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Mercy added this with no small relish. Your brain said: Fuck you for choosing this particular climate, you bursting organ, you wretched, self-regarding hypochondriac and half-fermented corpse with the nails still on, but your mouth said, “Necessarily, eldest sister.”
Mercymorn watched as you extracted your sword. Not the rapier that hung from your hip, which God had asked you to wear and which you wore as a sop to his extreme optimism; the great sword that you carried on your back. Your exoskeleton came into play here: the plates you wore in long overlapping scales running from back to ribs to elbow to forearm, the rudimentary apodemes that helped you heave a blade far too heavy for your body. Not for you the light ripple of muscle that now showed on Ianthe’s back and shoulders, especially if she was wet with sweat: for you the socket, the bone, the external ridge.
All the Saint of Joy said was, “I never needed the dramatics, but go on, and try not to do anything tectonic.”
As you had never done anything tectonic in the past, it was with an edge of resentful fury that you lifted the hilt high above your head. You drove the point of the bone-sheathed blade into the talc—obviously you never wanted it to have an edge of any kind, ever again—and using the sword as your focus, drove a killing lance of thanergy right into the planet’s heart.
The planet did not quake, or howl, or freeze, or writhe, skewered on your necromancy’s tines. You began the cascade outward, as you had been taught. A wide thanergetic scythe sheared out into the mantle, deeper into the minute thalergy of the rock, into the solid stone’s buried recollections of the day its ball of dust was formed. So much more difficult, on a planet of this character; that was why Mercymorn had chosen it, along with the hope that you would end up an ice corpse. The thanergy reaction had to be carefully wrought. Here the soul of the planet was in the striations of its sand and minerals: a soft woven network of miniature creatures, of bacteria, of thin, stretched-out skeins of life. You had not even understood what to look for, the first time. Now you felt it as you felt the sand scouring the outside of your suit.
You fell to a sitting position, and adopted the same posture as Mercymorn: feet flat on the sand as the wind howled, your spine a soft C-curve; this way when it was over you wouldn’t have a serious backache. You pressed your haz-shod shoe tips to the upright blade of the sword, and you felt the planet become aware that it was dying.
The cascade was perfect. Your cascades always were. The thanergy scoured through the soul like a lit taper touched to flimsy. The living flush of this rocky outcrop began to die in dizzying, concentric rings: flipping, the thanergy feeding on the thalergy as locusts fed on wheat. As the soul tore away, an extra thanergetic bloom fanned the fire of what you had already done. You were satisfied with the precision of your strike: you did not sit around anxiously, as you had done the first half a dozen times, but you closed your eyes, and you waded into the River even as the ghost of the planetoid started to rock itself free.
Teacher had described the bone or flesh magician’s transition to the River as like a sculptor being given a bowl of water and told, Build a statue, whereas the spirit magician was a swimmer given a block of marble and told, Do a lap. You loved God like a king, and you loved God like the promise of redemption, and you loved God like you weren’t even sure what, you had loved so seldom. But you hated his analogies with the depth and breadth of your soul.
Sculptor or swimmer, letting go proved more difficult than anything else. Part of you was always dimly frightened of it. Your fellow necrosaint-in-training now bragged that she could do it near-instantaneously: like closing her eyes, she always said. You had never found it natural. Your mind you dug out of your meat, and you drove it downward—always downward, somehow—and pushed with your awareness until you felt underfoot the dagger-sharp rocks of that grey and unimaginable shore beneath that grey and featureless sky. Then a step into that icy water, and another, until you were waist-deep and might open your eyes. You could see where the planet’s soul was thrashing. The ghosts had parted as though promptly combed away from that turbulent whirlpool churning. A Minor Beast. No Resurrection Beast, of course: this newborn ghast would need a thousand years of malign intent to become anything close to a true Beast. Or so you were told. You’d still never seen a true Beast. The great two-handed sword was in your hands, now light as forgiveness. You hauled yourself up to stand upon the face of the churning grey waters, and, wet through with filthy, bloodied spume, you began to walk toward the maelstrom.
You knew without venturing a look over your shoulder that Mercymorn the First stood on the shore, watching critically, the hem of her pearlescent Canaanite robes wet through. She was probably making faces at the growing stain. In the River her hurricane eyes were scouring, widening curlicues of ruddy grey, excruciating to look upon. You were glad that Mercy would see your facility with the spirit, a skill you were killing yourself trying to perfect. Nonetheless, you were also glad she was not close enough to distract you as you approached the jerking, squirming soul: a nightmarish mess of the organic and the inorganic, all of it a false mirage of spirit-stuff. It was a mass of bloody, crumbling rock faces; it was a hexapod with hairy insect legs, bristling with clay-covered spines. It was primarily grey, but a gory, slimy, sandy grey, organically seething yet still somehow stonelike. And it made a break for it.
Mercymorn hollered from the shore, her voice a muffled shout in the wind and the creak of the grinding waves: “It’s getting away!!”
You sheathed the sword and dived. Better to stay alongside the creature than to deal with importunate ghosts. The surface of the water parted for you, murky and oily—smelling like blood, and tasting like effluent. You opened the back of your wrist and worked needles of bone from your distals, and from them you formed a cluster of long, ragged harpoons. You told the pain that it was not truly pain, not truly your wrist, not truly your bones, only your mind’s excellent approximation thereof. You tied your perceived tendons into sinewy ropes. You raised the first harpoon. You judged. You threw.
The first harpoon bounced off the trembling mess of mineral and muscle, though not before it dislodged crumbling clumps of crystal viscera. The second stuck fast. The third popped its way through some gritty, corneal mass and was left floating in the water in a cloud of boiling, dusty fat. The fourth and fifth found their targets. You skidded and bumped behind the planet’s soul as it screamed and took off. As it dragged you through the River, the water rocketed up your mind’s sinuses and scoured the backs of your mind’s tonsils, and so your mind vomited gouts of water as it was bumped along in a single indignity behind the proto-Beast. You tugged yourself along on the slippery ropes of your own muscle and collagen, and from the shattered remnants of your javelins you raised construct after construct. You let your javelin clatter alongside one hip and climbed alongside your skeleton crew until you had mounted the ghost entirely, clutching handfuls of false stones that tore the soft flesh of your palms, holding on to carapaceous insect tarsus, holding on to gobs of aggregate and flesh.
Your constructs climbed over themselves, over the pseudo-Beast—it thrashed a few back into the water, but the rest climbed on steadily, untouched by fear—and, panting, you hauled yourself up after them. To your hand you transferred the javelin, ringed around your forearm by your seeping rope of tendon, and in the other you raised your two-handed sword. This might have been cool if it wasn’t faintly ridiculous. The Beast started to roll, an infant animal ghost that knew nothing but to flounder in its predator’s jaws: you drove your sword into its spirit as you had driven your sword into its mantle, as the water closed over you again in a maddening rush of filthy, tainted waves.
