“Two is for discipline, heedless of trial;

Three for the gleam of a jewel or a smile;

Four for fidelity, facing ahead;

Five for tradition and debts to the dead;

Six for the truth over solace in lies;

Seven for beauty that blossoms and dies;

Eight for salvation no matter the cost;

Nine for the Tomb, and all that was lost.”

The novel’s epigraph offers insight into the nature of the Houses and the characters present in Canaan House. Each Lyctor contributed certain portions to the Lyctor megatheorem with a House subsequently created around their contribution. The epigraph also foreshadows the characters’ personalities and behavior. The Third distracts with charisma and royal airs. The Seventh is afflicted with terminal diseases, and so forth for the other Houses.

“No one in the Ninth House understood what cruelty was, not really, none of them but the Reverend Daughter; none of them understood brutality.”

Gideon sees Harrow turning her self-loathing out onto the world. As the perfect necromancer carrying 200 dead souls, she’s capable of brutalizing in a way that others would struggle with. Before the two reconcile, Gideon views Harrow as a terrifying oppressor.

“Visible even up here were the floating chains of squares and rectangles and oblongs, smudging the blue with grey and green, brown and black: the tumbled-down cities and temples of a House both long dead and unkillable. A sleeping throne.”

Canaan House is characterized as an empty chair awaiting somebody. It is caught in an eternal stasis, similar to the immortality of the Emperor and Lyctors. Gideon’s feelings and description of Canaan House will steadily become more sinister as the plot progresses.