“Souls,” said Pat.

“Oh, you’re such a skeptic. Don’t you get it? We mages—we know that people have souls. We call them inself and outself, and since Danny’s little Egyptian expedition we started calling them ka and ba. But we know we have souls. And we know that Set is nothing but a spirit, a ghost, a soul without a body. So we can’t afford the pleasant ignorance of unbelievers.”

“Are you suggesting that if Danny dies, I might be able to go and fetch him back?”

“I have no idea,” said Veevee, “but I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Then what’s your point?”

“I don’t know if I even have a point. You said that death is so final, and I merely pointed out that every now and then there’s been a special case where somebody goes to the land of the dead and brings somebody back.”

“Only Persephone had to keep going back,” said Pat.

“Oh, now that part of the story is just silly,” said Veevee. “That’s a just-so story. ‘When Persephone returns to the world it’s spring, and then when she goes back to the underworld, it’s winter.’ That was added on to the story later, along with the absurd claim that Persephone’s mother was Demeter, the goddess of harvest and such.”

“She wasn’t?”

“Oh, human storytellers have had their way with these stories for ages. Hermia told me that the Greeks—pardon me, the Pelasgians or Illyrians or whatever—they believed in Persephone, rescued by the Hermes of that time, but she had nothing to do with any of the Demeters, who all come from a completely different tradition anyway. The earth-goddess tradition has nothing to do with the Indo-Europeans and therefore has nothing to do with the Westilian Families.”

“How do you sort it out?”

“Remember that Bulfinch’s Mythology is just a feeble attempt to rationalize all the god stories as if each name went with only one person. And Ovid’s Metamorphoses were just as feeble at the same task. The Families started a lot of the stupidest stories themselves, the way that people lie to children for their own amusement. ‘Santa Claus won’t bring you presents if you’re bad. You’ll get a lump of coal.’ What does punishment of naughty children have to do with St. Nicholas? And how is it a punishment to get something that can keep you warm in winter?”

“So with one breath you tell me to believe in the old myths, and in the next breath I’m supposed to think of them like Santa Claus putting coal in stockings.”

“Exactly,” said Veevee.

“You look so triumphant that I think you think you actually explained something.”

“Oh, my poor darling, of course I haven’t explained anything. I’ve read all the same stuff that Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell and a whole bunch of other philologists and psychologists read, and like them I’ve tried to fit it all together. The difference is that I don’t think I succeeded, and so I didn’t write a book.”