It had been a long time since you had been around those who were not Lyctors. You grasped for her, thoughtlessly, with your construct; you were astonished by the speed with which Hect drew those big, balanced knives from each shoulder, and hurled herself at your skeleton like a stone from a sling. Her first sweep with the butt of a knife shattered the ribcage—it coalesced back; you now disdained skeletons not made of permanent ash. She swept in with a foot, aimed at the fragile place beneath the knee, and sent your construct stumbling forward. You said, “Cease,” but she levered one knife into the base of the spine, severed it, pulled the spine back toward her with a twang—and you heard your voice rise to say: “I need to know you are real!”

She kicked the skeleton away from her; it was in two surprised parts, wriggling to fuse back together, slow to understand the damage. Camilla Hect sheathed her knives with as much speed and fury as she had unsheathed them, and she said: “No sudden moves.”

“I am Harrowhark Nonagesimus,” you said. “I am the ninth saint to serve the King Undying. I am his fingerbone; I am his fists and gestures … I am a Lyctor, Hect. What hope would you have against me?”

“None,” said Camilla.

And then she added calmly: “Yet.”

You were silent. Your head throbbed. The birds were very loud and shrill, and a multitude of smells drifted from the forest—of damp air, of damp earth, of all the things that crept upon it, with their insensible quantities of legs and little frondy parts. You sat down on your bone-plated log, and you wiped your face, and you said: “I watched your body be laid out. I examined it myself. And now you are here, forty billion lightyears from the Nine Houses, and you tell me that you are real.”

“If you’re going to sit around feeling sorry for yourself, you’ve changed,” she said. And then: “I’m going to come closer. All right?”

You watched with cold apprehension as this resurrection approached. She was not puppeted as your mother and father had been; nor was she a Seventh-style simulacrum. Her thalergy lit up with the pure combustive light of a strong, healthy human being, and the minute deaths throughout her body—bacterial, apoptotic, autophagic—produced a thanergetic embroidery you could see as easily as her breath heaving within her chest. You startled badly when she dropped to her haunches before you and looked you over coolly; looked into your left ear, then your right, peered into your eyes, glanced up your nose.

“Nice intercranial haemorrhage,” she said. “Kills most of us non-Lyctors.”

You said, “Why are you here? Why are you here now? How are you here? This planet orbits the sanctuary of the Emperor, Hect, reachable only by necromantic means, and you are dead.”