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One month ago, after you distractedly slit the jugular of your fourteenth planet, you were praying thus when a great alarm began pounding through the halls of the Mithraeum. You did not recognise the klaxon—red lights replaced the soothing blue glow of the habitation lamps lining the walls, strobing anxiously on and off.
And then a huge shutter slid over your window. You stood in front of the weirdly bending, echoing light in front of the plex, and you watched a great metal panel crunch into place with a silent grinding and huge vibration, slowly cutting out the light. Your rooms grew profoundly dark except for that excited red blinking; the klaxon continued as you were left in that red-hued darkness, tight with anticipation, ready to die.
The voice of the Emperor of the Nine Houses rasped over the comm speaker beside your door, and you rushed to stand before it as he said: “J. G. calling in. All clear. Lyctors, do you copy?”
“A. A. calling in. All clear.”
“G. P. calling in. All clear.”
A pause. Then you heard Ianthe’s cool, detached tones, as if she hadn’t even been asleep: “No one has yet seen fit to grace me with a callsign, but nonetheless, all clear.”
Augustine: “You’re I. N., of course. Harrow’s H … Yes, Harrow’s H.”
“H. O., calling in,” you said instantly, and you ignored Ianthe’s audible sniggers. “All clear. What’s going on?”
And God said urgently, “Mercy, do you copy? Who pulled the alarm?”
The communicator crackled. Somebody breathed deeply. Then there was a lowing over the system—a terrible animal call of uncomprehending pain—and it did not sound like the Saint of Joy. It sounded like a shower of static, and a bitten-off sob, and then a great, wet, horrible thump.
The Emperor said, “Someone unlock my door so I can get to her.”
Ortus said, “I’m closer.”
Another wet noise of contact. Then Mercy said hoarsely, “No. No. I am coherent. I just … less than a second of visual. I looked away, Lord, but it was optically magnified … there in the centre … It is here! The Resurrection Beast is come! The seventh colossus, brood of that which murdered Cyrus the First, packmate of that which murdered Ulysses the First, the one and the same that Cassiopeia died for. Oh, God, John, sometimes I wish I were capable of dying—I saw it! I saw it, and it is blue like Loveday’s eyes! It knows what you did to its kin, and it sees my cavalier’s mortal soul burning in my chest!”
The mechanical clank of a door unlocking was also audible over the line. The Emperor said, “Thanks,” and then his side of the communication cut off. Nobody else spoke on the line.
The klaxon ended. It kept ringing in your ears long after it was gone. Augustine’s voice crackled over the line, quite wearily: “What a dolt. She knows not to look within a kilometre of the thing’s predicted arrival. Well, it’s here early, and so are we. Back to bed, everyone.”
And you went back to bed. The shutters did not come up again. You would learn that they would not; you would learn that the Mithraeum would only be privy to even more shielding in the days ahead, lest the Emperor of the Nine Houses look upon what approached. But that night you just lay next to the Body, and you noticed that her eyes were open very wide, and that in the darkness they were death-mask gold.
You said, “Beloved?”
She said, “It’s coming,” with the most anticipatory astonishment you had ever heard in her low, many-personed voice—right then she used the voice of your father’s cavalier. And: “It’s near!”
Had she ever been astonished before? Had she ever been uneasy? You were lying face-to-face with her, centimetres from the wet sheen of her skin that ought to have made an imprint on your pillow, facing that crinkled lower lip. Her eyes, which the night lights had turned the sick amber of a healing bruise, stared through you. The Body was troubled: in that hovering place so close to the end of your life, it seemed only natural that you should reach for her. The fear of death had remade your worship into desperation, or maybe desire. You reached one hand out for that frozen tangle of hair at the back of the skull; you closed the gap between you, and you kissed that lovely corpse mouth.
Of course, you could not. There was nothing there. Contact made her drift away, just as with any of your hallucinations. You had not touched her. Maybe you had not even reached for her. The Body watched you with an expression you were terribly afraid was pity.
You said, “Please,” and you reached out again. A wave of dizziness rocked you. You pushed at the robe lying crooked at the slope of her shoulder; you pressed your hand low to her belly. Her dignity was untouched by this gross urgency, this coarse frenzy; or maybe, again, you had not done it. You said again, “Please.”
As though you had crossed no boundary, and above the soundless rough shouting in your ears, the Body said: “I have to go away for a while,” and you regretted everything.
“I have done wrong,” you said.
There was the tiniest suggestion of a furrow in that cool unbreathing brow, and she said, “How?”
You did not begin to know how to answer that. The Body reached out, and stroked her fingers forward, as though to close your eyes: you were too tired to imagine how those fingertips would feel on your lids, how that thumb might brush down the bridge of your nose. You closed your eyes in obedient response. And then—you poor brokenhearted sad sack—you fell deeply asleep.
In the morning, the Body was gone.
* * *
“Here is the strategy for engagement,” said Mercymorn.
She had wheeled a large piece of opaque white plex before the dinner table where you and Ianthe and Augustine and Ortus were seated, clustered close to her, with the Emperor at the end of the table busying himself with his own work—with his tablet and his diagrams, with his styluses and flimsy. By this point, it had been nearly two months since the death of the fourteenth planet. All the window shutters had been down for weeks. This contributed to a general sense of living inside a box, which you did not mind: there were no windows in Drearburh, though there had always been a sense of depth that made you feel freer than you did upon this flat collection of rings and corridors.
Your teacher stood before this assembled throng in her Canaanite robe, looking fragile as a white flower with a rotten-peach heart, and she said, “The engagement could go on for three hours. It could go on for eight. It could go on for a week … Assume that timing is labile, and proceed accordingly. Next!”
The Saint of Joy drew a large cylindrical tube on the plex whiteboard, with a fat black soft-tip pen. She segmented and labelled the cylinder from top to bottom, each a neat interval apart: EPIRHOIC. MESORHOIC. BATHYRHOIC. BARATHRON.
“The greatest portion of the fight will take place here, as normal,” she said, emphatically underlining EPIRHOIC. “We must use the bank as much as possible. Once the Beast tires—you’ll know because it will try to run—we wrestle it down to the mesorhoic layer, then the bathyrhoic, and then to the barathron. Once we’re there, the stoma will open—and we push it through. Simple!!
“Not,” Mercymorn added acidly, in case anyone had mistaken her.
Ortus said, “I maintain we should drive it downward at the start.”
“No thanks! Not all of us are spearfishers! Next!” she said, but the Saint of Duty wasn’t done; as he occasionally did, he ground forward with the force of gravity, and added doggedly:
“Our swiftest fight against a Beast took place in the bathyrhoic layer.”
“Yes, and Number Eight wasn’t tired by the time we got to the barathron, and Ulysses the First had to wrestle it through the stoma, and he is as we speak languishing in Hell! It’s a Resurrection Beast, honey! Thank you! Next!!”
From the end of the table, his white-ringed eyes still bent down upon his papers, the Emperor said quietly: “His was the action of a hero.”
“Oh, but the problem is that heroes always die,” said Augustine, who was worrying an edge of tablecloth between his long and elegant fingers. “You can’t even really pronounce one a hero until they die heroically. I thought the downward assault was a good wheeze when you two first came up with it, Ortus, but we know now that the last push against a Beast has to be sudden and conclusive. I’d rather have fought nine more hours and have Ulysses sitting here right now, inciting a sexy party, than have watched him wrestle that thing out of sight.”
“I hated the sexy parties,” said Mercymorn, with an almost tearful vehemence, and Augustine said, “We know, Joy. We know.”
