by Tamsyn Muir
All the Saint of Joy said was, “I never needed the dramatics, but go on, and try not to do anything tectonic.”
As you had never done anything tectonic in the past, it was with an edge of resentful fury that you lifted the hilt high above your head. You drove the point of the bone-sheathed blade into the talc—obviously you never wanted it to have an edge of any kind, ever again—and using the sword as your focus, drove a killing lance of thanergy right into the planet’s heart.
The planet did not quake, or howl, or freeze, or writhe, skewered on your necromancy’s tines. You began the cascade outward, as you had been taught. A wide thanergetic scythe sheared out into the mantle, deeper into the minute thalergy of the rock, into the solid stone’s buried recollections of the day its ball of dust was formed. So much more difficult, on a planet of this character; that was why Mercymorn had chosen it, along with the hope that you would end up an ice corpse. The thanergy reaction had to be carefully wrought. Here the soul of the planet was in the striations of its sand and minerals: a soft woven network of miniature creatures, of bacteria, of thin, stretched-out skeins of life. You had not even understood what to look for, the first time. Now you felt it as you felt the sand scouring the outside of your suit.
You fell to a sitting position, and adopted the same posture as Mercymorn: feet flat on the sand as the wind howled, your spine a soft C-curve; this way when it was over you wouldn’t have a serious backache. You pressed your haz-shod shoe tips to the upright blade of the sword, and you felt the planet become aware that it was dying.
The cascade was perfect. Your cascades always were. The thanergy scoured through the soul like a lit taper touched to flimsy. The living flush of this rocky outcrop began to die in dizzying, concentric rings: flipping, the thanergy feeding on the thalergy as locusts fed on wheat. As the soul tore away, an extra thanergetic bloom fanned the fire of what you had already done. You were satisfied with the precision of your strike: you did not sit around anxiously, as you had done the first half a dozen times, but you closed your eyes, and you waded into the River even as the ghost of the planetoid started to rock itself free.
Teacher had described the bone or flesh magician’s transition to the River as like a sculptor being given a bowl of water and told, Build a statue, whereas the spirit magician was a swimmer given a block of marble and told, Do a lap. You loved God like a king, and you loved God like the promise of redemption, and you loved God like you weren’t even sure what, you had loved so seldom. But you hated his analogies with the depth and breadth of your soul.
Sculptor or swimmer, letting go proved more difficult than anything else. Part of you was always dimly frightened of it. Your fellow necrosaint-in-training now bragged that she could do it near-instantaneously: like closing her eyes, she always said. You had never found it natural. Your mind you dug out of your meat, and you drove it downward—always downward, somehow—and pushed with your awareness until you felt underfoot the dagger-sharp rocks of that grey and unimaginable shore beneath that grey and featureless sky. Then a step into that icy water, and another, until you were waist-deep and might open your eyes. You could see where the planet’s soul was thrashing. The ghosts had parted as though promptly combed away from that turbulent whirlpool churning. A Minor Beast. No Resurrection Beast, of course: this newborn ghast would need a thousand years of malign intent to become anything close to a true Beast. Or so you were told. You’d still never seen a true Beast. The great two-handed sword was in your hands, now light as forgiveness. You hauled yourself up to stand upon the face of the churning grey waters, and, wet through with filthy, bloodied spume, you began to walk toward the maelstrom.
You knew without venturing a look over your shoulder that Mercymorn the First stood on the shore, watching critically, the hem of her pearlescent Canaanite robes wet through. She was probably making faces at the growing stain. In the River her hurricane eyes were scouring, widening curlicues of ruddy grey, excruciating to look upon. You were glad that Mercy would see your facility with the spirit, a skill you were killing yourself trying to perfect. Nonetheless, you were also glad she was not close enough to distract you as you approached the jerking, squirming soul: 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 w
rote, 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 from the abattoir. She thoroughly screwed up your peripheral vision: at times you panicked and speared her through, and she would only look at you with an unreadable, lifeless expression.
