Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  When his three sacrifices were dead he began the Ceremony of the Fire of Barnalk, stripping and dismembering the bodies and placing heart with heart with heart; brain with brain with brain; lungs with lungs with flatch;27 eyes and teeth and tongues in the centre as a unified pile; and so on it went.

  After the initial cascades of sludge and the brief upwelling of stench with each new stomach-pod, Grodnak was actually not all that unpleasant to deal with. Moskin’s nose may have shut down, he wasn’t sure. His eyes watered and his hands ached. There were words to be spoken, but the driving point of the Ceremony of the Fire of Barnalk was a state of mind, a respect for the lives surrendered and the intricate creation that is – or was – their working bodily functions … there were layers upon layers to the act, and a beseeching cry to the Pinian Brotherhood was only a facet of it.

  As he worked through his weariness, Moskin began to have … insights.

  These weren’t like his visions, which he used to have at the slightest provocation. As he dismantled the three sacrifices and reassembled them into their components around the complex circles and lines of the ceremony, he began to understand. It was difficult to put into words, and so he didn’t try. He saw the three worlds – Earth, Hell, Cursèd – severed from the mortal sphere and dismantled, their pieces scattered and recollected and yet still part of a working system, a meaning unto themselves. They were gone from one sphere but they lived on, interconnected by so much more than the fact that they’d floated together in the darkness. And yet, without that critical connection, without that spark and that conduit, they were just so much heaped-up wreckage.

  He didn’t know what it meant. He was missing something. And if he didn’t figure it out, then the whole thing really would die.

  He didn’t know how it would happen. He didn’t know what was happening in that sphere to which the Infinites had exiled the Disciples. He just knew that the worlds, severed and separated, would perish. And the Disciples … well, they were Firstmades and couldn’t really cease to exist. Maybe they would finally reappear in Heaven to receive new bodies from God. It wasn’t Moskin’s place to say. It just didn’t feel like the sort of punishment the Infinites would impose without reason. Certainly not on the Pinians, who according to all known scriptures and mythology were vastly unlikely to respond to such a punishment. No, it was more likely that something needed to be done to keep the dismantled pieces working, to preserve them and the Disciples with them, until they learned the sort of delicate balance and control and understanding of interconnection that the Ceremony of the Fire of Barnalk taught.

  So maybe it was Moskin’s place to say.

  He was, after all, the one who was going to have to help from this side of the sphere. Of this, he had never been more certain. He was left drained and confused and humbled by the ceremony, but with it had come a sort of clarity. He had no idea what he knew now that he hadn’t before, but he knew that he’d completed the part of his journey that would take part in Fade.

  And, as he had when he’d sacrificed his neighbour’s irritating morchi-bird back in Orbonyville, Moskin felt the eyes of God swing towards him like great beams of warm light, and he felt the ground tremble as the Lost Disciples took another world-shaking step closer. When the light and the Disciples met, he knew, he would be crushed between them and obliterated utterly.

  And it was everything he had ever desired.

  THAT NEXT STEP

  “So what happens now?” Soki asked.

  It was two days later. Moskin had slept like never before in his life, untroubled by the dreams that moved like leviathan under the surface of his subconscious, yet aware of them. Soki had waited, had let him sleep, let him unpack what he’d experienced as best he could. She’d waited for him to come to her, knowing he eventually would.

  “Now?” he hedged, although he knew what she was asking.

  “Can you tell me?” she asked, neutral but cautious. There was no accusation, no challenge in her voice.

  “I’m really not sure I can,” he admitted. “I am convinced that the worlds below us have undergone some great state-change, as well as being made intangible to us. And if it was just that, I wouldn’t be concerned. It would just be another chapter in the struggle between the Firstmades and the Infinites, something we watch from afar and have to be content not to understand. But I almost do understand it. And something has gone wrong.”

  “Wrong?”

  “The worlds changed in the vanishing, and the Disciples were caught in the change,” Moskin tried to explain. “And whatever the Disciples were supposed to do to make the new state workable, it’s failed for some reason. It’s failed, and things are falling apart.”

  “And you think that’s something the Infinites will let us interfere with?” Soki asked. “It sounds like a case for watching from afar and being content not to understand if ever there was one.”

  “Well, that’s just it, isn’t it?” Moskin said, giving her a smile. “Normally the Infinites would make even conceiving of interference impossible. Or as soon as we tried, the Vultures would darken the skies.”

  “If only the Disciples can fix it…”

  Moskin leaned forward. He’d come to recognise, over the years, those rare occasions when he was growing too enthusiastic even for his fellow denizens of Fade, but in this case he thought he was still on the right side of fervour. “You remember what I told you about the things I studied when I visited Heaven,” he said. “The incident with the apparent escape of a Disciple’s soul?”

  “Yes,” Soki nodded. “Something about the soul-journeying ability that the Firstmade Brotherhoods have.”

