5 stars
First Sentence: In the myriadic year of our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.
Thoughts: I found this book in the fantasy section because it’s about necromancers, but it’s not really fantasy. The necromancers live in space so it’s also science fiction. It’s also a murder mystery because necromancers keep dying. It’s a book of many genres, all of them awesome.
Gideon lives in Drearburh, the seat of the Ninth House of the Necromantic God. She doesn’t want to be there. She’s not really one of the Ninth, anyway; her mother had fallen onto the planet from the Eighth House and died after giving birth. Then she was boiled and resurrected as a skeleton because the Ninth House is the house of bone magic. They need lots of skeleton servants because the house is dying off. There are only two people left under the age of thirty-five: Gideon and the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark, the current Ninth necromancer.
Harrow gets an invitation to Canaan House to join the Lyctor tryouts. The God-Emperor’s Lyctors have been dying off and He needs to replenish the ranks. All the necromantic scions of the other seven houses* come to try out. But not alone. Each necromancer needs a cavalier for reasons that are explained by a single word: Tradition!
There’s also another reason, but they don’t figure that out until the end.
Ortus, the Ninth House cavalier, is a spineless little mama’s boy and he doesn’t want to go to Canaan House. He runs off with his mom back to her old House and promptly gets blown up. So Harrow picks the only other person who a) can handle a sword and b) isn’t decrepit: Gideon. She isn’t thrilled about it, but since Harrow promises Gideon that she’ll allow her to join the Cohort when all this is over, she goes along with it.
Gideon and Harrow have been getting on each others’ nerves since childhood, so Gideon’s not too upset when Harrow ditches her the very first day to explore Canaan House alone. She’s left instructions for her cavalier, though: remember to paint your face like a skull in the approved Ninth House way and don’t talk to anyone. Gideon does this and finds out it’s a great way to find out more about the other necromancers and their cavaliers than she would have otherwise.
Most of them are insufferable. Magnus, the Fifth House cavalier is all right, and the Seventh House necromancer, Dulcinea, is really, really hot, so she spends most of her time with then until Harrow returns and needs Gideon to go down to the basement with her. She’s found something in one of the labs that she needs another pair of eyes to check. It’s a necromantic puzzle and the labs are full of them. Together Gideon and Harrow work through the puzzles, collecting a new key at the end of each one. But there’s only a limited number of keys to go around and some of the other Houses have collected the others.
And then they find the Fifth House necromancer and cavalier dead at the bottom of a staircase. A staircase they were pushed down. Now they have a killer in their midst.
To solve the mystery and the puzzles, the remaining Houses are going to have to share their keys, but not without a lot of arguing first. In the midst of all this folderol, Harrow and Gideon finally tell each other the truth about their childhoods and let go of a lot of the baggage they’ve been carrying around.
It’s a weird story and a wild ride. Gideon has a great sense of humor and there’s a lot of cool necromancy being thrown around. I agree with Warren Ellis, author of the excellent Transmetropolitan series. His blurb on the back cover said that Muir is totally insane. Coming from him, that’s the highest praise and totally deserved.
*The First House is the Emperor and his Lyctors.
The Eclectic Reviewer 