Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  “Alright,” Gabriel said, his tone gentle.

  “You could have grabbed the Demon at any time,” Seam blurted, unsatisfied with the Archangel’s reaction and refusing, angrily, to use the Demon’s human name. “Made yourself into soup with him.”

  “I could have,” Gabriel agreed calmly.

  “Maybe you should have,” Seam said bitterly. “Protect a younger Angel, all that.”

  “Maybe I should have,” Gabriel admitted. “Maybe my power could have overwhelmed that of a young Demon. Broken the deadlock and actually bumped him off.”

  “Maybe it still could,” Seam said, “if you threw yourself into the mix.”

  “Maybe,” Gabriel agreed again, with equanimity. He looked at Seam. “And maybe you could have told Barry how you felt about him while he was alive.”

  “What?” Seam spluttered.

  “Nothing,” Gabriel grunted. “Forget it.”

  Seam struggled again for a long moment, then sat for an even longer moment wondering if he was going to cry, or be sick, or exude some other internal fluids that would gross the Archangel out. And wondering if he cared.

  Eventually, he composed himself and turned to look Gabriel straight in the eyes. In the sunlight, as opposed to the harsh electric lighting under which he was used to seeing them, their simian amber hue was richer, more earthy.

  He couldn’t meet that gaze for long.

  “It wasn’t really like that,” he mumbled and looked at his shoes, feeling stupid. Not even sure why it was important to make this clear to a celestial being like Gabriel. “I … yeah, I – I loved him, but it … it wasn’t like … it was just more than normal bloke-love, I guess. I don’t know.”

  “If it’s any consolation, the glorified version of Barry was in every meaningful sense the same one you knew as a human,” Gabriel said, “so you got … something of a postscript with him.”

  “He wasn’t really the same,” Seam disagreed.

  “Well, no,” Gabriel allowed. “I don’t know how much he told you about the circumstances of his glorification, but … it was the human part of him that came back, and that was the part you knew. For a while I thought there might be something more…” Gabriel didn’t seem like he intended to elaborate on this. “Think about how calmly you all took his appearance,” he said instead. “I mean, you even managed to hold out for a while after meeting me, and that’s no mean feat. But from what he said, right at the start you all sort of handled his reappearance pretty well, right? He didn’t mention everyone freaking out when he came back.”

  “I guess we all took it pretty calmly,” Seam acknowledged, not really understanding what the Archangel was driving at but sensing, on some level, that the ancient being was trying to console him. “I was freaking out a bit on the inside, but I was mostly just numb.”

  “See, that was Barry’s crowd control,” Gabriel said. “It was solid, right from the moment he landed. Clumsy, but…” he shrugged. “It seemed like when he was with you, he was a better Angel. You should take some comfort in that.”

  “Yeah,” Seam said, then managed a little laugh. “Oh, Tommo had a bit of a religious breakdown,” he added. “On that first night.”

  Gabriel frowned. “Tommo…”

  “He was the one who got murdered,” Seam reminded him levelly.

  “I know who he was,” Gabriel snapped, then went on in a calmer tone. “The three of you, you went to school together, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Always been friends?”

  “Pretty much,” Seam replied.

  “Born at about the same time?”

  Seam shook his head. “Nah,” he said, “all over the shop. Tommo in February, me in May, Barry in September. All in the same year though,” he added.

  “Huh,” Gabriel was squinting at him.

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Gabriel said grudgingly. “The three of you, you were close. It’s – I suppose I never really paid attention to that. I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “I certainly don’t think Barry thought of me, you know, in that way,” Seam went on, “and after he came back … well, it was just a bit strange, wasn’t it? I think a lot of us were … sort of drunk on him. His perfection, the way he’d changed. But I couldn’t see past that,” he shook his head. “Or I couldn’t not see past it.”

  “You loved him before he was glorified,” Gabriel said gently. “Afterwards, it was like some chrome-plated replica of the thing you had before.”

  “Yes,” Seam said, and when he blinked, the tears fell. “I guess you’ve been through this before.”

