thousand kilometres across. In ten thousand years only a handful have been killed, and fighting them is what the Lyctors are for.

They are killed in the River, the current of the dead that every soul falls into. The River has layers, from the surface down to the riverbed, the barathron, where vast toothed mouths called the stoma open; push a Beast’s soul down the stoma and it does not come back. To Harrow the River is rusty water on a grey shore of rocks sharp as daggers. Lyctors can travel it faster than light (everyone else uses the stele, a blood-powered drive), and ghosts can hold out in it in private pockets, bubbles, each held together by a single mind’s insistence. In Nona the Ninth Number Seven hangs over a besieged city as a monstrous blue sphere on the horizon, and the city’s necromancers go mad under it.

A lone figure on a concrete rooftop, seen from behind, looks out over a hazy ruined city at a vast dim blue sphere filling the horizon. — **10 The Beast in the Sky** The Resurrection Beasts are the souls of dead planets come back as monsters that hunt the living, numbered One through Nine and called “RBs” by the Lyctors who fight them; Number Seven is over fifty thousand kilometres across. In *Nona the Ninth* it hangs over a besieged city as a monstrous blue sphere on the horizon, and under it necromancers go mad.

A lone hooded figure in a long shimmering robe, face shadowed under the hood, wades waist-deep into murky rust-brown water off a grey shore of jagged rocks, under a sky of dull grey light. — **11 The River** Every soul falls into the River. It runs in layers down to a riverbed where vast toothed mouths, the stoma, swallow what is pushed into them; that is the only way to kill a Resurrection Beast. Lyctors walk it to cross space faster than light, and ghosts can hide in it in bubbles of their own making. *Harrow the Ninth* spends a lot of time here.

Blood of Eden and the Cohort

Outside the Houses are the people the Empire conquers. One Cohort officer’s report calls its expansion slash-and-burn: worlds outside the nine are taken, used and slowly killed. Blood of Eden is the insurgency that grows from that, an anti-necromantic resistance whose commandos must each kill a wizard to graduate and whose members go by long phrase-names — We Suffer, Unjust Hope. In Harrow the Emperor is asked who Eden was:

“Someone they left to die”

By Nona the Ninth Blood of Eden is fighting over a hot, ruined, besieged city of nine million, crowded with refugees, and is split into wings that argue over whether to negotiate or to burn every necromancer they find.

On the other side is the Cohort, the Empire’s army, drawn mostly from the Second and Fourth Houses, with ranks from lieutenant to grand admiral, a junior corps that takes children from ten, and a flagship, the Erebos. All Gideon Nav has ever wanted is to get off the Ninth and join it.

A woman in a plain white mask, black goggles and a deep black hood sits at a table spread with maps in a bare concrete room, two masked fighters in hazard gear standing at the window behind her. — **12 Blood of Eden** The Empire takes other worlds and bleeds them dry; Blood of Eden is the resistance, and it hates necromancers on principle. Its commandos must each kill a wizard to graduate, and its people carry long phrase-names. In *Nona the Ninth*, in a besieged city of refugees, its negotiators under the masked We Suffer argue with a harder wing that burns suspected necromancers in cages.

Ranks of soldiers in scarlet-and-white uniforms stand at attention in a vast grey steel hangar before a waiting shuttle, a single officer walking the line. — **13 The Cohort** The Empire’s army is the Cohort, drawn mostly from the Second and Fourth Houses: ranks from lieutenant to grand admiral, a junior corps that takes children from ten, and a flagship, the *Erebos*. On the Ninth, a cold monastery with no future, it is the only way out anyone can see — Gideon Nav has spent her whole life trying to enlist.

On screen, and elsewhere

Nothing from the Locked Tomb has been adapted for film or television, and nothing has been officially announced. The author’s own site, her publisher’s announcements and the trade press carry no screen deal as of October 2026.

Several claims to the contrary circulate on AI-written aggregator pages, and none has a primary source: that Tim Miller pitched a series to HBO (or Netflix); that the rights went to Vast Entertainment, or to Plan B with Muir writing the script; that a Gideon graphic novel was announced in 2023, or one of “As Yet Unsent” is due in 2027. The Tim Miller story has a likely seed. Miller created Love, Death & Robots and Secret Level, and Muir has written one episode of each — Secret Level’s “Spelunky: Tally” (Amazon Prime Video, December 2024) and Love, Death & Robots’ “For He Can Creep” (Netflix, May 2025, from a story by Siobhan Carroll). Neither has anything to do with her books; at New York Comic Con in 2024 Dave Wilson, Secret Level’s supervising director, mentioned that she wrote Gideon the Ninth, and that seems to be all.

