The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

In this novel, Paul Formain is a mining engineer who has an accident that tears off his left arm. Although he has regeneration treatments, the arm does not grow back. He is told that the problem is purely psychological, so he consults a therapist, but only learns something that he already knows: he is unusually resistant to hypnosis.

Taking another approach to the problem, Paul tries the Chantry Guild, an organization created by Walter Blunt after being the only survivor of a hunting party caught by a freak early-winter blizzard. While the others died of exposure, Walter walked out to shelter wearing only the lightest of hunting clothes and arrived warm and rested. Chantry Guild literature claimed successful regrowth of missing limbs even in the treatment of resistant individuals. Paul meets with Jason Warren, the Guild Secretary, and is provisionally accepted in the Guild. He finds the training to be weird, but effective, and becomes a Necromancer.

This novel shows Paul developing certain skills in the Alternate Laws, but otherwise seems to lack any forward movement. The reason for his passivity is implied by the continued concern over a sailing episode five years before. Paul had been caught in a small sailboat by a severe storm and nearly died of exposure, much as Blunt had come close to death. Paul has a continuing vision of dying in that boat. At the end of the book, Paul visits a body wrapped in chains far below the surface of the ocean near the location where he had been rescued; this scene will be shown again in other stories in this series.