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“What a gorgeously futile idea,” said Augustine warmly. “I should chuck things in there more often. There’s no way that could come back to haunt me. No, my Lord, I am not Cassiopeia; I am a spirit generalist, and happy with my lot.”
“So we’re talking about ghosts, and liminal spaces, and hell,” Ianthe said. Ianthe always wanted everything brought back to liminal spaces and hell, as though her rooms were not enough. You could not deny an interest yourself.
The Saint of Patience never took this bait. “Dear one, I need the right moment to go to hell. But ghosts and spirits are as good a place as any to begin. You might say I like to follow energy trails back to their source. Revenants in particular are fun that way. Resurrection Beasts feed like revenants: they find thalergenic planets and guzzle them up wholesale, crack them open like clams, and take the soul for meat. Then they turn all that remnant thalergy into what we call the corpus, or the hive, and the thanergy—the dead clam itself—for armour. You can ask the Saint of Duty about the thanergy transfer.” (You did not think this would be viable.) “When you look at a revenant on this side, what you’re seeing is the thanergy mass that it’s gathered. Usually revenants can only inhabit things connected to them in life—the best and most desirable would be its own corpse or skeleton, or planet if you’re an RB: you’ve formed a bond with that thing through habit and genetics, it’s your soul’s preferred housing. Unfortunately, apopneumatic shock makes most of us do a blind dash away from the site of our deaths—Resurrection Beasts included. The card up the sleeve of the revenant, and the Resurrection Beast, is that it can inhabit anything it’s got a connection to. Anything thanergetically connected with their death.”
Ianthe suggested, in what you saw as a low-value suck-up play: “Burial implements. Grave goods. Any possession that they kept over time, that was exposed to their thalergy and thanergy. If they were murdered, the murder weapon.”
“Bang on,” said Augustine. “Even things that touched the murder weapon, though the connection’s fairly weak there and the revenant would have to be particularly bloody-minded.”
She pressed, “Could they use thanergy they generated after death? Thanergy directly related to themselves? I mean, things they kill.”
“You are absolutely and beautifully right,” said the Saint of Patience warmly, and you were not annoyed that she had won such approbation. It was not as though your brain had failed to come to the same conclusion; you simply hadn’t felt like articulating. “This is how the RBs got on, having scarpered away from the Dominicus system. Resurrection Beasts add to their corpus anything they’ve done a good solid murder to. They eat planets; they suck up the thanergy, then add bits of the planet to themselves, getting bigger and meaner each time. Your average revenant doesn’t kill human beings and stick them on its outside—for which I’m devoutly thankful. The last time we eyeballed Number Seven, it was over fifty thousand kilometres in diameter…”
“This is why you will be sent out to establish the perimeter,” said God, as Augustine was lost in fifty thousand kilometres of reverie. “We can slow Number Seven if we take away its food. If we flip a planet all at once—a thalergetic death—the Resurrection Beast will ignore it.”
(“This is the way we used to prepare a thalergy planet for necromancy,” God explained to you, much later, after Mercy began schooling you in the way of butchering planetoids. “No adept can perform any substantive work if they’re reduced to scavenging trace thanergy. Even a master of the Ninth can only do so much with a few scattered bones. So back at the start we’d drop in a single Lyctor, unnoticed, to start the thanergy reaction. Not to flip the whole planet, you understand, just to get the juice flowing.” He made a hand gesture for get the juice flowing, which made your head hurt. “Then within an hour or two you could send down a team of adepts and be confident they’d have all the reserves they needed. Nowadays we can’t afford to use Lyctors, so the first strike falls to the men and women of the Cohort, and they do a magnificent job … but the old way was neater, and kinder too, I think.”)
Ianthe said, “If the Resurrection Beast is that big, surely the main worry is that we’ll be drawn into its gravity well.”
