bond with that thing through habit and genetics, it’s your soul’s preferred housing. Unfortunately, apopneumatic shock makes most of us do a blind dash away from the site of our deaths—Resurrection Beasts included. The card up the sleeve of the revenant, and the Resurrection Beast, is that it can inhabit anything it’s got a connection to. Anything thanergetically connected with their death.”
Ianthe suggested, in what you saw as a low-value suck-up play: “Burial implements. Grave goods. Any possession that they kept over time, that was exposed to their thalergy and thanergy. If they were murdered, the murder weapon.”
“Bang on,” said Augustine. “Even things that touched the murder weapon, though the connection’s fairly weak there and the revenant would have to be particularly bloody-minded.”
She pressed, “Could they use thanergy they generated after death? Thanergy directly related to themselves? I mean, things they kill.”
“You are absolutely and beautifully right,” said the Saint of Patience warmly, and you were not annoyed that she had won such approbation. It was not as though your brain had failed to come to the same conclusion; you simply hadn’t felt like articulating. “This is how the RBs got on, having scarpered away from the Dominicus system. Resurrection Beasts add to their corpus anything they’ve done a good solid murder to. They eat planets; they suck up the thanergy, then add bits of the planet to themselves, getting bigger and meaner each time. Your average revenant doesn’t kill human beings and stick them on its outside—for which I’m devoutly thankful. The last time we eyeballed Number Seven, it was over fifty thousand kilometres in diameter…”
“This is why you will be sent out to establish the perimeter,” said God, as Augustine was lost in fifty thousand kilometres of reverie. “We can slow Number Seven if we take away its food. If we flip a planet all at once—a thalergetic death—the Resurrection Beast will ignore it.”
(“This is the way we used to prepare a thalergy planet for necromancy,” God explained to you, much later, after Mercy began schooling you in the way of butchering planetoids. “No adept can perform any substantive work if they’re reduced to scavenging trace thanergy. Even a master of the Ninth can only do so much with a few scattered bones. So back at the start we’d drop in a single Lyctor, unnoticed, to start the thanergy reaction. Not to flip the whole planet, you understand, just to get the juice flowing.” He made a hand gesture for get the juice flowing, which made your head hurt. “Then within an hour or two you could send down a team of adepts and be confident they’d have all the reserves they needed. Nowadays we can’t afford to use Lyctors, so the first strike falls to the men and women of the Cohort, and they do a magnificent job … but the old way was neater, and kinder too, I think.”)
Ianthe said, “If the Resurrection Beast is that big, surely the main worry is that we’ll be drawn into its gravity well.”
“Yes, but it almost never travels as a physical revenant. That’s why it’s so damned hard to track Beasts: much easier if they’d just leave flattened galaxies in their wake. They travel as River projections instead. ‘Periscoping,’ Cass called it. And once they do instantiate, they don’t seem to want to get too close. This is where the Heralds come in. Unlike normal revenants, RBs have developed external actors, and those are the things that will attack the Mithraeum. We’ve nicknamed this the hive, and inside the hive are the Heralds. They’ll look like independent creatures, but really they’re just extensions of it. Spider, web. Hand, finger.”
This whole lesson took place with you, God, and Ianthe sitting at the dining table, which still smelled like breakfast, and you did not like the lack of ceremony. Augustine was leaning over the table drawing a careful diagram on a piece of flimsy with a pencil he had borrowed from God. The resulting sketch was almost impossible to follow.
“You keep saying creatures,” you said. “That is a little—”
“Nondescript?” said Augustine. “I can’t describe them, sis. The first time we ran into the tools of a Resurrection Beast—and this was just looking at them, I mean, they hadn’t even engaged us—I watched a Lyctor, one I had never hitherto seen so much as cry out, scream like a colicky child. Another two, RIP since, simply vomited.”
God added, “The Heralds and corpus sometimes vary between Beasts. They are the dead parts their