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.”
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