“One fewer for Number Seven to eat on the way in,” said the Saint of Joy. “Eight minutes thirty-four,” she added, because Mercy always lied when one thought she wasn’t going to, and never lied when one assumed she would, and mixed it up every so often to unbalance everyone further. “Not really good enough, Harrowhark.”
You swallowed down large quantities of icy saliva in the cold, in the dark. Within your helmet, frigid strands of hair had glued themselves to the back of your neck with sweat: you were going to need another haircut. You could not keep the querulous note out of your voice when you said, “That’s two minutes off my previous time, eldest sister.”
“Yes,” said the Lyctor, and you could imagine her focus behind the dark plex of her haz mask as she carefully drew another line on the graph she was plotting. “You’ve been improving rapidly. But you could take it down in four minutes, infant, and it would still be not really good enough.”
Your tongue slurred in your mouth: “Because these are so different from the real Resurrection Beast?”
“No,” said the Saint of Joy, and her voice took on the gossamer thinness of a razor blade, poisoned by being perfectly reasonable. “You could take it down in two. You could take it down in one. But what it boils down to, baby sister, is that you’ve got hypothermia and I don’t!”
All the way back to the Mithraeum, in the tiny shuttle, you brooded on that. So many ways you had tried to contravene the inescapable fact that, when you went into the River, your necromancy on the meat side fell apart. Mercy never had to ask the unkind elements for her namesake, but you were unutterably vulnerable, no matter what you tried. Constructs crumbled, even ones you’d made of permanent ash. Your wards faltered. Your theorems failed. Bone you had manipulated would hold shape so long as you removed all artificial stimulation, but it took tedious trial and error to discover how to make your exoskeleton inert so that upon reawakening you would not find yourself weighed down by dissolved collagen. When your brain travelled back to your flesh, your arts would all spring neatly into being as though a valve had been turned to let them flow once more; but until then …
This was the secret of the Lyctoral process. When a normal Lyctor’s soul went to the River, the dead, blank energy that had once been their cavalier kept the lights on in their body. A normal Lyctor’s dormant shell responded with mechanical precision to threats mundane or fantastic. It could normalise its own temperature; it could filter poisons and toxins; it could repair damage with preternatural speed; and, of course, it could fight like a highly disciplined tiger. A Lyctor’s limbs remembered all the training of her stolen second self, and would use it, ruthlessly and perfectly, until the Lyctor came back to reclaim them.
A normal Lyctor’s body could look after itself. But it had become obvious to everyone: you were not a normal Lyctor.
13
NOT A NORMAL LYCTOR was God’s favourite euphemism. Your assigned brothers and sisters favoured different terms. (The Saint of Patience quite liked “diet Lyctor.” You sometimes planned Augustine’s death, and you did not make it quick.) But you found chilly comfort in being within a range of normality, rather than on the wrong side of a binary. Within that range was also Ianthe the First. On that same night, after you came back safely to the arms of the Mithraeum, you found her sat in the tawdry quarters of her forebear glumly eating soup.
Her exquisite Canaanite robe hung from a peg—you noticed that the hem was muddy—and she was wearing one of the ridiculous skirts and shirtwaists she had unearthed from the wardrobe, all of which had Valancy carefully embroidered on the inside seams. The skirts and waists were all beautifully cut for someone of a different height and body type than Ianthe possessed. They were tight where they should have been loose and loose where they should have been tight. They looked like her burial clothes, and she looked as though she had emerged fifty years after that burial.
This particular garment, a deep spinel-tinged satin, exposed one shoulder entirely, and it was the shoulder of what you had come to think of as the arm: the right arm that Cytherea the First had removed just above the elbow, with somebody else’s reattached wholesale. The new limb hung heavy from its olecranal point with a bluish seam. It looked fat and swollen and unused, which was ridiculous, because you had never been able to see anything wrong with it. It had been very nicely matched to the original until she had ceased using it altogether, and the difference was more pronounced each day. Unconscious of your critical eye, she scratched fretfully at the line until red hives appeared.
“Fifteen ten,” said your sister Lyctor, as soon as she noticed you.
