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“If you’re going to sit around feeling sorry for yourself, you’ve changed,” she said. And then: “I’m going to come closer. All right?”
You watched with cold apprehension as this resurrection approached. She was not puppeted as your mother and father had been; nor was she a Seventh-style simulacrum. Her thalergy lit up with the pure combustive light of a strong, healthy human being, and the minute deaths throughout her body—bacterial, apoptotic, autophagic—produced a thanergetic embroidery you could see as easily as her breath heaving within her chest. You startled badly when she dropped to her haunches before you and looked you over coolly; looked into your left ear, then your right, peered into your eyes, glanced up your nose.
“Nice intercranial haemorrhage,” she said. “Kills most of us non-Lyctors.”
You said, “Why are you here? Why are you here now? How are you here? This planet orbits the sanctuary of the Emperor, Hect, reachable only by necromantic means, and you are dead.”
“I’m really not,” she said. And, after a pause, in her dry abrupt voice: “I came to find you, Reverend Daughter.”
“You have found me. Tell me for what purpose.”
Camilla took the bag from around her neck. She held it between her hands, and you could see her hesitate; she did not appear to be the hesitating type. Her thumb gently stroked the leather thong closing the drawstring neck—rested there lightly—and then she offered it to you. She silently proffered this shabby little bag, about as big as your two hands cupped together, as if it were a casket filled with jewels. You knew before you touched it what was within. What you did not understand was why.
You opened the bag and removed its contents before her dark and stony gaze. It was not particularly full. You cupped the thing between your palms, and marvelled.
It was a cracked piece of human skull—a ridge of supraorbital bone and a cut-off curve of parietal, a bulge of zygomatic cheek bone, a shard leading down to the maxilla. That was all. As a skull, it was not particularly interesting—male, early twenties, maybe eight months dead—but as a reconstruction, it was incredible. The piece had been assembled from fragments, manually, and not by a bone magician. The smallest would have been no bigger than the moon of your cuticle. It had been painstakingly—passionately—laboriously reassembled, from the skull of someone who, soon after death or symptomatically during, had exploded. There were miniature cracks where it had been glued. You turned it over and over in your hands.
“Eyes,” said Camilla.
A thin stream of blood was emerging from your right lacrimal duct. You wiped it away. Your headache was quite bad now.
You said, “Your necromancer.”
She said, after a moment’s pause, “Yes.”
This was also impossible, as the last time you had seen the skull of Palamedes Sextus, it had been speckled with firearm propellant from the bullet that had shattered his face—inward. You wiped your left tear duct before the stone-faced cavalier could say a word.
You asked, “What do you want from me?”
Camilla stood up.
“The Warden’s still in there,” she said.
You waited, with that work of astonishing labour between your hands. After a moment she said, “He’s attached. To the skull. I want you to confirm. That’s all.”
That’s all. You beheld the skull again. The six-month-old bone was yet lively with thanergy. All scraps of flesh had been carefully removed; there were no hunks of hair on that pulverized skull, nor fragments of dried brain matter within the parietal bone. You tried to recall Palamedes Sextus, and your ears renewed their liquid assault. When you hastily scanned your brain for the source, you found nothing particularly wrong, and it made you bleed more. You shook blood out of your right ear, and said: “Elaborate.”
“Thanks for not smiling. He’s in there,” she repeated, a little doggedly, but with that same dry calm. “He’s a revenant.”
You had been too honestly astonished to do anything so coarse as smile, or laugh, or say, You have got to be kidding me, that is a good one. “No, he’s not,” you said. “A ghost attached to an immobile object—a ghost attached to an immobile object for this length of time—it would have lost coherency and drifted away long ago. He could not walk. He could not speak. He could not perceive. A ghost does not cling passionately for months to a few fragments of skull.”
“He would,” she said.
“I’m certain he had a—forceful personality, but—”
“No, I mean he deliberately fixed his soul to his body, with spirit magic,” said the cavalier. “We planned for it. In the event of his death. I know he did it, because I got the message. I only want to make sure I snagged the right part of the skull. We didn’t account for—pieces. If he’s not in here I have to go find the others.”
You looked up into her face. Camilla Hect was a closed object, with locks and snaps; she had an expression like the rock before the Tomb, inexorable, giving nothing away. But her eyes—her eyes were dark as the grit mixed with the soil, neither grey nor brown but both. They were the eyes of a winter season without any promise of spring. In comparing the eyes to the face, you saw into a zipped-up agony.
And she said, with that same dull, blank, diamond-hard pain: “The Cohort took the rest of him away. And I don’t know where they have put him.”
It was not pity that moved your hand. It was open curiosity about the kind of man who would have sealed his soul to his fragmented corpse before he died. You tucked your knees up and you put the parietal bone lightly beneath the print of your index finger: you scoured every cell of that bone for some remnant soul.
And you could find nothing.
It was not the first time you regretted your unfamiliarity with spirit magic. You had flayed yourself in writing with the accusation: Your understanding of flesh and spirit magic is execrable. Now your regrets reached their pinnacle: you were not even sure that your inability to find a dead boy was due to the dead boy’s absence, or due to your lack of study.
You said, “If his ghost in any way travelled to the River, it would have driven him mad. If he released his hold for even a moment, or if he was unable to bear the prison of his bones…” Camilla just looked at you. You relented: “One moment.”
The ninety-six puzzle pieces this cavalier called a skull did not warrant what you were about to do. Your construct skeleton you compacted neatly back to a chip of bone, and your exoskeleton you made inert. If you left them, they would crumble to pieces, and it was better not to give her any indication of your vulnerability while you were under. You moved to sit on the grass. It crushed beneath you, and the smell made you anxious. You deliberately did not think about all the insect life squirming and seething beneath the seat of your robes. You planted your feet flat on the ground and made your spine a soft curve. The ghost wards were already painted on your belly and the back of your neck, though they were superstition only, placed for the unseen emergency where you were forced to physically move your body through the River. A mind without its meat would not attract a ravenous ghost. There would be a thronging populace here, all uninterested in you if you were not attached to your bright, delicious flesh, and anyway you only intended to take the briefest look. You took the weighty sword from your back and placed it beneath your feet, and then you took the partial skull from your lap, and you waded into the River.
You had intended to use the skull to triangulate its owner. It would be otherwise impossible to pick out one ghost between the billions upon billions—innumerable spirits, a nearly infinite mass—making their way through the dark waters.
Time and space works differently in the River no matter how you enter, my chicks, Augustine had warned. Anchor yourself as you’re leaving the old meat robes behind, and as you wade through the waters. Attach to worldly geography; be aware of your body; let it be your harbour, unless you’re dying to be pulled somewhere you don’t want to go.
You used the skull as your geography instead. The water was very cold when it closed over your head. It felt thick and slippery as oil. Augustine had ducked you and Ianthe in the River, to train you for this—to get you used to a River teeming with the mad, the insane, and the ravenous—and you knew what to expect. You would be in filthy water, with the teeth, and the rotten flesh, and the bloody, unseeing eyes. You might, if you were lucky, look down upon the mad ghost of the skull. You could discharge your duty by confirming that he had long ago drifted away, and that Hect might drift away from the buttoned-up primal grief a ghost story had frozen in place. You prepared for the ice, and the initial panic of ghosts exploding outward from your body, that safe predatory entry of your brain—the cloudy water, foggy with old blood—
