away from her; it was in two surprised parts, wriggling to fuse back together, slow to understand the damage. Camilla Hect sheathed her knives with as much speed and fury as she had unsheathed them, and she said: “No sudden moves.”
“I am Harrowhark Nonagesimus,” you said. “I am the ninth saint to serve the King Undying. I am his fingerbone; I am his fists and gestures … I am a Lyctor, Hect. What hope would you have against me?”
“None,” said Camilla.
And then she added calmly: “Yet.”
You were silent. Your head throbbed. The birds were very loud and shrill, and a multitude of smells drifted from the forest—of damp air, of damp earth, of all the things that crept upon it, with their insensible quantities of legs and little frondy parts. You sat down on your bone-plated log, and you wiped your face, and you said: “I watched your body be laid out. I examined it myself. And now you are here, forty billion lightyears from the Nine Houses, and you tell me that you are real.”
“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 cheekbone, 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