“A Lyctor has a metaphorical sitting temperature of over a thousand degrees,” said the Emperor. He had gone to check the boxes again, and the clasps. Space rotated slowly past the windows, inordinately black and dizzying. “We have this incomparably done ward, exquisitely created by an expert who gave her heart’s blood for it—it may last for around a minute and a half. I’m hoping for upward of a minute forty, with work like that—and we’re on our own from there … No Lyctor has lasted longer than seven minutes in full physical submersion. And that was a titanic effort on the part of Cassiopeia the First, who was brilliant and sensible and careful—she thought she could bait physical portions of the Resurrection Beast into the current. She was right. It followed her.”

You said, “And?”

Mercy said lowly: “It turned out that being sensible and brilliant and careful doesn’t keep you from getting ripped to shreds by ten thousand feral ghosts.”

Ianthe said, “But the Beast—?”

“Emerged unscathed twenty minutes later,” the Emperor said. And: “Life’s a bitch.”

He looked out the window to the stars, and to the jewelled gleam of a planetoid in the distance, which looked a sooty red from your position. “Unbuckle your belts,” he said. You both did so. “Lie down on the floor.”

You and Ianthe said as one, your voice a parched whisper, hers low and cool: “Yes, Teacher.”

Self-conscious of your limbs, you lay down on the floor. The Kindly Prince said very evenly: “Start slowing your breath. I want it at two per minute. If you need to flush yourself with oxygen, do it now. It has been a long time since I have thought about teaching this trick, and I barely know where to begin.”

“You should start with Pyrrha’s trial,” called out the other Lyctor immediately.

“Right,” said the Emperor. Then: “I mean, I was being more or less facetious, Mercy, but yes, I’ll probably begin there— Do you both recall the projection trial, back at Canaan House? It would have been in Lab Three.”

You recalled the enormous construction of regrowing bone, your hands encased in it so that you could not wrench yourself free, your mind voyaging nauseously into the chamber of another person’s brain. God said, “You’ll need that skillset now. Your mind and body won’t couple automatically in the River. You have to hold them together, and any wrong move will see your consciousness stuck on the outskirts of Dominicus, wondering how the hell to get home. Most of the time you won’t even bother taking your body into the waters—it’s too dangerous—but for physical travel, we’ll need mind and body both.”

Your mind was racing, and you cursed yourself, not for the first time, for not continuing your advanced studies into spirit magic. You said, “What happens to a Lyctoral body without a soul?”