UNDER THE CROSIER’S SHADOW

Sleet drives sideways through the gap in the basalt spine above Gallow-Row. It is the kind of cold that finds the seams in your coat and the gaps in your resolve. Above the town, the crosier keeps its vigil — and below it, something has started answering prayers that were never meant to be answered.

Nobody buried the dead properly that winter. That turns out to be the whole problem.

Under the Crosier’s Shadow is a dark fantasy necromancy progression: power drawn from the dead, owed to the dead, and collected with interest. The progression is real. So is the bill.

It runs on machinery — literally, in the case of the broken ribs, and institutionally in the case of everything else. There is a scholar unearthed from an urn, ninety-four skulls and a broken dray-wheel, footprints in the salt-grass, a stage-managed ambush, and the topology of a scriptorium that turns out to matter a great deal. Cold porridge and a cloister reliquary. Night runs, mouldy tax ledgers, blacksmith hammers, gold marrow siphoned out of an alley. A scaffold plunge, a missing officer, nomad whistles over the rampart, sewer tunnels, salt-boiler carts. A mill raid, a granary riot, sun-refinement arrows in the dark, a south wall breach and a feast of vultures.

The magic system is the reason to read this one. Necromancy here is not a costume — it is an economy with an exchange rate, a collection schedule, and a set of creditors who are extremely patient and eventually show up. Every gain is a debt. The protagonist gets stronger in exact proportion to what he owes.

For readers who like necromancy written as a system with costs rather than a wardrobe, ecclesiastical intrigue, and progression where the price is always visible.