  Gabriel didn’t seem grossed out by the fluids. “I’ve been through almost everything before,” he said. “Humans aren’t very complicated animals, even though they like to talk about how they are.”

  Seam laughed and wiped his eyes and nose on his sleeve. “The other guys have mostly forgotten,” he said. “About Nails. Sort of. Or they’ve gone into denial, or they’ve just…” he shrugged, lacking the materials at hand to construct an explanation.

  “Like they’ve decided it was a thing that happened and now it’s done,” Gabriel said, “never to be spoken of again. I’ve been around humans a while, like you were saying.”

  “How can they be like that? They saw Angels,” Seam exclaimed bitterly. “Tommo was killed. Vampires, Demons, Nails back from the dead. How can they pretend?”

  “Because that’s what humans do,” Gabriel replied. “They can’t not. How do they go on living, going to jobs, sleeping and waking and obeying the laws of man, knowing this?”

  “How can I?” Seam asked with a short laugh that was mostly sob.

  “Well, that’s a question only you can answer,” Gabriel hesitated. “You … might forget too, you know.”

  “How’d you get here so fast after Barry died?” Seam asked, not wanting to go down that road. “I mean, after he actually died, in the Duxworth. You were already at Preston Point Anglican before he came back – you were waiting there for us that first night.”

  Gabriel shrugged. “I’d been in Perth, north of the river–”

  “I know where Perth is,” Seam said, perhaps a little shortly.

  “Of course,” Gabriel said, unnaturally contrite. “Well, when the glorification process began, I knew roughly where he’d be, and so I laid some groundwork. But I’d actually been in Perth for a couple of years, long before Barry had his accident. This whole thing took a lot of setting up, you have no idea.”

  “What whole thing?” Seam frowned.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Gabriel twirled a long, many-knuckled hand. “Barry’s glorification, and everything around it, was like a … a formula. A set of ingredients that needed to be mixed. And it didn’t work. Not like it was meant to, anyway.”

  Seam remembered, disjointedly, their first encounter with the Archangel. Gozu goa? Gozu goa, yala Pinian?

  “So Barry died and you didn’t get your payoff,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “I suppose,” Gabriel agreed. “It’s all so intricate, so fantastical, even I have trouble believing any of it now. Let alone understanding it. Stormburg’s Theorem isn’t for short-term residents, and you actually have the good fortune of being one of those.”

  “I should resign myself to dying without ever knowing the truth,” Seam said, “is that it?”

  Gabriel raised his massive leathery black eyebrows. “Never,” he said. “What sort of a human would you be?”

  PART TWO: MOSKIN THE ELF

  - - - Fade - - -

  - - - The Flesh-Eater - - -

  - - - Atonement - - -

  FADE

  To say Moskin Stormburg was devout would be a critical – nay, dangerous – understatement. Even Moskin himself would admit that. He believed so relentlessly in God and the blessed Lost Disciples, it wasn’t so much a matter of faith as obsession. When his neighbour made a disparaging remark about the monthly Daja ritual interfering with t
he kangoss playoffs, Moskin killed his neighbour’s family pet.

  This, ultimately, was what led him to Fade.

  He killed his neighbour’s pet morchi-bird16 in a manner laid out in an ancient Pinian text long since abandoned by the modern church, cleanly and painlessly severing its spine, setting aside the waste organs as tribute to the Brotherhood, feeding the musk bladder to the house-spirits17, the eyes and brains and throllipers to the Gyrlei belonging to the neighbour on his other side, and tanning its skin and fashioning hide and feathers into a mulluck-wrap for one of the local homeless. This was a sacrifice of practicality, benefitting many, and it was the sort of thing the old books were full of. These days, of course, with the Disciples gone and the faithful tested in their beliefs by the seeing-is-believing crowd, the church had cut down on the roaring and the bloodletting, and all the real stuff.

  But Moskin had felt it, when he’d killed that yipping rat-bird. He’d felt vindication, recompense for his neighbour’s disrespect, he’d felt the eyes of God open and he’d felt the ground shake as the Disciples took a titanic step nearer to him. And he’d had a vision, the next time he had slept. This wasn’t particularly unusual – biting his tongue at breakfast was sometimes enough to give Moskin a vision – but this time it had been so clear.

