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You had been watching Ianthe. She could not bear meetings, or any kind of organised activity where she might be forced to deal with anyone else’s opinion, which you found strange considering that she had spent her entire life at the hip of her twin sister. She was sitting in her chair with her pallid arm crossed across the shiny gold of her skeleton one, both framed hideously against the coalescing rainbow whites of her robe. Her hair fell in thin, straight sheets over her shoulders, and she rested the back of her head against the chair-back as though she might nap at any moment. She looked to you; you looked away quickly, but you had been caught watching.
Lately you found yourself praying that the traitor was not Ianthe, all the while having seen for yourself the living Coronabeth in the arms of Blood of Eden: the twin who, as far as you could tell, was the only human being Ianthe loved more than herself. For the sake of this sister Ianthe had held your gaze while sliding a knife through the palm of your hand.
Why did you pray for Ianthe’s innocence, when it was so dubious? It was not the way of the Ninth House to pray with such wilful credulousness; yet you prayed all the while knowing Ianthe’s facility for tergiversation would have given the whole universe pause.
That wanton backstabber said idly, “What about the physical form? Is it really invulnerable?”
“At its current trajectory I have triangulated that it will perch—here,” said Mercy, and fixed a map of local space to the plex with round magnets. You were bewildered by how far the perch seemed from the Mithraeum; your erstwhile tutor had pegged its location at, if the diagram read true, somewhere in the orbit of a planet five billion kilometres away. “The asteroid field means that we’ll only get waves of Heralds around twenty-five thousand strong—it can’t all-out rush us.”
Ianthe said, “We know where it is. Bomb it.”
“We tried that, duckling, as I’ve told you,” said her teacher, but quite kindly. He had removed his kit of rolling papers and pouch of evil-looking innards, and had begun to roll a cigarette. “The layer of dead matter and Heralds is two thousand kilometres thick.”
“Send a Lyctor to penetrate the layer, plant the bomb close up. I’ll do it, if courage fails in the hearts of my elders.”
Ortus said, “Tried that,” and Mercy said, “Cytherea was mad for weeks. And I do not mean mad cross, I mean mad insane. She didn’t even touch on the surface.”
“It’s not that getting rid of the corpus wouldn’t be useful,” said the Emperor. “It would be. When Cyrus drew the corpus into a black hole, Ulysses said that it was the simplest thing in the world to dispose of the brain, that it fell into a dormant state, and he could bring it down to a stoma singlehanded … but that cost us Cyrus. And Cassiopeia drove the body into the River alongside its own brain, but only Cassy could have ever done that … or Augustine.”
It was halfway to a question. Augustine said, “I’m not Cassy, John. It’s all theoretical to me.”
And God said, “I hope it stays theoretical. Anyway, the damn thing hardly seemed to care. Put the Heralds aside, Ianthe. Leave them to your sword-hand.”
You said, “And how to defeat the Beast? What does it look like? How will it attack us? What must we expect?”
Mercymorn took her fat-tipped marker and scribbled on the plex, placing her new object squarely in the epirhoic layer. “This is the Beast,” she said.
Augustine said, “That’s a muffin.”
“I see a cloud, but with a face,” said Ianthe. “If you take that main squiggle for an eye.”
You said, “I thought it was a flower,” and God said, “No, yes, I agree, there’s something—florescent about it.”
And Ortus said, “Thought it was a snake in a bush.”
“I hate you all,” said Mercymorn passionately. “I have hated you for millennia … except you, my lord.”
“Thanks,” said God.
“I merely want to put you in a jail,” said his Lyctor, now meditative, “and fill up the jail with acid once for every time you made a frivolous remark, or ate peanuts in a Cohort Admiralty meeting, or said, ‘What would I know, I’m only God.’ Then at the end of a thousand years, you would say, ‘Mercy, I have learned not to do any of these things, because I hated the acid you put on me.’ And I would say, ‘That is why I did it, Lord. I did it for you, and for your empire.’ I often think about this,” she finished.
