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London, 1893. Occult scholar Mathias Grimbly receives an unsigned letter containing a generous retainer and three sentences: there are papyrus scrolls, they require authentication and translation, he will present himself that evening. Standard enough, except that the scrolls are written in a dialect no living person should be able to read. Mathias reads them in a single sitting.
What they describe is not history. It is a warning. And a function.
The scrolls are the documentary record of the Ankharan tradition - three thousand years of practitioners who have been maintaining something the rest of the world has never known requires maintenance: the threshold between the formed world and the Unwritten, the vast and patient condition that existed before existence, the thing that pressed against the membrane from outside with the consistency of something that has been attending to a thin place in the earth since before recorded history. The tradition's succession has failed. The membrane is unguarded. And the interval of maximum pressure, the turning, is coming.
Mathias Grimbly is the conduit. He has been, without his knowledge or consent, fitted to this function since before he was old enough to choose it. The language that opened for him, the language that should have been impossible, is the language he was made to speak. The question the novel asks is not whether he can do what the tradition requires. It is what he chooses to do with the function he did not ask for, and what it costs him, and what it is worth.
What follows takes Mathias from a Whitechapel practitioner's rooms to a secret chamber thirty feet beneath a Scottish country house, from the occult underworld of Victorian London to the threshold of something the Ankharan caretakers have spent three thousand years holding back. It takes him through the truth about his own formation, the lies of people who loved him, the grief of a daughter who cannot stop reaching for her lost father, and the quiet enormous fact of an ancient tradition asking its only available person to become what it requires.
The Ninth Tongue is the first volume of the Grimbly Series, a lavishly researched, intimately rendered supernatural thriller in which the magic is a form of maintenance, the monster is not malevolent, and the hero's most heroic act is simply deciding to show up.
Three books. Eight characters. Two hundred years. One door.
