“And yet they take possession anyway,” said Wad-who-was. “One or ten or a hundred Belmages or Sutahites, however many it takes to do it, they force their way into the body and rule it. We gatemages drive them out, until now, until this Set.”

“They only take possession as your manmages do—they persuade the ka-and-ba to see the world the way they see it, and then to act within the world according to their will.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“It is not the same thing,” said Kawab. “They feel nothing of the body—they only watch us feel it. They do not cause a single finger to curl, a single eyelid to close or open. They cannot taste the food we eat, or make the jaws chew. They have only the power that comes from our obedience.”

“Except for Set.”

“Not even him,” said Kawab. “Not even the great Set. He rides the ape-brain like a man on horseback, but he never becomes the horse.”

“Not even the way a beastmage becomes the heartbeast?” asked Wad-who-was.

“It is the ba that goes into the beast, but it is the ba of a mage who is attached to a living body of flesh and blood. The ba knows how to become a part of the body. The ba feels what the beast feels. Yet doesn’t it also persuade rather than rule?”

“The will of the mage is much stronger than most beastminds,” said Wad-who-was.

“But the strongest beasts can disobey the ba; is that not true?”

It was true, or so Wad had heard from the beastmages.

“Even Set?” asked Wad-who-was. “Even he cannot bind himself inside the human body?”

“Even when he rides the woman through your gate and laughs at you. He may have power to stay, even through the gate, but he has not become the woman. She is still there, a ka-and-ba inside the body, but completely subject to him. Feeling her limbs move in obedience to the will of Set, hearing her mouth speak his words, powerless to stop him. And yet she is the one who owns the body; Set is and always will be an interloper. That’s why he hates us all. That’s why he wants to destroy us.”

“Then he is all-powerful,” said Wad-who-was. “Because he can take possession of the most powerful mages, and they can never get free of him, and must always do what he says, and he cannot be killed, but they can be killed.”

“I did not say that,” said Kawab, “because that is not known. What we do know is this: The ka-and-ba of the Sutahites, these wandering souls, cannot be divided. Even when they possess a body such as yours, which caused your own ba to divide ten thousand times, their ka-and-ba remains a single thing.”

“What does that mean?” demanded Wad-who-was, frustrated with the strangeness of Kawab’s teachings.