  The Disciples were Lost, as all knew, behind the veil that concealed the distant and shining realms of God. The veil could not be lifted, for it had been set in place by the Infinites. But with the right sacrifice, it could be pierced. It was supposed to be pierced. And as with all the great old magics, the required sacrifice was a heavy one. The morchi-bird, showing him the way, had just been the beginning.

  Moskin had sold most of his belongings, everything but his birth blades and the clothes on his back, and with the totality of his worldly mammon had purchased two things: a berth on the Koshanna Doof, and a plot in Fade.

  Frankly, the people of Orbonyville were relieved to see him leave Barnalk Low – and once they knew he was, several of them were forthright in telling him so. Áea-folk did not mess around with whispers behind hands. Moskin had a way, they said, of turning conversations into homilies, and – this one he found particularly amusing – a habit of staring fixedly at your forehead while he was talking, as if he was directly addressing the part of your brain that was telling you to run away.

  No, he wasn’t likely to be missed in Orbonyville.

  Fade was a curious place. It was a nation in its own right by the time Moskin arrived there, albeit a small one. Sixty-odd kilometres long by fifteen at its widest point, it occupied the lowest stair of the Eden Road, a vast cascade of mountain-sized slabs that curled down from the flatworld of Heaven and then … well, faded. Beneath the step on which Fade had grown over the years were three more of the massive formations, each more ephemeral than the last and even the topmost of which was too absent to support a living body, much less a thriving city-state.

  Beneath that trio of ghostly stairs, there was … nothing. An empty gulf in which the great flatworlds of Earth, Hell and Cursèd had once floated. Far, far below the gulf was the terminus and the Eden Road continued down to the Rooftop of Castle Void, marching back into solidity in a similar-but-inverse progression of misty stone. There was even a community on the first solid stair down there, known as The Godfang’s Landing or, rather less poetically, Rise.

  Rise was overrun by Darking worshippers and other denizens of the Castle, however, so it was to Fade that most of the true faithful gathered, at least according to the accepted wisdom around Orbonyville from whence Moskin had come. The faithful of Fade huddled together on the dangling broken helix of the Eden Road and looked out on the emptiness between Heaven and Rooftop, the great mythical Face of the Deep that had swallowed the Disciples of God almost thirteen Firstmade centuries before.

  After a few months in Fade, Moskin had acclimated well. He found he was no longer the craziest person in his neighbourhood. In fact, quite often he wasn’t even the craziest person on his street. There were significantly crazier people, objectively speaking, living in Fade. The city was inhabited predominantly by Gróbs, and Áea-folk like himself. The Áea, known by their common nickname Lowland Elves or simply Elves, often cohabited with large yipping nests of Gyrlei. His new neighbours, in fact, proudly sported a pair of pedigrees that could talk, in a limited fashion.

  There were also assorted Heaven-folk, and of course a few thousand Molren. Moskin was a little intimidated by the former, and wary of the latter – Molren were a rarity on Barnalk Low, even though Moskin knew intellectually that his homeworld was itself a rarity in this sense. Molren found their way everywhere.

  It was ideal … but it wasn’t long before Moskin began to feel that familiar pull. That familiar and intimate sense that God wanted him to be doing more, that he was needed elsewhere.

  That was when he started asking around, and that was when he discovered that the true believers weren’t living in Fade. They weren’t living on the Eden Road at all.

  The true believers went to the Elevator, it was said. And most of them never came back.

  VISITING THE NEIGHBOURS

  That wasn’t how the locals put it, of course. The locals, although many of them were at least as intense in their belief as Moskin was, talked about the truly devout who tried to enter the Elevator as “the real crazies.”

  “The last one to come through was a wild-eyed bastard who said he had pure lineage dating right back to the first Burning Knights,” Soki told him after he’d been living in Fade for two months and paying regular visits to the house she shared with her grandmother for about half that. They hadn’t yet performed the monthly Daja ritual as a group, but he felt that was the next step – it was a safely impersonal and yet community-building observance. “He looked like a regular old Elf with a Panescan squint to me, but who knows? He could have been a long-lost scion of the Pinians’ chosen.”