The Emperor of the Nine Houses said, “I ate peanuts, discreetly, the once.”
You said, “Let us continue on the assumption that the diagram is the Beast.”
“Yes! Thank you,” said your teacher, “except that I noted your use of the assumption, and I would like to remind you, infant, that I also hated you on sight. The Beast’s brain will sit in the epirhoic layer, and it will attack us in—any way it chooses. Each Beast is different. I have fought numerous now, and each Beast is quite unlike any other … Number Two spewed quicksilver and remade itself into hundred-foot spikes. Number Six kept sucking us into enormous sphincters and spraying us with worms. I cannot even remember what it looked like. I remember Number Four … it was a humanoid creature with a beautiful face who held me under the water, and it spoke in a lovely voice but it only repeated, die, die—and I recall Number One as a great and incoherent machine … when I saw it I thought it had a great tail, and a thousand broken pillars on its back, but Cassiopeia saw it as a mechanical monster with swords for wings, and great horns of myelin, tessellated over with graves.”
It was the Saint of Duty who said, restlessly: “Number Eight was a giant head.”
“Finned like a fish,” said Augustine, lost in reverie. “Its ribs were bloody bandages, and its teeth protruded through its own skull, tangled about its face like a nest. It was red, and it had a single eye of green that moved all about the body … Look,” he said, coming back to himself, perhaps seeing something in your and Ianthe’s expressions. “They’re not great, is what we are saying.”
Ianthe said, “Then this is a waste of time, eldest sister. We can’t plan on fighting it.”
“We can arrange our formation,” said the Saint of Joy primly. “Take your own section of the Beast, and concentrate. You, idiot baby, will take the east. Augustine will take the west, Ortus the north. I will take southmost to its central point, whatever that point looks like, and whatever it may be—it may be we can’t even comprehend it spatially, but at that point, fight it and get out of everyone else’s way.”
You said, “What about me?”
No one looked at you, except for Mercymorn. Ianthe’s gaze was fixed in some totally different direction, perhaps her appointed east; Augustine was lighting a neatly rolled cigarette, and the Saint of Duty simply studied the shield pulled down over the wide window that had used to look out into space. Even God did not look up from whatever administrative work concerned the Prince Undying. The only eyes for you were Mercy’s: that endless, red-shaded hurricane, sinking into those sandy brown depths, moving over the face of grey waters.
“Just don’t get in the way,” she said.
Augustine said smoothly: “See where you’re needed, sis. It may be that the Beast has some vulnerability you can mark. Or it may try to attack us from without, which means you’ll be useful on the perimeter. Keep flexible.”
This would have been a perfectly reasonable request had its meaning not been so obvious. Do not distract us with your death.
The Kindly Prince said, idly: “He’s right, Harrowhark. From what I can tell, it’s useful to have someone who can move laterally, rather than being obliged to keep to one place … and in any case, like most best-laid plans, this one won’t survive contact with the enemy. Do what you feel is best, and everyone else will endeavour not to swamp your skeletons … Can we have a tea break, Mercy? I’m gasping.”
Your sister closest in age did not stand, as everyone else did, at God’s request to put the kettle on. She was still looking at the black diagram, and she asked, quite unconcernedly: “What is the stoma?”
Mercy said, “Augustine, you did tell her about the stoma,” in tones of accusation, but he simply said: “No. I saw no reason to frighten her. Why—did you tell Harrowhark?”
Naturally, you had not been told about the stoma. Your teacher simply said, fractiously, “She’ll never see it! Why bother?”
“If I have my way, we’ll leave Ianthe safely in the mesorhoic. We three old lags will be more than enough to take it down,” said Augustine sharply. Ianthe’s languid brown-spotted gaze dragged up to him as though it barely had the energy to do so. “That thing has a ferocious gravitational pull. It’s not for neophytes.”
“Excuse me, we may not all of us be alive by the time the thing is exhausted, so I would stop swaddling your squalling baby—”
“You never did take the stoma seriously, which is why your whole damned House sucks at it like a grotesque teat—”
“Don’t be coarse—”
