In conversation, she claims that her cavalier was Ortus, not Gideon Nav. Harrow, healing from her traumatic ascent to Lyctorhood on the flagship Erebos, begins to learn the truth of responsibilities of a Lyctor: the Emperor explains that with the resurrection of the planets came the creation of the Resurrection Beasts, who now hunt him and his Lyctors and that no Lyctors may ever return home for fear of luring the Beasts. Harrow reveals to her cavalier that she needs his help to cover up the fact that she is insane. As Harrow and Ortus argue over the propriety of Ortus attending her, Harrow sees a hallucination of the Body in the Locked Tomb in the place of a servant. She instructs him that, though she knows he is no great swordsman, she needs him to take his rightful place as cavalier primary and accompany her to Canaan House. Harrow is thrown back out, impaled, and dying on her own rapier.įourteen months earlier, Harrow appears back on Ninth House with her cavalier, Ortus Nigenad reading a summons from the Emperor calling all the heirs of the Nine Houses to come and study and ascend to the position of Lyctor. The battle begins in earnest, and the Emperor and his Lyctors sink into The River. Ianthe comes to her and speaks of letters, work, and their former cavaliers and begs her to ascend to her full strength, but Harrow dismisses her and sends her away. The Emperor and Ianthe Tridentarius attempt to offer Harrowhark Nonagesimus extra protection to make up for her weakness, but she refuses them. The night before the Emperor's murder, the Mithraeum, the sacred shuttle-home of God and his Lyctors, is facing the final assault of the Seventh Resurrection Beast, called Number Seven. Sealed in the gothic gloom of the Emperor's Mithraeum with three unfriendly teachers, hunted by the mad ghost of a murdered planet, Harrow must confront two unwelcome questions: is somebody trying to kill her? And if they succeeded, would the universe be better off? Plot Prologue

Side-by-side with a detested rival, Harrow must perfect her skills and become an angel of undeath - but her health is failing, her sword makes her nauseous, and even her mind is threatening to betray her. Harrowhark Nonagesimus, last necromancer of the Ninth House, has been drafted by her Emperor to fight an unwinnable war. Nothing is as it seems in the halls of the Emperor, and the fate of the galaxy rests on one woman's shoulders. She arrived with her arts, her wits, and her only friend.Īfter rocking the cosmos with her deathly debut, Tamsyn Muir continues the story of the penumbral Ninth House in Harrow the Ninth, a mind-twisting puzzle box of mystery, murder, magic, and mayhem.

Alecto the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir