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You felt the dead in some onboard morgue—ten bundles of discrete dead, of thanergy with the rot of thalergy arrested, snap-frozen. The stillness of this thanergy was profound: not even a body in ice was so still.

Harrow the Ninth - Act One, Chapter Two

Sweat came to the centres of your palms totally unbidden. A trickle of blood started down your leg, and you stopped it in midflow, dried it to flakes on your skin, and clotted the breach. Such an act took no effort now.

Harrow the Ninth - Act One, Chapter Two

As Gideon sized up the best angle to join the fray, a bleached, skeletal hand emerged from behind Cytherea and grabbed her face. Another hand gripped her sword-arm at the wrist. Over Gideon’s shoulder, the skeleton in the fountain began to stir. Harrowhark stood at the top of the stairs, hands full of white particles, her skull-painted face as hard and merciless as morning: she flung them out before her like she was sowing a field. From each grain of bone a perfectly formed skeleton arose, a huge angular mass jostling and crowding on the stairs, and they poured out in single formation to rush the Lyctor one by one. She went under in a sea of bone.

Gideon the Ninth - Act Four, Chapter Thirty-Six

Harrowhark watched Crux get older, and older and older, and tried all the tricks in her box to keep him upright—there was terrible plaque in his arteries, and he pretended that he did not notice her scraping them.

Harrow the Ninth - Act One, Chapter Three

You were close enough to the crates stacked up by the door now to see that they had been placed against the wall hastily, and somewhat ajar. You wobbled to your feet and pushed them down in a domino cascade of clanging plex.

Behind the boxes were hundreds of thick nail fragments, like the broken horns of some weird animal, scattered on the floor and embedded in the wall. Some of them were brown with dried blood. Long, ragged missiles of keratin were, at some points, finger-deep in the panelling. You crawled back to the cot where the Body laid you down on the sheets, placed the heinous sword within your arms, added the letters to this pile, and gave you the go-ahead to fall unconscious.

Harrow the Ninth - Act One, Chapter Four

You did not wake up having passed into the thanergetic space that was the sole province of the dead, and the necromantic saints who fought the dead; you woke up in the corridor outside your rooms, on your side and broiling, gasping for air, soaked right through with sweat—your own—and blood—your own; the blade of your rapier leered through your stomach, punctured through from behind. The wound was not a hallucination or a dream: the blood was wet, and the pain was terrible. Your vision was already curling up black at the edges as you tried to close the rent—tried to sew your viscera shut, cauterize the veins, stabilize the organs whimpering into shutdown—but you were far too gone already. Even if you had wanted it, the imminent death letter would not be yours to read. All you could do was lie gasping in a pool of your own fluids, too powerful to die quickly, too weak to save yourself. You were only half a Lyctor, and half a Lyctor was worse than not a Lyctor at all.

Harrow the Ninth - Prologue

Gideon the Ninth charged. Cytherea went straight for her heart, no foreplay, but this was a Gideon who had trained with a double-handed sword since before she could even hold the damn thing. This was a Gideon who had lived her entire life behind the hilt of a two-hander. No more playing around with dodging and ducking and moving away—it was her, her sword, and all of the power and strength and speed that Aiglamene had been able to realise in her.
She met Cytherea’s water-smooth thrust to her heart with an upward cut that flung the Lyctor’s rapier’s point skyward, and ought to have knocked it clean out of her hand. She stopped thinking about the pain in her knee and went back to being the Gideon Nav who never left Drearburh, who fought like it was her only ticket off-world. The Lyctor danced out and in again, close quarters, trying to slide her sword under and around Gideon’s own. Gideon knocked the thing to the ground, the rapier scraping the flagstones with an awful screech. Cytherea retreated, prettily, and Gideon smashed her guard and followed through with a huge, perfect overhand cut.

Gideon the Ninth - Act Four, Chapter Thirty-Six