“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