  Moskin, whose hometown of Orbonyville had been in a region fairly close to Panesca, gave Soki his best stereotypical squint. Soki laughed.

  They were sitting in the back yard of her house, enjoying the sunlight that shone directly down the Eden Road for a handful of pleasant hours each day. Heaven’s distant sun was a stationary and constant source of light, heat and power high above the mighty flatworld, but it only shone down through the opening in the forty-thousand-kilometre-across mass for brief, regular periods. This, the orientation team had explained to Moskin while the Koshanna Doof had been in transit, was because there was a chain of huge airborne farming structures that revolved in the air above the uppermost stair of the Eden Road, and these blocked a lot of the sunlight. A giant stone staircase, and the small community of religious fanatics who lived on it, were deemed a lower priority than the feeding of the hosts of Heaven, and Moskin could hardly fault that. If Heaven had decided to periodically empty its waste treatment shooey over the top of the stairs, the people of Fade would have met it with rapturously upturned faces.

  “When did this Panescan pilgrim light out for the Elevator?” he asked Soki.

  “Four years ago,” she replied, carving off a chunk of rock-pig with the wickedly sharp blade she’d brought out for the purpose, and tossing the ragged shred of meat to Unknown Provenance III, the family’s prize Gyrlei. The lean, arm-long, three-legged lizard loped across the mossy yard and snagged the meat from the air, and Soki cut herself a strip.

  “How did he manage it?” Moskin asked, taking the knife when she offered. He’d brought the pig over, having cornered it and wrung its neck in his attic the previous day and left it to drain overnight.18 He cut off a couple of pieces, chewed one himself and tossed another to Provenance. “This is the last step on the Eden Road that is capable of holding a person,” he knew this, of course, because as well as spending a lot of time on Thrabney Point looking off the craggy grey edge into nothingness, he’d also descended the Carved Face express chute to the tiny satellite community of Dorrow. Dorrow was built on a cantilevered slab of reinforced stone right on the lo
wermost edge of the greater Fade step-block, where Fade met the next block down, Uterña.

  Uterña, while it was technically capable of supporting the weight of an Áea- or Molran-sized person, was insubstantial and unstable. You could step off the Dorrow slab and walk on the indistinct surface of ancient grey stone, provided you moved lightly and constantly and kept yourself on the surface. It was like moving in low gravity across the top of a mass of loose sand or grain. Resistance increased once you were about waist-deep but at that point moving was a challenge. There were shifting patches of lesser density, as well, where people had been known to sink and vanish altogether.

  It had been enjoyable, in a creepy sort of way, and something every newcomer had to try. It was a rite of passage, of sorts. There were scientists in Dorrow studying the Uterña phenomenon but after all the centuries since the worlds below had disappeared – an event that had taken on the portentous but rather uninspired name ‘the vanishing’ – they were no closer to an answer.

  “He waded to the edge of Uterña, found the equivalent of Carved Face on that step – Butcher’s Cascade, I think it’s called – and started to wade his way down it,” Soki said with a shrug of her broad shoulders. “The last anyone saw of him, he was halfway down the edge of the Uterña slab and the solidity wasn’t enough to hold him anymore. He began to fall, faster and faster, and he’d already refused rescue. He dropped, same as any of the hundred lunatics a year who jump off Thrabney Point. He thought the Elevator would manifest and take him in.”

  “And she didn’t.”

  “She didn’t,” Soki grinned and shook her bright mane of green-and-purple hair-spines. “The Elevator doesn’t take Elves.”

  This much at least seemed to be the commonly-accepted wisdom, and made sense when you considered that the Elevator was a construct specifically related and accustomed to operating between the Pinian realms. As such, the Áea-folk were relative strangers, visiting allies at best, and probably hadn’t been added to the Elevator’s manifest. But nothing was really known about her. Her movements were a mystery, impossible to track and apparently outside any mere mortal control. She was a force of nature, beholden to God and – provisionally – to the Lost Disciples.