What does exist is audio. All three novels are unabridged audiobooks read by Moira Quirk for Recorded Books, released on the same days as the hardcovers. RBmedia, which owns Recorded Books, also lists a two-part Gideon the Ninth “[Dramatized Adaptation]” in its catalogue, with no cast, no producer and no release date; treat it as listed, not released.

And the story itself is unfinished: Alecto the Ninth is announced as the last book, and as of October 2026 has no publication date or cover.

At a glance

The Nine Houses

House	Seat · epithet	Colours	Speciality	Founding Lyctor · cavalier	Heir · cavalier at Canaan House
First	Canaan House, on the drowned First House · “Necromancer Divine, King of the Nine Renewals” (the Emperor)	Pearl, “Canaanite white”	The Emperor’s own	The Emperor	None sent; Canaan House kept by Teacher and two priests
Second	Trentham · “The Emperor’s Strength, House of the Crimson Shield”	Scarlet and white	Soldiers; drawing thalergy from the living*; the Cohort	Gideon the First · Pyrrha Dve*	Captain Judith Deuteros · Lt. Marta Dyas
Third	Ida · “Mouth of the Emperor, the Procession”	Gold and purple*	Flesh magic*	Cyrus the First · Valancy Trinit*	Coronabeth and Ianthe Tridentarius · Naberius Tern
Fourth	Tisis · “Hope of the Emperor, the Emperor’s Sword”	Navy (and white*)	Battle necromancy; first into the fight*	Ulysses the First · Titania Tetra*	Isaac Tettares · Jeannemary Chatur
Fifth	Koniortos Court · “Heart of the Emperor, Watchers over the River”	Brown and gold*	Spirit magic; speaking to the dead	Augustine the First · Alfred Quinque*	Lady Abigail Pent · Magnus Quinn
Sixth	The Library · “The Emperor’s Reason, the Master Wardens”	Grey (and silver*)	Psychometry; scholarship	Cassiopeia the First · Nigella Shodash*	Palamedes Sextus · Camilla Hect
Seventh	Rhodes · “Joy of the Emperor, the Rose Unblown”	Seafoam green (pale green and silver*)	Preserving the body*; beauty	Cytherea the First · Loveday Heptane*	The Duchess of Rhodes · Protesilaus Ebdoma
Eighth	The White Glass · “Keepers of the Tome, the Forgiving House”	White (and silver*)	Siphoning souls and life	Mercymorn the First · Cristabel Oct*	Silas Octakiseron · Colum Asht
Ninth	Drearburh · “House of the Sewn Tongue, the Black Vestals”	Black; skull face paint	Bone magic: skeletons and constructs	Anastasia · Samael Novenary* (never a full Lyctor)	Harrowhark Nonagesimus · Gideon Nav

Continuity notes

This page states nothing beyond the setting; the deaths, the body-swaps and the identities the books reveal are kept for the book pages.
At the start of Gideon the Ninth: Gideon Nav (18) is indentured to the Ninth and about to try her eighty-seventh escape; Harrowhark (17) is the Ninth’s heir; the Emperor is far away; the Lyctors are legend.
Alecto the Ninth, the fourth and final book, is announced with no date (October 2026).

Reading order

Publication order is the reading order: Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth, Nona the Ninth; each picks up where the last stops.
The short fiction slots in around them: “The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex” is set before Gideon but reads best after it, since it is told after Palamedes is gone; “As Yet Unsent” and “Blood of Eden Memorandum for Record” between Harrow and Nona; the one-act play “The Unwanted Guest”, set during Nona, after it. The stories page has them.

Notes

Asterisks in the table mark what comes from the Locked Tomb fan wiki rather than the books’ own text. The books confirm the Ninth’s black and skull paint, the Sixth’s grey, the Fourth’s navy, the Second’s scarlet-and-white uniforms, the Eighth’s white robes, the Seventh heir’s seafoam frills and the First’s pearl “Canaanite white”; the Third’s gold and purple, the Fifth’s brown and gold and the Seventh’s House green-and-silver are the wiki’s. The founding-Lyctor pairs and several specialities are likewise the wiki’s reading of the books. The epithets and the heir-and-cavalier pairs come from the Gideon dramatis personae.
Placing the Houses on particular planets of our own Solar System is fan inference from clues; the books do not name them.
The Gideon the Ninth e-book ends with a glossary, in-world Cohort dossiers on every heir and cavalier, and a pronunciation guide (“Judith Deuteros DEW-ter-oss”); which print editions carry all of it varies. The Harrow the Ninth e-book likewise ends with a glossary, the source of the Resurrection Beasts’ definition above, and a pronunciation guide.
Muir on her necromancy: “I have focused very heavily on death and the body rather than the ghost” (r/Fantasy AMA, 2020).

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