Harrowhark found herself studying Dulcie’s face: there was a strange, tucked-in stillness that made her old again, those fine sigil wrinkles on either side of the mouth that told her own lesson of suffering. Harrow said, “Then there is the River.”

“The River means madness,” said Abigail immediately. “You’ve never been there as an unanchored soul. You don’t know what it’s like. I haven’t the faintest idea of what would happen to the secondary soul in a Lyctoral bond if the host soul abandons the body … You are alive, Harrowhark—that does mean something where souls are concerned. Your soul longs for your body, and without something else to inhabit, I could not even promise that in your madness you wouldn’t somehow find your way back, rendering all this moot.”

Even with her feelings schooled, Harrow’s voice sounded feeble and childlike and plaintive. “Is there nothing I can do before entering the River that might mean I stay put?”

“No,” said Abigail. “It’s the River. It moves. You’d have to pick the revenant’s path and travel along a thanergetic link, and that’s just madness again: sitting inside—I don’t know—a teapot, clinging on without sense or understanding, going slowly insane. And as I said, your soul longs for your body. What if you lose yourself to eventual madness and are reabsorbed, leading to some kind of melange—you know what Teacher was—a patchwork fusion between your soul and fragments of Gideon’s? Harrowhark, you stand before a known quantity and hideous unknowns. Don’t walk back toward the unknown.”

“If it were me,” Magnus said, “I’d go home, and live, and live for her.”

There was a terrific crash from out in the corridor, followed by a hideous creaking as, close by, a girder came down. The noise was awesome. It was as though the world were screaming and bending all about them. The Fifth House spirit-caller lost her reserve, and took Harrow’s hands in her own, and said: “I’m so sorry, Harrow. I wish it were different. I am so tremendously sorry.”

The ceiling above them buckled and shuddered, but held. Harrow looked at the stricken faces before her: at the now-sombre lines of the cavalier of the Fifth, his jolly face achieving a certain supernatural dignity; his historian wife, a woman whom she now knew could never be properly avenged. The tragedy of the genius and the useless death. The irreparable loss to the universe.

As though the universe could withstand more holes; as though the fabric of the universe had not become a series of lacework cut-outs linked by the thin, snappable joins of those who remained. Could the pattern sustain itself, with such absences? Could she, who had once thought herself well-versed in absence, endure alone? The answer was so obviously no; she was not even ready to have the question put to her.

And yet—and yet—