put his hands beneath your armpits in a perfectly normal way and raised you to stand, and clasped your arms clumsily—a quick, awkward squeeze, as though wanting to comfort and not knowing how—before he took his hands away. He said, “Harrow, you won’t kneel to me. I won’t let you, not until you know exactly what it means when you do it. It hurts me to see you perform obeisance when—if you knew the full story—you might strike me full in the face instead.”
You coloured at that, and protested, “My God—”
“And you shouldn’t call me God either,” he said. “You don’t comprehend the word, and I don’t want to be God to you yet. You’re an invalid, not a disciple. Listen to me. Can you do that? I hate to push you, Harrowhark, but we have so little time.”
This was not to be borne. “I still maintain some of my faculties, Lord.”
“Well, that’s all anyone can hope for,” he said.
You propped yourself up against the coffin that did not contain Coronabeth Tridentarius, as it was a heavy slab that couldn’t be hurt by your leaning on it. The sword was making your back ache. The Kindly Prince watched you try to stand, your shoulders bowing beneath the steel, and then he said: “Harrow, we’re still just outside the Dominicus system. Once you’re better, we will send the Erebos to the Ninth House, and it will deliver what I said to you it would deliver. Then it will go from House to House to give them back their dead—but I won’t be on it. You can choose to part ways with me. Or you can come with me as my Hand. In a real sense, it’s up to you.”
You tried to remember what you had said when you had first woken up aboard the Erebos; what you had said when first faced with your Resurrector. But you couldn’t. “I chose—”
“In ignorance,” he said. “It was no choice. Listen.”
He went to half-lean against the bulkhead closest to the plain coffin, put his tablet atop it, and let his hand rest upon the unadorned surface quite close to the little rose. The Emperor said, “Harrowhark, what happens when somebody dies?”
It was a crèche question. You ought to have been able to answer it in the same way other people walked or breathed, which was why you found it difficult. The simplicity seemed a trap. You dug your thumbnail into the top of your thigh until it squelched all the capillaries beneath the skin, and you said: “Apopneumatism. The spirit is forced from their body. The initial thanergy bloom occurs.”
“Why?”
“Thalergetic decay causes cellular death,” you said carefully, pressing the nail in harder, “which emits thanergy. The massive cell death that follows apopneumatism causes a thanergetic cascade, though the first bloom fades and the thanergy stabilises within thirty to sixty seconds.”
“What happens to the soul?”
“In the case of gradual death—senescence, illness … certain other forms—transition is automatic and straightforward. The soul is pulled into the River by liminal osmosis. In cases of apopneumatic shock, where death is sudden and violent, the energy burst can be sufficient to countermand osmotic pressure and leave the soul temporarily isolated. Whence we gain the ghost, and the revenant.”
“And what has a soul?”
You weren’t going to last the distance. The questions were beginning to sound stupid, or sophistic. The Body watched you with careful, filmy eyes. “Anything with a thalergetic complexity significant enough to … have a soul. So, humanity.”
The Emperor drummed his fingertips atop the plain coffin, and he said, a little whimsically: “Why have we not an immortal soul? I would give gladly all the hundreds of years that I have to live, to be a human being only for one day.”
This threw you utterly. “I— Pardon?”
“Harrowhark, think,” he said, which reminded you very unwelcomely of someone. You gave your thumbnail a better edge, sharpened the dead keratin to a point, and finally drew blood. “What else has an enormously complex mass of thalergy? What’s the role of a Cohort necromancer?”
Your brain bowed out disgracefully, but something of the old Harrowhark remained, enough to stand there and ask questions. You were grateful for your impertinent ghost-self to ask: What was the role of a Cohort necromancer? Better to ask the purpose of a Cohort swordswoman: to support the necromancer, to provide the death and the thanergy to begin the cycle for necromantic magic to work. Foreign planets were never thanergy planets; they possessed dilute thanergy, of course, but