You said, “Eight thirty-four,” and she said, “My God! Hark at the creature. Eight thirty-four … and such a dreadful pity that it doesn’t even matter.”
She was in a filthy mood, if she was wearing that thing, with her arm exposed. You were not in the best frame of mind yourself.
“Let us interrogate,” you said. “Does it not matter because despite cutting three whole minutes off your previous time you could never hope to challenge me in this arena, or does it not matter because I’m going to die to Number Seven?”
“You’re being damned optimistic if you think you’ll live to see Number Seven,” she said, blue eyed, those oily little freckles glittering almost pinkly above the dress. They reflected the red rims of her eyelids. You thought that she had been crying. “I’m amazed you made it here from the docking bay without getting assassinated, Harry.”
“I will not answer to that sobriquet.”
“Close the door and I’ll call you Nonagesimus.”
There were a few academic reasons that you closed the door, and from the inside, rather than behind you as you left. Her quarters held some measure of safety for you, as she warded with the paranoid focus of an escaped murderer, and therefore half as tightly as you did. You got better autopsies of her encounters with Beasts than you did from your own, as Augustine was wont to explain significantly more to her than either he or Mercy did to you.
But by the Sewn Tongue, those fucking rooms. Those candied, white-and-gold-striped rooms, those crystal-chandeliered rooms with a bed as big as some of the penitential cells back home. You’d hated them from first sight, as instantaneously as Ianthe took a fancy to them. You despised the cobwebby, overornate furniture, with filigree on curlicue on flourish, the masses of embroidery thread, the hangings on everything, swath of fabric atop another swath of fabric squashed down on a plush divan that rustled if you sat on it; and most upsettingly, the paintings. They were life-sized nudes in languorous attitudes, generally in oils, and all of the same two persons. They were enthusiastically executed. The duo posing held a variety of objects both likely and unlikely. You had once been fool enough to recommend that Ianthe take them down, at which point she had rustled up another from the bathroom and hung it in pride of place above an overpainted dresser. It was not that you were a prude. It was simply that sitting in a room with those paintings was like having a long visit with someone who kept laughing at their own puns.
But despite the violently awful nudes—the excess of latticework—Ianthe—you were a frequent visitor to her den. You took such a pitiful pleasure in Nonagesimus, now that you had spent months being Harrowhark the First. As God said, you might be the ninth saint, but you could never be Ninth again—except when you closed Ianthe’s door.
“It’s down to your want of ambidexterity, Tridentarius,” you said, giving her the same sickly pleasure in nomenclature. “It’s not exactly mathematics. You are trying to fight with a sword in your wrong hand. I am not even trying to fight with a sword. As I’ve been t
old tiresomely often, a half-cocked version of something is significantly worse than not being cocked at all.”
Despite the fact that you had said not being cocked at all, Ianthe only slurped angrily at her soup, making a sound like custard going down a flute. “Tell me to stop breathing,” she said. (“I have, on multiple occasions,” you said.) “You won’t understand. It’s utterly instinctual. It doesn’t matter if I try to fight from a distance. I’ll flinch at something, and then Babs will kick in, and the arm won’t work—”
“You cannot pass the blame on to your burnt-up soul. It’s psychological.”
“Bullshit,” she said, with vehemence.
Babs indicated a very bad day. She so rarely mentioned her cavalier. “Augustine is critical, I take it.”
“Augustine told me they might as well smother me along with you.”
You were only astonished that you had any ego left to bruise. She took another spoonful of soup and said, her whey-coloured face dissatisfied: “He says the same thing you do … psychological … says I persist in being damaged for my own enjoyment.”
Still cold and very weary, you laid your sword at your feet and sat yourself down in a high-backed armchair with a frill around the bottom, done up in citrine stripes. Ianthe’s rooms were undoubtedly more luxurious than yours, and more interestingly appointed, having belonged for centuries to a long-dead Lyctor with time enough to come back every so often and furnish them to taste: but that long-dead Lyctor still seemed to sit in all the chairs and lie in the bed and shave by the water-pump sink, and you were relieved that your rooms contained no ghosts but your own.
