You didn’t know, Pat told him silently. There is no blame, no shame; no harm was intended, and so no guilt ensues. It’s not time for you to return to Duat now. Take up your body and live the life you were sent to live. You still have much to do, and it can only be done with a body, with the power of the gatemage you were born to be.

Enopp seemed to ignore her—he made no move to reinhabit his body—and yet he also did not rise up to make the quick voyage across the lightyears to Duat. Is it because he wants to stay alive, but doesn’t think that he deserves to have a body after depriving Eluik for so long? Or am I holding him here by surrounding him with my outself?

I have no more right to hold his ka than he had to inhabit his brother.

Pat pulled her ba back inside herself.

And then felt Enopp’s ka-and-ba start to rise. His last connections with Eluik’s body began to attenuate and break. He had chosen. He was going to die.

At that moment, Eluik threw himself clumsily from his chair to land on top of Enopp, where he sat on the floor. It knocked Enopp over. Eluik lay on top of him, embraced him awkwardly, and he began shouting something. Weeping and shouting.

Pat was not a gatemage. She had no gift for languages, and did not understand the language of his cries.

But she did understand—for who could fail to understand?—what Eluik’s ka was communicating to Enopp’s ka. So much force. It felt like shouting. This One had not used even a fraction of this power when communicating with Pat and Danny on Duat. And the message was simple and pure: Stay with me. Live.

Enopp’s ka stopped its upward movement.

Eluik began clumsily punching and slapping Enopp’s arms and chest, as if to wake up his senses, or even to provoke him into striking back.

Pat felt it, empathically, as Enopp’s ka returned to his body and thrust its tendrils, or rather its influence, into every place in his body where those connections needed to be complete.

And as he did, he let go of his last few connections with Eluik’s body. In a moment, Enopp’s ka-and-ba existed only inside his own body, and almost at once his connection was deep and complete. More complete than most people’s self-connection. Now he was connected to himself as Pat and Danny had learned to connect with their own bodies.

Eluik, too, had learned how it was done, and his ka reached deep inside himself. Like Danny, his domain could not be usurped again.