—and you were standing in a room. Your wet robes were dripping onto a scrubbed wooden floor.

The room was penitent-sized, big enough for a bed and a table. Less penitential, the bed was strewn with pillows and cushions and comforters; the table was similarly scattered with preparations, little paper packets, and a stained enamel bowl. An old chair was pushed close to the bed, its back re-stapled to its frame and some of the stuffing coming out in square, foaming chunks of yellow. Above the bed, a dirty little window that had resisted someone’s attempts to clean it looked down upon a dying courtyard where a thick array of salt-choked vines were the only greenish things among an array of spindly leafless trees. A shelf held a few desiccated books, one standing out like a fleshy corpse among skeletons. Your eyes fell upon the title: The Necromancer’s Marriage Season.

“It’s a historical,” said a voice behind you. “Abella Trine, inevitably of Ida, is considered a poor prospect on the marriage market because she’s too skinny, her tract-specialist flesh magic is too good, and she wears her thick chestnut hair in an unflattering bun, which is mentioned at least twice a chapter.”

You turned around.

A man stood in the doorway to the tiny room. He was taller than you. His dull robes lapped around a body of starvation thinness. He was toying with a pair of glasses, and he stared at you with naked eyes of exquisite, pellucid grey: the softness of charcoal burnt nearly white, with the glass clarity of quartz.

He continued, “There’re a few suitors vying for her affections, though Abella’s such a pain in the arse I’ve got no idea why. There’s a spoiled swordswoman I’m quite fond of, but the narrative doesn’t like her because she goes to sexy parties every night, which I’d regard as a blameless enough hobby—and then Abella meets an insanely tedious widower from the outskirts of Tisis, whose saintly husband ate a grenade in the war. After two massive misunderstandings, they hook up, and then there’s a time skip to their adorable baby, who talks with a phonetically impossible lisp and can already form a kidney. The whole is unspeakably sordid.” He slid the glasses back on to that beaky nose. “Long time no see, Reverend Daughter.”

Then he did a very terrible thing. He stepped forward, and he pulled you into a wild embrace—the hold of a man drowning in deep water who cannot help but drag his rescuer down to the bottom with him. He dug his fingers into you in a way you were a little familiar with: tight against the chance that the person in front of you might be a cloud, or a mirage. He lifted you off the ground in his impatient, overfamiliar eagerness, and then he set you down again and saw your face.

“Excuse me,” you said, with sodden asperity.

“Oh. Apologies,” said Palamedes Sextus. “Misread the moment. Let’s call it cabin fever. Nonagesimus, is Camilla—”

“She sent me,” you said, wringing out your wet hem. “She is alive and well and living.”

He whistled a sigh.

“Oh, thank God,” he said a little unsteadily. “Thank God for that mad, stubborn, lovely girl. Speaking of. Harrowhark, you are a sight for sore eyes.”

You frantically clapped your hands to your exoskeleton, but knew as your fingers touched the representation of bone that it was no good. There were no letters there; they could not transfer when you did not know their contents–and there had never, in any case, been a letter addressed to Sextus. The previous Harrow had never bothered to think of it. You knew full well she had seen Hect and Sextus dead; why account for one’s reappearance, but not the other’s? This was a mystery you had no answer for; you were utterly on your own, in this nonsensical miracle of a room.

You said instead, “A projection. A projection in the River?”

“I’d call it on the bank, though that’s not accurate either,” he said promptly. “I couldn’t anchor myself to my body properly when I was about to render myself down to my component parts. So I established a kind of bubble attached to the Riverbank and anchored it to myself at the cellular level—not one thick rope, but lots of tiny little strings. Like a spiderweb, I suppose. As long as anyone could find any bit of me, be it never so small and soggy, there’d be a couple of strands still clinging to it, and me on the other end. Or that was the hope. Couldn’t test it, of course.”

You said: “I have been inside the River, Sextus, multiple times, both in spirit and in flesh. You cannot build a bubble there.”

“Okay, wrong word, perhaps, but—”

“You cannot build in the River! It is a dimension of perpetual flux—defined space is nonsense here—you might as well try to wall off time with bricks and mortar.”

“Yes. Sort of. But by our very presence in the River, we briefly exert space on non-space. Think of how, when you blow air into water, you make bubbles. The water can’t be where the air is. It’s like the air temporarily enforces its own rules over a localised area. If you were in one of those bubbles, you could do things under air-rules—like talking, or lighting a fire—that water doesn’t permit. Like water rejecting air, the River instinctively rejects what lies outside it—it doesn’t want any here in its hereafter. So you can impose your own rules on it, to a very limited extent … I could write at least six very good papers about this, Harrow. There’s so much work to be done.”

You quickly scanned the room again and were struck by its nagging familiarity. You should have known it. You did know it. “This is Canaan House,” you said.

“Moment of death,” he agreed. “I said the rules were limited. I can hang on to my sense of self in here, but not my necromancy. I can’t do anything. All I have is a single still image of the room, and for some reason a single romance novel, which I have read upward of fifty times. Thank God I had a pencil in my pocket; I’m in the process of crafting the sequel on a section of wallpaper.”

“How much were you able to retain?”

“Look out in the hallway,” he suggested.

Cautiously, you stepped out of the doorway. What you had taken for an exit consisted of no more than the view from the door, with some leeway for peripheral vision. It extended maybe a foot in either direction, and then gave way to an enormous white blank: when you walked toward it and pushed (“Steady,” Palamedes warned), the white was solid, though with a vague sticky jellified quality to it. It was an abyssal whiteness. It was an absence, resolved into touch.

When you stepped back into the room and knelt on the bed to peer out the window, it was the same. The vision was all the same dead terrace, and a sliver of ocean, and stone: craning to look either way revealed that great and terrible whiteness. The window was solid and did not open.

You said, “The barrier begins where your line of sight ended. It’s derived from everything you saw.”

He said, “And it doesn’t change … the sea is still. It looks like it’s moving, but it’s not—it’s like one of those holographic pictures where turning it up and down lets you see another part of the image. There is nothing here, and that nothing never changes.”

You sat down on that overcushioned bed, and you looked up at his long, grave face; you tried to remember if you had ever seen it, before it was summarily blown off by gunshot. You really did try. When you closed your eyes, there was nothing cauterized upon your eyelids—except a little redness. You said, “A human mind cannot live this way, Sextus. Being stuck in place is any revenant’s undoing, unless it has a very specific anchor. Eventually it will lose purchase—it will let go—it will return to the River. I cannot imagine the type of mind that would hold on to that edge, and keep holding.”

“I can, and it scares me,” he said heavily. “Look. How long have I been dead, Nonagesimus?”

“Eight months,” you said, “give or take.”

He took off those thick lenses and looked at you with diamond-grey horror. His face was homely; he looked somewhat like a beak, a chin, and a jaw put together as a joke—but the beauty of his eyes made the whole attractive, as though they were a mould colonizing the rest of the stratum.

He spluttered, “Eight months?”

“I don’t have an exact record, but—”

“What? Why did it take you so long? It should have taken you a week, tops.”

“Excuse my apparently sluggard pace,” you said, feeling that this was an unjust accusation, “but your cavalier only just brought me your bones, and regarding that I have more than one question to ask her—”

His brows were crisscrossing like swords. “How did you and Cam get separated in the first place?”

“I was not aware I owed a debt of care to—”

“I mean she wouldn’t have left your side, if you’d given her half a chance—”