The first sentence, part 2: Pariah

I’ve been up all night, while the cat’s still fresh.

I’ve already described how the first sentence of my novel Gifted was suggested to me by my old pal Chris Bidmead. Having stuck with that line through thick and thin, it was inevitable that I’d think consciously about how the sequel, Pariah, should kick off.

I figured that another dead animal might be appropriate. Frank, my sorcerer protagonist, would be trying to create a search elemental, a magical entity designed to go out and find somebody for him. The magical metaphor demanded that it should be an animal with a powerful sense of smell. I considered some sort of dog, or maybe a bear. But finally I went with:

I’ve said it before so I’ll say it again: there’s a lot I can do with a dead shark.

So early drafts of Pariah began with Frank trying to buy a shark. But a few revisions down the line, I decided that the story needed a new first chapter, preceding the existing one. It would be a bit like the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark: we’d get dropped in with Frank while he’s on the run from the Knights of St Cyprian, the Society of Sorcerers’ enforcers. So, new first sentence:

Let’s start with a chase and see how we go on from there…

The ensuing chapter seemed like fun – to me, at least – with Frank ducking and dodging his pursuers. But as the rest of the book developed through subsequent redrafts, this beginning created problems of its own. I decided to try another first chapter. And, scratching my head for a good first sentence, I finally found it, there for the taking in an existing scene, about ninety pages into the book.

Frank and his pal Charlie are reminiscing about a failed experiment at the institute where they both studied sorcery:

About eighty years back, there was this sorcerer, Walter Skinner. Got a First at Saint Cyprian’s, so the grown-ups let him do what I wanted to do, but wasn’t allowed to: theoretical thaumaturgy. He spent fifteen years trying to come up with an experiment to demonstrate what happens when you invoke a demon and set it contradictory tasks. By the time he’d got it all worked out, of course, he was way post-peak and couldn’t do it himself; so he got one of his students to take a crack at it.
It all ended in tears, obviously. There’s an old saying: once there’s a demon in the room, all bets are off.
‘Did you ever read the invocation?’ I say. ‘Fabulous work—I read it once. Couldn’t really follow all the symbols, you know, but amazing stuff!’
Charlie chuckles. ‘Except it didn’t work.’
The demon was given two tasks, finding two different items of treasure—gold coins—that Skinner had got his assistants to bury at exactly the same moment in two different places, equal distances away. The ritual was structured so that the demon couldn’t do anything until the student pronounced a single, final name of God. And the question was: would the demon prioritise one task over the other, would he find some way to carry both out at the same time… or would he just go into a sulk?
The answer was: none of the above. The demon yelled and screamed and howled for an hour or so, then broke into four quarters and ate Skinner, the assistants and the student.
‘Anyway.’ Charlie gives me a meaningful look. ‘That’s what happens to smartarses.’

That scene didn’t make it into the final draft of Pariah, but a sentence from the second paragraph found its way to the beginning of the first chapter where it introduces what will turn out, during the course of the story, to be an important truth:

Any sorcerer will tell you: once there’s a demon in the room, all bets are off.
Funnily enough, though, the demons aren’t the problem. So long as you say the right words, make the right smells and remember to duck in the right places, it’s easy enough to avoid getting mashed up.
It’s the people you’ve got to watch out for.

---

Pariah was published by Corgi on 4th February 2016