#sample chapters

Chapters One & Two

The Emperor needs necromancers.

The Ninth Necromancer needs a swordswoman.

Gideon has a sword, some dirty magazines, and no more time for undead bullshit.

(Author’s notes: total lies. Gideon ends up with so much time for undead bullshit. We’re not saying that this is how she wanted the book to go, but there it is.)

Chapter Three

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, a hardworking girl looking after her parents’ interests, cunningly tricked the boorish Gideon into a battle Gideon might have easily won had she only possessed forethought, virtue, or a spade. Gideon is handily beaten through the dark and beautiful necromancy of the bone, which she does not appreciate, and we are delighted by the moral.

Chapter Four

Harrowhark adds religious piety to her growing list of virtues. Gideon is poorly behaved during a nice Locked Tomb mass wherein we learn that the Necrolord Prime, holy Emperor of the Reignited Sun, is offering all scions of the Nine Houses the chance to become his powerful Lyctors. Gideon, to whom this is all pearls before swine, is shown yet again the error of her ways.

Chapter Five

Now that Ortus Nigenad is out of the picture, Harrowhark condescends to offer Gideon his job, the honour of which she fails to recognise. Will Gideon choose to aid her Lady in becoming a necromantic saint, putting aside her crude broadsword for the elegant rapier, or will she continue to issue poor quality one-liners to her betters? (The answer, alas, was both.)

Chapter Six

Harrowhark graciously shared correspondence from the King of Dead Kings with Gideon, detailing aspects of the holy sacrament they are about to partake of in the First House. Gideon continues to fail at perfectly reasonable things like painting herself in vestal skull paint and showing fealty to her Reverend Daughter, who is too well-bred to take offense.

Chapter Seven

Gideon has trained with the rapier and become adequate. In a very affecting goodbye, Harrowhark blesses her necromantic congregation of ageing faithful, and leaves the sacred darkness of the Locked Tomb, where lies that which must remain buried behind the rock that must not be moved.

Chapter Eight

Sunday after Ascension

By Canon Paddick (the ‘Army with banners’ sermon):

‘We are to be doers of the word, and not hearers only.

‘We yearly beat the parish bounds. We must daily and hourly beat the bounds of, survey and map out, and repair and restore, the bounds of the heart.

‘It behoves us that we pause, every so often, and remind ourselves who we are. It behoves us that we pause from time to time and query ourselves, asking, Who are we?

‘In these parishes, there is an answer to hand.

‘We are Anglican. We are a part of the Church of England; and we know that, although one or another error may for a time prevail, we must not surrender; we must not allow ourselves to be extruded; we mustn’t walk away; and we must remain to bear faithful witness.

‘But – faithful witness to what?

‘Error has prevailed for a time in the past. It prevailed – I apologise that what I am compelled to say is likely to offend our Roman Catholic brethren – in the church of Rome; to such an extent that such men as Thomas More were all afire to reform it from within. It prevailed all the same, such that – despite the indignities and shabby politics of the immediate cause – the ultimate cause of the breach between the church in England, which became the Church of England, was the unwillingness of the Roman communion to reform – and to let itself be reformed.

‘Error prevailed for long periods within the Church of England as well: and here I apologise in advance to our brothers and sisters of the Nonconformist traditions, who I fear must be offended by what I must say. The shabby indignity of politics led to a settlement which attempted to please everyone – save God. For much of the Tudor period, and for no small part of the reign of the first James, Calvinism, yoked uneasily with the prayer-book and the sacraments, prevailed, with its doctrines of predestination and damnation – and, less injuriously although quite as distastefully, its radical and hate-driven rejection of any tradition, any ceremony, and every sacrament that could be thought by the most radical Calvinist to have had any connection with the past. Wherever you find men bitter against the past and full of a furious and unreasoning, an indiscriminate and violent, rejection of it, making a rebellion against the past which rebellion wishes to rewrite that past and consign what cannot be rewritten to oblivion, to Orwell’s “Memory Hole”, you are in the presence of evil. There have always been such men, for there has always been the temptation to such evil; in some generations they may be called Puritans; in others, National Socialists or Communists: but they are all of the same evil disposition and disposed to the same evil and wickedness.

