“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.”