That evening, it was funny to see Harrow fuss. She put on her best and most senescent Ninth robes, and became a skinny black stick swallowed by night-coloured layers of Locked Tomb lace. She fiddled with long earrings of bone in front of the mirror and repainted her face twice. Gideon realised with no small amount of amusement and curiosity that Harrowhark was very frightened. She got more snappish as the evening wore on, and moved from languid postures of affected boredom with a book to a tense, rolled-up curl with hunched shoulders and knees. Harrow kept staring at the clock and wanted to go a full twenty minutes early. Gideon had just thrown on a clean robe and her tinted glasses, and noted that the necromancer was too tetchy even to veto those.

Why on earth was she scared? She had headed up function after dreary, overembroidered Ninth function, ornate in its rules and strict in its regulations, since she was a kid. Now she was all jitters. Maybe it was about being denied her dark necromantic needs down past the access hatch. In any case, both she and Harrowhark turned up, gorgeously gowned in their Locked Tomb vestments, painted like living skulls, looking like douchebags. Harrow clinked when she walked with the sheer multiplicity of bonely accoutrement.

“You came!” said Magnus Quinn when he saw them; he was too well bred to double-take at two horrible examples of Drearburh clergy on the loose. “I’m so pleased you’re wearing your, ah, glad rags; I was convinced I’d be the only one dressed up, and would have to sit resplendently among you all, feeling a bit of an idiot. Reverend Daughter,” he said, and he bowed very deeply to Harrow. “Thank you for coming.”

He himself was immensely trim in a pale brown, long-coated suit that had probably cost more than the Ninth House had in its coffers. The Ninth was high on ancient, shitty treasures but low on liquid assets. In a lower and chillier voice than Harrow usually ever affected, she said: “Blessings on the cavalier of the Fifth. Congratulations on the eleventh year of your espousal.”

Espousal. But Magnus said, “Indeed! Yes! Thank you! It was actually yesterday. By happy accident I remembered and Abigail forgot, so in her resulting angst she wanted to make me dinner. I suggested we all benefit. Come in, please—let me introduce you.”

The dining room off the atrium looked as it ever did, but with certain festive additions. The napkins had all been folded very carefully and some mildly yellowing tablecloth had come out of deep storage. There were correctly articulated place cards by each bright white plate. They were both led to the little kitchen and introduced to the slightly stressed Fifth necromancer whom Gideon had only ever seen in passing: she proved to have more or less the same easy, unaffected manner as Magnus, the type you only got when you came from a house like the Fifth. She looked Gideon very straight in the eye and shook her hand very firmly. Unlike Magnus, she also had the manner some necromancers and librarians developed when they had been working on dead spells for the last fifteen years and no longer worried too much about the living: her stare was far too intense. But she was wearing an apron and it was hard to feel intimidated by her. Her very correct pleasantries with a po-faced Harrow were interrupted with the appearance in the doorway of the wretched teens, who were wearing around a million earrings each. The Ninth moved back to the hall.

It was a strange evening. Harrow nearly vibrated with tension. Teacher, perennially pleased to see them for no reason Gideon ever knew, cornered them immediately. He and the other priests were there already and each had a birthday expression of glee: for his part, Teacher was twinkling with a magnitude usually reserved for dying stars.

“What do you think of Lady Abigail?” he said. “They do say she’s an extraordinarily clever necromancer—not so much in your line, Reverend Daughter, but a gifted summoner and spirit-talker. I have fielded many questions from her about Canaan House. I hope she and Magnus the Fifth are good cooks! We First have all hyped the occasion, I’m afraid, but priests who live plainly must get excited over food. Of course, the sombre Ninth must be similar.”

The sombre Ninth, in the form of its adept, said: “We prefer to live simply.”

“Of course, of course,” said Teacher, whose attention had already wandered to trashy gossip. His bright blue eyes had searched the room for other objects of interest, and finding them, leaned in confidingly. “Yes, and there’s young Jeannemary the Fourth and Isaac Tettares. Looking very pretty, the both of them. Isaac looks as though he has been studying too much.” (Isaac, the necromancer teen with brushed-up hair bleached orange, looked more like he was suffering an abundance of pituitary gland.) “Naturally he is Pent’s protégé. I hear the Fifth takes special pains with the Fourth … hegemonic pains, some may say. It must be difficult when they are both so young. But they all seem to get on well…”

“How do you know?”

“Reverend Daughter,” the priest said, smiling, “you miss out on important things spending all your time so usefully down in the dark. Now, Gideon the Ninth—she could tell you a great deal if she were not bound to her admirable vow of silence. Your penitence shames me.”

At this, Teacher gave Gideon a roguish wink, which was also the worst.

Movement in the doorway. The Third and Sixth Houses had arrived all at once, the drab moth of Palamedes making the golden butterfly of Coronabeth Tridentarius all the more aureate and fair. They were sizing each other up like prize fighters. Teacher said, “Now, the main event!”

It turned out that the Fifth’s idea of a rollicking good time was a seating arrangement. This realisation caused Harrow’s carefully controlled mask to take on a distinct veer to the tragic. They were separated, and Gideon found herself elbow to elbow between Palamedes and the dreadful teen cavalier of the Fourth, who looked as though she regretted everything that had ever led up to this moment. Dulcinea, opposite, kissed her hand to Gideon twice before Gideon had even sat down.

At least Harrow wasn’t faring any better. She had been placed at the other end of the table diagonal to the mayonnaise uncle, who looked even more appalled than Jeannemary the Fourth. Opposite was Ianthe and to the other diagonal was Protesilaus, completing one of the worst tableaus in history; Naberius Tern was to Harrow’s left and was carrying on some long communication with Ianthe conducted entirely in arch eyebrow quirks. As Harrow smouldered with hatred, Gideon began to enjoy herself.

Magnus clinked his spoon against his water glass. The conversation, which was terminal to start with, convulsed to a halt.

“Before we begin,” he said, “a short speech.”

The three priests looked as though they had never wanted anything so much in their lives as a short speech. One of the teens, slumped out of Magnus’s sight, mimed putting their neck in a noose.

“I thought I’d, er,” he began, “say a few words to bring us all together. This must be the first time in—a very long time that the Houses have been together like this. We were reborn together but remain so remote. So I thought I’d point out our similarities, rather than our differences.

“What do Marta the Second, Naberius the Third, Jeannemary the Fourth, Magnus the Fifth, Camilla the Sixth, Protesilaus the Seventh, Colum the Eighth, and Gideon the Ninth all have in common?”

You could have heard a hair flutter to the floor. Everyone stared, poker-faced, in the thick ensuing silence.