“Yes, but it almost never travels as a physical revenant. That’s why it’s so damned hard to track Beasts: much easier if they’d just leave flattened galaxies in their wake. They travel as River projections instead. ‘Periscoping,’ Cass called it. And once they do instantiate, they don’t seem to want to get too close. This is where the Heralds come in. Unlike normal revenants, RBs have developed external actors, and those are the things that will attack the Mithraeum. We’ve nicknamed this the hive, and inside the hive are the Heralds. They’ll look like independent creatures, but really they’re just extensions of it. Spider, web. Hand, finger.”
This whole lesson took place with you, God, and Ianthe sitting at the dining table, which still smelled like breakfast, and you did not like the lack of ceremony. Augustine was leaning over the table drawing a careful diagram on a piece of flimsy with a pencil he had borrowed from God. The resulting sketch was almost impossible to follow.
“You keep saying creatures,” you said. “That is a little—”
“Nondescript?” said Augustine. “I can’t describe them, sis. The first time we ran into the tools of a Resurrection Beast—and this was just looking at them, I mean, they hadn’t even engaged us—I watched a Lyctor, one I had never hitherto seen so much as cry out, scream like a colicky child. Another two, RIP since, simply vomited.”
God added, “The Heralds and corpus sometimes vary between Beasts. They are the dead parts their centre has mashed together. Some Lyctors have seen them as insectoid. They’re monstrous, and deadly, and there are often hundreds of them—thousands.”
Once upon a time you might have asked questions: good, interesting, thorny questions, the difficult ones that showed you knew something and could be relied upon to run where you were directed, blindfolded. This time, you kept blessedly quiet.
“And they only halfway matter,” said the Emperor, vindicating your choice. “Certainly they’re dangerous. If you are devoured by the Heralds I cannot bring you back. But you can destroy them easily enough, if you’ve a blade and the facility to use it … or necromancy. But as a Lyctor, of course, your necromancy is needed elsewhere.”
“Would you like to teach this one, John,” said Augustine, patiently.
“No—sorry—keep going.”
“I mean, I love the tack you’re taking. I hadn’t thought to scare the living wee out of them with, They’ll eat you alive, starting with your feet.”
“Sorry! Sorry. Go on.”
Briefly smiling at God, Augustine pointed at the diagram. “The part of the Resurrection Beast that we can destroy squats in the River, ladies,” he said. “Just as the most important part of the revenant is where the soul is, the most important part of the Resurrection Beast is sitting over here. You’ll leave your bodies, which protect you nonetheless—your good old cav’s right there in your neurons and amygdala, ready to come out for exactly such a happenstance—and they’ll fight it much better than you can because they’re immune to Herald fear. I have lived for a very long time, and when I see a Herald, I still get the most appalling whim-whams. My cavalier doesn’t care. I removed the part of him that did when I became a Lyctor … That’s his main advantage. Your body can’t, and won’t, use necromancy without you. The power doesn’t flow both ways.”
Ianthe said, “But if we’re in the River, then the ghosts—”
“You’re a projection. They can’t hurt you,” said the King Undying. “And you won’t even see them. No ghost will approach a Beast submerged.”
He sat back in his chair. God had a quiet, ambling posture, an upright if slightly stoop-shouldered gait; he was mobile and alive. He was always somehow more alive than everyone else around him, and yet dislocated from what you considered living. A man-shaped eclipse. “And there we fight it,” he said simply. “Much like fighting anything else.”
Augustine said, “You ward against it. You hack up whatever it points in your direction. You wither its false flesh. It has form as we have form in the River, and it’s vulnerable the same way we are. You get a good tight grip on its soul and you pull the damn thing to pieces. In the end, if you wear it down, you exorcise it altogether. It is a revenant … a revenant of a specific hell.”
The Emperor said, “Once defeated, it can be forced down into the abyss, and from there it will not return.”
“We hope,” said Augustine. “Oh, Lord, do we ever hope.”
17
MERCYMORN (WHILOM???) THE FIRST, SAINT OF JOY (IRONY?)
Not forthcoming.
