On the terrace stood a figure in haz orange, swathed in crinkling safety material from neck to feet. A breathing apparatus obscured the face. And in one gloved hand, clear even from this distance, you saw it: a huge two-bore gun. The figure stared with empty goggle eyes as the wind lashed, and as the thunder boomed, farther away now.

Sextus was saying, “The hell is—”

You said, and your voice sounded strange to yourself, as though you had heard the word only in dreams and never articulated by waking tongues: “The Sleeper.”

The Sleeper looked at you both. There came another sudden violent burst of obscuring rain, and it was gone. You and the necromancer of the Sixth House moved as one: shouldered both of your bodies against the door to the room until it shut fast, as you slid a crude deadbolt home. You leaned your full weights against it. This was not a very impressive mass. He said, quickly: “Ninth, this place is powered by one single theorem, held together with the fragility of spirit magic. I cannot manipulate it. I cannot change anything about it, not the room, not the cushions, not the astonishingly shitty book. I can’t change a thing about this space—but anyone coming to me could change the parameters, and you’ve brought something with you that’s changing them. Go.”

Both of you froze as you heard shuffling steps outside the door, a low, asthmatic wheezing from the apparatus. Then you shoved your pathetic necro bodies more forcefully against the door. You said, “Don’t be a fool.”

“Go and go now, Nonagesimus!”

“I’m not about to leave you alone with something I have done, Master Warden!”

“That’s more like the old Harrowhark—but I mean it, get out! I’m banking on it going with you. I’ll be fine. Just tell me, what’s Cam got of my bones?”

“Three inches of right-hand parietal, full right-hand frontal, leading down to—”

“That’s enough. Just so I know what to focus on— Can you change that into something more useful?”

You said arctically, “I am a Lyctor, Palamedes Sextus.”

“And I’m so sorry about it,” he said. “Point taken though. Anything that articulates, okay?”

“But—”

The crash against the door rattled you all the way down to your toes. You had no magic in that River bubble; it might as well have been the vacuum of space, before you had built the furnace within yourself. Your necromancy was as still and dead as the room itself. It was surprising, how badly it frightened you. It was only you, and your mind’s outline of your body, and the ghost of a dead man, and the thing that followed you inside.