A fantasy novel with a House cycle, a main character hitman, and resurrection element

I read this book over 15 years ago, I think it's part of a long series I didn't read. The main character is an assassin, but killing people only really works permanently on the poor since you can pay mages for resurrection. Some other character assassinates someone with a blade that steals/destroys souls which the main character finds very dark because you don't get an afterlife.

There are a bunch of houses, there's some kind of voodoo cycle that causes the most powerful current house to fall out of favor and the next house in the cycle to reign supreme for another few hundred years. The main character's house specializes in subterfuge but is not especially powerful.

I thought the book was called something like "House of J" but google hasn't really liked any my search queries for the last 20 minutes.

Edit: SOLVED SOLVED SOLVED thanks /u/raevnos/