You propped yourself up against the coffin that did not contain Coronabeth Tridentarius, as it was a heavy slab that couldn’t be hurt by your leaning on it. The sword was making your back ache. The Kindly Prince watched you try to stand, your shoulders bowing beneath the steel, and then he said: “Harrow, we’re still just outside the Dominicus system. Once you’re better, we will send the Erebos to the Ninth House, and it will deliver what I said to you it would deliver. Then it will go from House to House to give them back their dead—but I won’t be on it. You can choose to part ways with me. Or you can come with me as my Hand. In a real sense, it’s up to you.”

You tried to remember what you had said when you had first woken up aboard the Erebos; what you had said when first faced with your Resurrector. But you couldn’t. “I chose—”

“In ignorance,” he said. “It was no choice. Listen.”

He went to half-lean against the bulkhead closest to the plain coffin, put his tablet atop it, and let his hand rest upon the unadorned surface quite close to the little rose. The Emperor said, “Harrowhark, what happens when somebody dies?”

It was a crèche question. You ought to have been able to answer it in the same way other people walked or breathed, which was why you found it difficult. The simplicity seemed a trap. You dug your thumbnail into the top of your thigh until it squelched all the capillaries beneath the skin, and you said: “Apopneumatism. The spirit is forced from their body. The initial thanergy bloom occurs.”

“Why?”

“Thalergetic decay causes cellular death,” you said carefully, pressing the nail in harder, “which emits thanergy. The massive cell death that follows apopneumatism causes a thanergetic cascade, though the first bloom fades and the thanergy stabilises within thirty to sixty seconds.”

“What happens to the soul?”

“In the case of gradual death—senescence, illness … certain other forms—transition is automatic and straightforward. The soul is pulled into the River by liminal osmosis. In cases of apopneumatic shock, where death is sudden and violent, the energy burst can be sufficient to countermand osmotic pressure and leave the soul temporarily isolated. Whence we gain the ghost, and the revenant.”

“And what has a soul?”

You weren’t going to last the distance. The questions were beginning to sound stupid, or sophistic. The Body watched you with careful, filmy eyes. “Anything with a thalergetic complexity significant enough to … have a soul. So, humanity.”

The Emperor drummed his fingertips atop the plain coffin, and he said, a little whimsically: “Why have we not an immortal soul? I would give gladly all the hundreds of years that I have to live, to be a human being only for one day.”

This threw you utterly. “I— Pardon?”