lovely girl. Speaking of. Harrowhark, you are a sight for sore eyes.”
You frantically clapped your hands to your exoskeleton, but knew as your fingers touched the representation of bone that it was no good. There were no letters there; they could not transfer when you did not know their contents–and there had never, in any case, been a letter addressed to Sextus. The previous Harrow had never bothered to think of it. You knew full well she had seen Hect and Sextus dead; why account for one’s reappearance, but not the other’s? This was a mystery you had no answer for; you were utterly on your own, in this nonsensical miracle of a room.
You said instead, “A projection. A projection in the River?”
“I’d call it on the bank, though that’s not accurate either,” he said promptly. “I couldn’t anchor myself to my body properly when I was about to render myself down to my component parts. So I established a kind of bubble attached to the Riverbank and anchored it to myself at the cellular level—not one thick rope, but lots of tiny little strings. Like a spiderweb, I suppose. As long as anyone could find any bit of me, be it never so small and soggy, there’d be a couple of strands still clinging to it, and me on the other end. Or that was the hope. Couldn’t test it, of course.”
You said: “I have been inside the River, Sextus, multiple times, both in spirit and in flesh. You cannot build a bubble there.”
“Okay, wrong word, perhaps, but—”
“You cannot build in the River! It is a dimension of perpetual flux—defined space is nonsense here—you might as well try to wall off time with bricks and mortar.”
“Yes. Sort of. But by our very presence in the River, we briefly exert space on non-space. Think of how, when you blow air into water, you make bubbles. The water can’t be where the air is. It’s like the air temporarily enforces its own rules over a localised area. If you were in one of those bubbles, you could do things under air-rules—like talking, or lighting a fire—that water doesn’t permit. Like water rejecting air, the River instinctively rejects what lies outside it—it doesn’t want any here in its hereafter. So you can impose your own rules on it, to a very limited extent … I could write at least six very good papers about this, Harrow. There’s so much work to be done.”
You quickly scanned the room again and were struck by its nagging familiarity. You should have known it. You did know it. “This is Canaan House,” you said.
“Moment of death,” he agreed. “I said the rules were limited. I can hang on to my sense of self in here, but not my necromancy. I can’t do anything. All I have is a single still image of the room, and for some reason a single romance novel, which I have read upward of fifty times. Thank God I had a pencil in my pocket; I’m in the process of crafting the sequel on a section of wallpaper.”
“How much were you able to retain?”
“Look out in the hallway,” he suggested.
Cautiously, you stepped out of the doorway. What you had taken for an exit consisted of no more than the view from the door, with some leeway for peripheral vision. It extended maybe a foot in either direction, and then gave way to an enormous white blank: when you walked toward it and pushed (“Steady,” Palamedes warned), the white was solid, though with a vague sticky jellified quality to it. It was an abyssal whiteness. It was an absence, resolved into touch.
When you stepped back into the room and knelt on the bed to peer out the window, it was the same. The vision was all the same dead terrace, and a sliver of ocean, and stone: craning to look either way revealed that great and terrible whiteness. The window was solid and did not open.
You said, “The barrier begins where your line of sight ended. It’s derived from everything you saw.”
He said, “And it doesn’t change … the sea is still. It looks like it’s moving, but it’s not—it’s like one of those holographic pictures where turning it up and down lets you see another part of the image. There is nothing here, and that nothing never changes.”
You sat down on that overcushioned bed, and you looked up at his long, grave face; you tried to remember if you had ever seen