All three priests sat at the lip of the fountain, holding their teacups unsipped in their hands. Unless they were hiding a bunch more in some cupboard, it seemed terrifically lonely to Gideon. The second was the tottery priest, his frail shoulders bowing as he fretted with his bloodstained belt; the third was mild of face and sported a long salt-and-pepper plait. They might have been a woman and might have been a man and might have been neither. All three wore the same clothes, which gave them the look of white birds on rainbow leashes, but somehow Teacher was the only one of the three who seemed real. He was eager, interested, vital, alive. The penitent calm of his fellows made them seem more like the robed skeletons arrayed at the sides of the room: silent and immovable, with a red speck of light dancing in each socket.

Once everyone was awkwardly perched on the exquisite wrecks of furniture, finishing their tea, clutching their cups with the gaucherie of people who didn’t know where to put them, making zero conversation, salt-and-pepper plait raised their pale voice and said: “Now let us pray for the lord of that which was destroyed, remembering the abundance of his pity, his power, and his love.”

Gideon and Harrowhark were silent during the ensuing chant: “Let the King Undying, ransomer of death, scourge of death, vindicator of death, look upon the Nine Houses and hear their thanks. Let the whole of everywhere entrust themselves to him. Let those across the river pledge beyond the tomb to the adept divine, the first among necromancers. Thanks be to the Ninefold Resurrection. Thanks be to the Lyctor divinely ordained. He is Emperor and he became God: he is God, and he became Emperor.”

Gideon had never heard this one. There was only one prayer on the Ninth. All other services were call-and-speaks or knucklebone orison. Most of the crowd rattled it off as though they’d been saying it from the cradle, but not all. The hulking mass of man-meat, Protesilaus, stared straight ahead without even mouthing the words, his lips as still as the pale Third twin’s. The others joined in without hesitation, though with varying fervour. Once the last word had sunk into silence, Teacher said: “And perhaps the devout of the Locked Tomb will favour us with their intercession?”

Everyone’s heads twisted their way. Gideon froze. It was the Reverend Daughter who maintained complete equanimity as she dropped her cup into Gideon’s hands and, before a sea of faces—some curious, some bored, and one (Dulcinea’s) enthusiastic—Harrow began: “I pray the tomb is shut forever. I pray the rock is never rolled away…”

Gideon had known on some basic level that the religion practised in the dark depths of Drearburh was not quite the religion practised by the other Houses. It was still a shock to the system to have it confirmed. By the expressions on some of the faces—bewildered or blank or long-suffering or, in at least one case, openly hostile—the others hadn’t been confronted with it either. By the time Harrow had finished the three priests looked softly delighted.

“Just as it always was,” sighed the little bent priest in ecstasy, despite the wretched dirge.

“Continuity is a marvellous thing,” said salt-and-pepper plait, proving themself insanely tedious.

Teacher said: “Now I’ll welcome you to Canaan House. Will someone bring me the box?”

The gangling silence focused on a robed skeleton who carried over a small chest made entirely of wood. It was no wider than a book and no deeper than two books stacked on top of each other, estimated Gideon, who thought of all books as being basically the same size. Teacher threw it open with aplomb, and announced: “Marta the Second!”

An intensely dark girl snapped to attention. Her salute was as crisp as her flawless Cohort uniform, and when Teacher beckoned, she marched forward with a gait as starched as her officer’s scarlets and snowy white necktie. As though bestowing a jewel upon her, he gave her a dull iron ring from the box, about as big around as the circle made by a thumb and forefinger. To her credit, she did not gawk or hesitate. She simply took it, saluted, and sat back down.

Teacher called out, “Naberius the Third!” and thus followed a rather tiresome parade of rapier-swinging cavaliers in varying attitudes coming up to receive their mysterious iron circles. Some of them took the Second’s cue in saluting. Others, including the man-hulk Protesilaus, bothered not at all.

Gideon’s tension grew with each name. When at last in this roll-call Teacher said, “Gideon the Ninth,” she ended up disappointed by the banality of the thing. It was not a perfect iron loop, as she had thought, but a twist that overlapped itself. It locked shut by means of a hole bored into one end and a ninety-degree bend at the other, so that you could prise it open simply by fiddling the bend back through the hole. The metal in her hand felt granular, heavy. When she returned to her place she knew Harrow was sweating to snatch it off her, but she clutched it childishly tight.

Nobody asked what it was, which Gideon thought was fairly frigging dumb. She was near to asking herself when Teacher said: “Now the tenets of the First House, and the grief of the King Undying.”

Everyone got very focused again.

“I will not tell you what you already know,” said the little priest. “I seek only to add context. The Lyctors were not born immortal. They were given eternal life, which is not at all the same thing. Sixteen of them came here a myriad ago, eight adepts and the eight who would later be known as the first cavaliers, and it was here that they ascended. Those eight necromancers were first after the Lord of Resurrection; they have spread his assumption across the blackness of space, to those places where others could never reach. Each of them alone is more powerful than nine Cohorts acting as one. But even the divine Lyctors can pass away, despite their power and despite their swords … and they have done so, slowly, over these ten thousand years. The Emperor’s grief has waxed with time. It is only now, in the twilight of the original eight, that he has listened to his last Lyctors, who beg for reinforcement.”

He took his cup of tea and swirled the liquid with a twitch of his wrist. “You have been nominated to attempt the terrible challenge of replacing them,” he said, “and it is not at all a sure thing. If you ascend to Lyctor, or if you try and fail—the Kindly Lord knows what is being asked of you is titanic. You are the honoured heirs and guardians of the eight Houses. Great duties await you. If you do not find yourself a galaxy, it is not so bad to find yourself a star, nor to have the Emperor know that the both of you attempted this great ordeal.

“Or the all of you,” added the little priest brightly, nodding at the twins and their sullen-ass cavalier with a flash of amusement, “as the case may be. Cavaliers, if your adept is found wanting, you have failed! If you are found wanting, your adept has failed! And if one or both is wanting, then we will not ask you to wreck your lives against this impossible task. You will not be forced if you cannot continue onward—through single or mutual failure—or make the decision not to go on.”

He looked searchingly over the assembled faces, somewhat vague, as though seeing them for the first time. Gideon could hear Harrowhark chewing the inside of her cheek, fingers tightly knuckled over her prayer bones.

Teacher said: “This is not a pilgrimage where your safety is assured. You will undergo trials, possibly dangerous ones. You will work hard, you will suffer. I must speak candidly—you may even die … But I see no reason not to hope that I may behold eight new Lyctors by the end of this, joined together with their cavaliers, heir to a joy and power that has sung through ten thousand years.”