a nightmarish mess of the organic and the inorganic, all of it a false mirage of spirit-stuff. It was a mass of bloody, crumbling rock faces; it was a hexapod with hairy insect legs, bristling with clay-covered spines. It was primarily grey, but a gory, slimy, sandy grey, organically seething yet still somehow stonelike. And it made a break for it.
Mercymorn hollered from the shore, her voice a muffled shout in the wind and the creak of the grinding waves: “It’s getting away!!”
You sheathed the sword and dived. Better to stay alongside the creature than to deal with importunate ghosts. The surface of the water parted for you, murky and oily—smelling like blood, and tasting like effluent. You opened the back of your wrist and worked needles of bone from your distals, and from them you formed a cluster of long, ragged harpoons. You told the pain that it was not truly pain, not truly your wrist, not truly your bones, only your mind’s excellent approximation thereof. You tied your perceived tendons into sinewy ropes. You raised the first harpoon. You judged. You threw.
The first harpoon bounced off the trembling mess of mineral and muscle, though not before it dislodged crumbling clumps of crystal viscera. The second stuck fast. The third popped its way through some gritty, corneal mass and was left floating in the water in a cloud of boiling, dusty fat. The fourth and fifth found their targets. You skidded and bumped behind the planet’s soul as it screamed and took off. As it dragged you through the River, the water rocketed up your mind’s sinuses and scoured the backs of your mind’s tonsils, and so your mind vomited gouts of water as it was bumped along in a single indignity behind the proto-Beast. You tugged yourself along on the slippery ropes of your own muscle and collagen, and from the shattered remnants of your javelins you raised construct after construct. You let your javelin clatter alongside one hip and climbed alongside your skeleton crew until you had mounted the ghost entirely, clutching handfuls of false stones that tore the soft flesh of your palms, holding on to carapaceous insect tarsus, holding on to gobs of aggregate and flesh.
Your constructs climbed over themselves, over the pseudo-Beast—it thrashed a few back into the water, but the rest climbed on steadily, untouched by fear—and, panting, you hauled yourself up after them. To your hand you transferred the javelin, ringed around your forearm by your seeping rope of tendon, and in the other you raised your two-handed sword. This might have been cool if it wasn’t faintly ridiculous. The Beast started to roll, an infant animal ghost that knew nothing but to flounder in its predator’s jaws: you drove your sword into its spirit as you had driven your sword into its mantle, as the water closed over you again in a maddening rush of filthy, tainted waves.
You thought: I’ll end it. The skeletons—you had made their legs sharpened stakes, driven them into anything soft and jammed and glued them on to anything hard—were tilling up the damned thing with their fleshless hands. You turfed up boiling rock and flesh with your javelin, trying to scrape away the surface, trying to uncover the brain. It was too young and weak to have made a skull. Gathering up your hate, your fear, and your serenity, you thrust your javelin down the moment you perceived a wrinkle of hemisphere, straight through the lobes, and you made the spike a wheel, and you cleaved in half that which was already dead.
Less than sixty seconds later you were curled up on the surface of the planetoid, half-dead with cold, trying to flush your extremities and dilate your blood vessels. Wading out of the River had never been a problem for you; you were always happy to go. The night-stricken planet had not reacted overmuch—you prided yourself on being the knife that cut silently—but the sandstorm had died as though arrested in midair. Particles that had been whipped miles up into the atmosphere were pattering down like rain. It grew exceedingly dark as the suns set in unison, and Mercy had clipped a little light to her ever-present clipboard as she wrote, which created a tiny corona of her pen, and the clipboard, and the softly falling sand.
A shaft of light fell on the dead beauty of the Body. She was always there, when you made the cut. She was always there to welcome you home