“Thanks for not smiling. He’s in there,” she repeated, a little doggedly, but with that same dry calm. “He’s a revenant.”

You had been too honestly astonished to do anything so coarse as smile, or laugh, or say, You have got to be kidding me, that is a good one. “No, he’s not,” you said. “A ghost attached to an immobile object—a ghost attached to an immobile object for this length of time—it would have lost coherency and drifted away long ago. He could not walk. He could not speak. He could not perceive. A ghost does not cling passionately for months to a few fragments of skull.”

“He would,” she said.

“I’m certain he had a—forceful personality, but—”

“No, I mean he deliberately fixed his soul to his body, with spirit magic,” said the cavalier. “We planned for it. In the event of his death. I know he did it, because I got the message. I only want to make sure I snagged the right part of the skull. We didn’t account for—pieces. If he’s not in here I have to go find the others.”

You looked up into her face. Camilla Hect was a closed object, with locks and snaps; she had an expression like the rock before the Tomb, inexorable, giving nothing away. But her eyes—her eyes were dark as the grit mixed with the soil, neither grey nor brown but both. They were the eyes of a winter season without any promise of spring. In comparing the eyes to the face, you saw into a zipped-up agony.

And she said, with that same dull, blank, diamond-hard pain: “The Cohort took the rest of him away. And I don’t know where they have put him.”

It was not pity that moved your hand. It was open curiosity about the kind of man who would have sealed his soul to his fragmented corpse before he died. You tucked your knees up and you put the parietal bone lightly beneath the print of your index finger: you scoured every cell of that bone for some remnant soul.

And you could find nothing.

It was not the first time you regretted your unfamiliarity with spirit magic. You had flayed yourself in writing with the accusation: Your understanding of flesh and spirit magic is execrable. Now your regrets reached their pinnacle: you were not even sure that your inability to find a dead boy was due to the dead boy’s absence, or due to your lack of study.

You said, “If his ghost in any way travelled to the River, it would have driven him mad. If he released his hold for even a moment, or if he was unable to bear the prison of his bones…” Camilla just looked at you. You relented: “One moment.”