‘Error prevailed during the long slumber of the Church under the last Stuarts – Mary and Anne – and the first Georges, when Anglicanism became a mere social obligation and a governmental department, Erastian, truckling, boot-licking, slovenly, purblind, concerned only with loyalties to a shabby political settlement and wholly forgetful of, ignorant of, the high and holy calling of the Church as the Church. There was neither holiness nor beauty; there was no thought of the beauty of holiness; there was no evangelism – indeed, there was a great contentment with the repudiation of evangelism: what decent, sober churchman wished to associate of a Sunday with tinkers and labourers and washerwomen? – and no pastoral care; there was only place and preferment and profit, and political posturing and party loyalty.

‘At any of those periods, one might have looked at the Church, in, and the Church, after, of, England, and seen no hope; one without the eye of faith might well have expected error and national apostasy to prevail forever, cemented and founded sure, eternally; one might hardly have been able to imagine that the Church had not finally, fatally, and forever ceased to be a Church, and become, simply … a quango.

‘Even in more recent times, there has been error sitting in high places and seemingly enthroned forever: equally when the Church of England was “the Conservative Party at prayer”, and when it became instead the social outreach wing and wholly-owned subsidiary of New Labour and the Islington and Notting Hill Cameroons and other bien-pensant subscribers to the Guardian and its petty, secular orthodoxies. But a Church is a house of prayer for all people; and our loyalties are not to any party or view or ideology on earth: our constituency is the City of God.

‘And the Church – I again apologise for giving offence to friends and colleagues – certainly might well appear to mortal eyes now to be sunk finally and irrecoverably in a swamp of mere entropy, a final dissolution, wholly penetrated by the world and the flesh, by political fashion and passing fads, to the great delight of the Devil.

‘We. Are. Not.

‘Evil is not founded now upon eternal foundations. The Gates of Hell shall not prevail. We are not sunk into final dissolution.

‘Hooker attests that we are not and have never been.

‘Andrewes and Donne and Laud, Ken and Taylor, the Caroline divines and their successors, proclaim that we are not lost and never shall be.

‘The Non-Jurors, who would not sell their consciences, bear witness.

‘The Scottish Episcopal Church, disestablished by William of Orange and replaced in national church polity by the Calvinists of the Scots Kirk who were more biddable in the shabbiness of domestic, mortal politics – that Church, by its disestablishment and the reasons of that disestablishment – and by its endurance and persistence all the same –, proves that we are not and never can be.

‘The Great Tew Circle and the community of Little Gidding show by shining example that we aren’t and shan’t be.

‘The Wesleys, that linchpin and link between the Caroline divines and the Tractarians of the Catholic Revival, standing shoulder to shoulder – a city at unity in itself – with the Church Army and renewed Evangelism, shout from the rooftops bold, joyous defiance of the hopeless resignation which says we are dissolved.

‘Keble and Pusey – and Betjeman and Eliot and Lewis in the pews, antiphonically – chant in measure that we are not and in the nature of things cannot be defeated; for we are established by acts eternal and not parliamentary, and by the authority of a sovereign far greater than any mortal and earthly monarch, even our beloved Queen. For there is another country....

‘In every church, as in every community of mortal men: and because in every community of mortal men; and in every community because in every individual heart: there is a great deal of dull, inert, heavy, and unbaked dough. We are – because we are called to be, and because, God having called us, he gives us Grace to be – the salt and the leaven to make that dough rise and be baked into the daily staff and support of life, the bread that may be consecrated to become his body: for the Church and the Host at Mass are one and the same in this, that of them only has God said the same thing: This is my body.

‘Broken? Oh, yes. That is the point of the sacrifice.

‘So who are we? We are the Church of England, quiet in our ways, redolent of tea and cakes, yet terrible as an army with banners.

‘Who are we? We are – not we alone, and not to the exclusion even of our erring brothers – the Church of England.

‘We are Reformed – and ever reforming; beginning with the daily reformation of our own hearts, through confession and absolution and the Grace that comes to us through the sacraments; seeking ever to scrape the barnacles off the boat, grow again though they may, for that is the only true reformation.

‘We are Catholic: for we, even when separated by our own failures as much as when sundered by the failings and the failures of others to reform, are part of the universal, the catholic, Church of God.

‘We are Arminian and Wesleyan – and John Wesley lived and died, as he himself on his deathbed insisted, a priest of the Church of England, and a High Churchman at that – because we know that we are called to be the sons and daughters of God by adoption, by him given the Grace to use – or abuse – our wills, freely, in accepting and in rejecting him and the call of his Grace; and we know that predestined damnation is not our lot nor the lot of any of those whom he created to know and to love and to serve him. All that believe in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. All that travail and are heavy laden will he refresh. He has made a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.

