The parish runs on names. Licensed witches buy their craft by selling a piece of themselves to the Dark, and every working after that is paid quietly out of the hole where the piece used to be. The arithmetic never balances, and nobody notices, because nobody remembers well enough to check.

Pippa Corder remembers everything. On the morning of her own Selling she finds her name on the proctors' board with a ruled black line where her price should be, inked rather than pencilled, by someone who wanted no number entered there later. Five books that descend one floor at a time, through corridors of black glass and a gallery of vanished saints whose frames are chained shut, to a final alchemy that drains a soul one named thing at a time: fear, grief, mercy, shame, hunger, memory, love.