Bob's voice quavered, the motes becoming a vague cloud again. "I can."

"Then tell me what you know."

"Is that a command?"

I blinked. "Do I have to make it one?"

"You don't want to command me to remember, Harry."

"Why not?" I demanded.

The cloud of lights drifted in vague loops around the lab. "Because knowledge is what I am. Losing my knowledge of what I knew of Kemmler took away a… a big piece of my existence. Like if someone had cut off your arm. What's left of what I know of Kemmler is close to the missing pieces."

I thought I started to understand him. "It hurts."

The lights swirled uncertainly. "It also hurts. It's more than that."

"If it hurts," I said, "I'll stop, and you can forget it again when we're done talking."

"But—" Bob said.

"It's a command, Bob. Tell me."

Bob shuddered.

It was a bizarre sight. The cloud of lights shivered for a second, as if in a trembling breath of wind, and then abruptly just shifted, flickering to one side as quickly as if I had been looking at it with one eye closed and suddenly switched to the other.

"Kemmler," Bob said. "Right." The lights came to rest on the other end of the table in the shape of a perfect sphere. "What do you want to know, wizard?"

I watched the lights warily, but nothing seemed all that wrong. Other than the fact that Bob was suddenly calm. And geometric. "Tell me what The Word of Kemmler is."

The lights pulsed scarlet. "Knowledge. Truth. Power."

"Uh," I said, "a little more specific?"

"The master wrote down his teachings, wizard, so that those who came after him could learn from him. Could learn about the true power of magic."

"You mean," I said, "so that they could learn about necromancy."

Bob's voice took on the edge of a sneer. "What you call magic is nothing but a mound of parlor tricks, beside the power to master life and death itself."

"That's an opinion, I guess," I said.

"More than that," Bob said. "It is a truth. A truth that reveals itself to those who seek it out."

"What do you mean?" I said slowly.

There was a flash, and a pair of white eyes formed in the glittering cloud of red points of light. They weren't pleasant. "Shall I show you the start of the path?" Bob's voice said. "Death, Dresden, is a part of you. It is woven into the fabric of your being. You are a collection of pieces, each of them dying and in turn being reborn and remade."

The white lights were cold. Not mountain-spring cold, either. Graveyard-mist cold. But I'd never seen anything quite like them before.

And there was no sense interrupting Bob when he was finally spilling some information.

Besides. Fascinating light.