‘We know that we are, as men and women, far gone from original righteousness – each and every one of us, however conventionally good we appear – yet that none of us is, in his right and healthy mind, utterly depraved; and for those who are, there are special causes that are the province of healing, not of predestined reprobation: such causes as injury and disease. And we believe in salvation by faith – and also that faith without works is dead.

‘We are English: we are the heirs of a particular strand of liturgy and spirituality that, by God’s providence and Grace, happened to arise in England, yet which is open to all. We are the English Church, the Church in and of England, but we are not the Church only of the English.

‘We are Protestant in that we testify for, we bear witness to, we are on the “pro” side rather than the “contra” in testifying for and affirming, certain principles for which we have authority in the Scriptures and in the early Fathers and Doctors and Councils of Catholic Christianity, and which commend themselves to right reason.

‘We are sinners saved by Grace and called to convey and to transmit that Grace to our fellow sinners, to be channels of Grace to them as they are to us, affirming human worth and dignity and testifying that, through Grace, we may all of us be justified and cleansed, accepting of our weakness and that of all men, rejoicing in Grace and the strength God gives the weak and the sinful and the broken who turn to him and are saved; and never compromising with sin – beginning with our own – even as we accept and affirm the worth of our fellow sinners and ourselves, despite our sins and theirs, because God gave all of us this equal worth … and because without him and his Grace we are all, however quiet or conventional or fashionable our sins may seem to the world, we are all – all – equally unworthy.

‘We are scholastic, Thomistic, and the heirs of Richard Hooker; and our faith may be beautified by ceremonies which partake of the beauty of holiness, but is not founded in social status or habit or æsthetic taste or liturgical preference, but upon the sacraments, upon Christ and him crucified and him resurrected and ascended, upon the Incarnation and the Passion and the Atonement: upon God’s great gifts of the will which he made free; upon God’s great gifts of revelation, tradition, and redeemed reason.

‘We are broken because we are the body of Christ, which was broken for us upon a cross and is broken for us in the Host at every Mass, all for our salvation.

‘We are militant because until death shall second us to the Church Triumphant and at rest, in God’s immediate presence, we are called to serve in arms in the Church Militant, combating all evil and error without hatred of those its victims whom we are called to rescue as Christ rescued us.

‘We are a minority because God always calls a few, a happy few, a band of brothers, to renew, as he must ever renew, his people and their faith.

‘We shall prevail because if God be for us, who can be against us? If that from which we must in conscience dissent be not of God, it cannot last: nor shall it.

‘We are tradition’s keepers because we have inherited through no virtue of our own the traditions of the Church, which are inspired by Grace through the Holy Ghost; and having inherited it, as stewards, it is our plain duty to preserve and enhance and pass on that inheritance to those who shall come after us.

‘We are orthodox because orthodoxy is simply what God requires of his Church, that it follow his will, that it apply right reason to his revelation, and that it keep the faith he has given it; that it do what he has always and unchangingly, he the Eternal, commanded. God may upon occasion make it very clear to the Church, “Behold, I will do a new thing”: yet if and when he does so, it is a thing in consonance with his commandments of old, making a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. For Our Lord is “the same yesterday, and today, and for ever”.

‘We are ceremonial in worship because God is owed, deserves, our love for his incomprehensible love; he who created all things requires nothing of us, in that all which we are and have is by rights his who gave it, and we can no more repay him than a child can repay a parent with the pocket-money which that parent gave her; yet he who created all things requires of us … “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything”. Love offers care and ceremony and dignity to the one who first loved us.

‘We are called. We are chosen. We are the Church of England. And were we tomorrow to be turned upon and turned out for a time, expelled and exiled and excommunicated from the Church of England, or were it, even the Church by law established, as a whole disestablished, proscribed, persecuted, we should remain what we are, secure in the knowledge that God’s strength supplies our weakness, his Grace amends our faithlessness and failure, his foundation – our one foundation, Jesus Christ our Lord – secures our standing; and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against us so that we are with him, as they cannot withstand him and were cast down by him through his crucifixion, death, resurrection, and ascension. We shall prevail not because it is we who can prevail, but rather because he has prevailed. The strife is already over; the battle, already won.

‘It matters not for a time if one or another party seems to be atop the heap within the Church; for God at the last governs, corrects, amends, prevails, and sets all things to rights. Our job is to stick to our posts.

‘We are called. We are chosen. We are the Church of England.