Now available for pre-order: The Blacksmith’s Circus Series Combined Volumes 1 & 2 edition
Celebrating 10 years since the publication of The Automation, comes a combined edition — married until their third arrives.
Cover Reveal Teaser
Quote from ‘All the Living and the Dead’
In the Egyptian mummification process, all organs were removed and placed in jars, bar the heart. The heart – considered to be the centre of the person’s self, their whole being, their intelligence, their soul – was left in place to be judged by the gods. In the underworld, it was weighed against a feather to see if the person had lived a virtuous life. If it did not make the scales tip, the person was granted entry to the afterlife. If the heart proved heavier than the feather, the goddess Ammit – part lion, part hippopotamus, with the head and teeth of a crocodile – would eat it.
In the mortuary, on the lower ground floor of St Thomas’ Hospital, on the South Bank of the Thames, a heart is placed on scales and the result shouted across the room to be recorded on a whiteboard in fading pen. Its weight is determined to be healthy or unhealthy 0 here you are judged only on what is known and seen by naked eye or microscope. It is not for these people to rule on how you lived, but how you died, on the balance of probability.
– Hayley Campbell, All The Living And The Dead