You looked at him. The Emperor of the Nine Houses raised his hands, palms up, as though offering a helpless prayer to the roof of the cargo hold. His alien eyes were cool and calm. You knew of only one mass dying-off of planets.

So you said: “You tell me, Lord. You were there for the Resurrection.”

“Yes,” he said. “And I saw the thalergy convert immediately. The difference between dying of illness and dying from murder. An enormous shock, the immediate expulsion of the soul. And just as when a soul is ripped untimely from a human being, when a soul is so rudely taken from a planet—”

Sweat came to the centres of your palms totally unbidden. A trickle of blood started down your leg, and you stopped it in midflow, dried it to flakes on your skin, and clotted the breach. Such an act took no effort now.

“A revenant,” you said.

“Always a revenant,” he said. “Every single time, a goddamned revenant. Pardon the pun.”

You fancied you could see the Body breathing, her chest rising very slightly, in and out. The Emperor crossed his arms and stared across the cargo hold, his face lit from beneath by electric lighting, the gleam in his eyes black and wet. You caught him moistening his lips with the tip of his tongue.

“We called them Resurrection Beasts,” he said.

It took him another moment to continue, and when he did, it was with the air of a man telling a very old story. “When the system died … when I was younger, those ten thousand years ago, and I brought us back from that brink—all those revenants scuttled off to the farthest parts of the universe, as the soul runs from its corpse in the blind first fear of transition. I have never seen a planet make another in the same way; I’ve seen lesser monsters—minor Beasts—but nothing, nothing, like that first wave.

“Harrowhark, those revenants move through the universe, inexorably, without pause … and they feed on thalergenic planets as they go, like vampires … and they won’t stop until I and the Nine Houses are dead. They have had me on the run for a myriad, and they’re nearly impossible to take down.”

This made very little impact on you. It had the dim and nonsensical ring of a fairy story. You said, “The Lyctors have died … fighting these things?”

“Fighting them?” said God. “Harrow, I’ve lost half my Lyctors distracting them. They’re hideously complex to destroy. The ones we’ve killed, we killed through luck—they were young, and we were at full power—and then … once our numbers thinned out … by sheer accident, or by suicide mission.”

“How many revenants are there?”

You prepared for an astronomical number. The Body raised its eyebrows when the Emperor Undying said, “Three.