fundamentally they were thalergenic in character. Send a necromancer down there and she would be largely useless. Thanergy really came from—
More to the Body than to him, you said: “A planet’s a ball of dust. Its thalergy comes from the accumulation of microbial life. You can’t consider it one coherent system.”
“Call it a communal soul,” said her Emperor. “What’s a human being, other than a sack of microbial life? You’re a bone adept, aren’t you? Flesh magicians are exposed to this idea of a system earlier than in your school.” This was kindly, even humourously said, but you still found that you immediately wanted to be tossed out the airlock at the idea that your aptitude made you less than a flesh magician: someone whose entire education was in the carnal. Experts in things that were yellow, and wobbled. People who thought there was something really interesting to be found in meat.
He mistook your deeply bigoted hate for disbelief, and said: “Just accept the proposition for now that a planet has an enormous single amount of thalergy. If this thalergy is converted, what might happen during that transition?”
“We already know what happens,” you said. Your tongue was growing thick in your mouth, and your eyelids were sore and swollen from wanting to close. The first rush of adrenaline had run its course. The Body came and took your wrist in her hand and ringed her fingers around your bones, quite tightly. This let you say: “The Cohort prepares a planet for necromancy every time they have to breach it. Over time, with the introduction of thanergetic decay, the planet converts. Necromancy proceeds as normal afterward. Nothing happens … plant and animal life both change, of course … and eventually the planet flips totally and the population has to be moved, but that’s such a long-term process that it takes generations. You can’t quantify it as something happening.”
“Now kill the planet all at once,” said her Emperor. “What then?”
You looked at him. The Emperor of the Nine Houses raised his hands, palms up, as though offering a helpless prayer to the roof of the cargo hold. His alien eyes were cool and calm. You knew of only one mass dying-off of planets.
So you said: “You tell me, Lord. You were there for the Resurrection.”
“Yes,” he said. “And I saw the thalergy convert immediately. The difference between dying of illness and dying from murder. An enormous shock, the immediate expulsion of the soul. And just as when a soul is ripped untimely from a human being, when a soul is so rudely taken from a planet—”
Sweat came to the centres of your palms totally unbidden. A trickle of blood started down your leg, and you stopped it in midflow, dried it to flakes on your skin, and clotted the breach. Such an act took no effort now.
“A revenant,” you said.
“Always a revenant,” he said. “Every single time, a goddamned revenant. Pardon the pun.”
You fancied you could see the Body breathing, her chest rising very slightly, in and out. The Emperor crossed his arms and stared across the cargo hold, his face lit from beneath by electric lighting, the gleam in his eyes black and wet. You caught him moistening his lips with the tip of his tongue.
“We called them Resurrection Beasts,” he said.
It took him another moment to continue, and when he did, it was with the air of a man telling a very old story. “When the system died … when I was younger, those ten thousand years ago, and I brought us back from that brink—all those revenants scuttled off to the farthest parts of the universe, as the soul runs from its corpse in the blind first fear of transition. I have never seen a planet make another in the same way; I’ve seen lesser monsters—minor Beasts—but nothing, nothing, like that first wave.
“Harrowhark, those revenants move through the universe, inexorably, without pause … and they feed on thalergenic planets as they go, like vampires … and they won’t stop until I and the Nine Houses are dead. They have had me on the run for a myriad, and they’re nearly impossible to take down.”
This made very little impact on you. It had the dim and nonsensical ring of a fairy story. You said, “The Lyctors have died … fighting these things?”
“Fighting them?” said God. “Harrow, I’ve lost half my Lyctors distracting them. They’re hideously complex to destroy. The ones we’ve killed, we killed through luck—they were young, and we