  “Well, that was the sign,” Moskin said, tapping the table intently with a fingertip. “The incident – if it really happened, of course – proved that there’s a route for souls, and perhaps other kinds of energy, maybe even matter, to pass between this sphere and whatever sphere the worlds below have been exiled to.”

  “What does that have to do with the Disciples solving their own problems?”

  “Well, maybe they were trying,” Moskin said, “but they fell afoul of that soul-burner from Farrendohr. Imagine the three Disciples in there, one of them goes to sleep with the plan to soul-journey out for help–” he clapped his hand on the tabletop, “–and wakes up as an Elf,” he concluded.

  “And not one of the good kind of Elves,” Soki added with a grin. “An ancient old mad broken one. No wonder they gave up on that approach. It probably seemed like a pretty clear message.”

  “‘Stop trying to get out’,” Moskin grunted agreement and sat back.

  “I just don’t see how you doing anything to help the Pinians counts as them solving it…” Soki trailed off, and her eyes widened. Soki Thalaar, while not precisely the same kind of unhinged as Moskin, had beaten her own crooked path in the worship and service of the Pinians. And this was, after all, something of a universal obsession in Fade. “Hell and blood,” she said, “you’re counting on the origin of our species to be the connection.”

  “It’s all I have,” Moskin agreed. “The Áea-folk evolved from a life-form possessed by the Pinian Second Disciple. The Gróbs from the First. The Gyrlei from the Third. If I help them from this side – even just a little – it’s technically as though they are helping themselves.”

  “I’m not sure ‘technically’ is a qualifier the Infinites are all that fond of,” Soki warned in amusement.

  “Oh, not our God either of course,” Moskin smiled. “Loopholes don’t really suit the divine plan.”

  “Twice becursèd in My eyes are the pedants,” Soki homilied.

  “Quite so,” Moskin said. “But ‘an answer tens of millions of years in the making’ is exactly the sort of thing mythology is made of. And that’s what I think we’re a part of, here.”

  “Think big or go back to Barnalk,” Soki laughed.

  “Think big or go back to Barnalk,” Moskin agreed, and laughed with her, feeling exhilaration fill him. Not the wan, weary feeling t
hat he’d experienced when he began to piece together his insights after the sacrifice, but a wild and heady elation.

  It wasn’t quite the blaze of the eyes of God, but it was close. He knew enough to be wary of the feeling, but even so it was intoxicating.

  “This all sounds so vague, though,” Soki said. “Not that I was expecting instant clarity, answers and action, but…”

  Moskin understood her disappointment. After a sacrifice so momentous, after what she’d lost, the expectation of immediate response was strong. Every day, every hour that passed made the deaths of Gyre, Grodnak and Hucklecomb seem more of a waste, made it seem more likely that it was all for nothing. But that was the voice of mortal conceit. Any higher level of urversal awareness, let alone an actual sentient higher power capable of sending these sorts of hints to mortal minds, simply wouldn’t have any interest in making it easy for them. That included bending to the whims and needs of little organisms who had a mere millennium and a half of life in which to figure out mysteries far beyond their capacity to understand. Some things were a lot of work because they were just too hard. Some things were impossible by the same token.

  “It’s a step,” he said. “It was an important step, but it is just a step, it isn’t the ultimate answer. It isn’t anything I can act on. I have to take the next step too, and the next. And there’s no instruction manual for this. There’s no recipe. There’s only old rituals like the Fire of Barnalk,” he frowned, his elation fading. “And I think those have taken me as far as they can.”

  LITTLE ORGANISMS

  AND THEIR LITTLE PROBLEMS

  Moskin remained in Fade for another twenty years.

  He gained a certain amount of notoriety for his threefold sacrifice. Those sorts of things didn’t happen very often, and it had happened relatively close on the heels of his Petition and ascent to Heaven, adding significance to it. Indeed, for a short time he became something of a local celebrity.

  It was partly this that delayed his next move, although it was mostly down to not knowing what his next move was supposed to be. He was under a lot of scrutiny for a couple of years, and gathered a following even though he didn’t really want one. There were many cases of prophets, seers and other holy individuals in the scriptures. All of them stood alone. There was no such thing as a community of prophets in the Book of Pinian.

  He wasn’t sure it was in good taste to claim to be one of those, and so he didn’t. But … well, this was what Fade was all about. They were here to figure out what had happened to the Lost Disciples, and to look out over the emptiness into which they had vanished, and await their return. This was a place that bred mystics of all stripes. If there was a community of prophets, this was it.

  No, he couldn’t say he was a prophet … but he couldn’t say he wasn’t one, either.

  Still, he kept his most personal insights secret, telling himself they weren’t important – wouldn’t even have any meaning – to anyone but him. He shared what he thought, told the most ardent seekers some of the things he’d told Soki. If only for the sake of the Thalaar legacy, and for Grodnak’s relatives, he was humble in the face of the revelations he’d been shown.

  His ‘revelations’, for the most part, meshed with the most widely-held beliefs of the Fade populace. This had the curious effect of discouraging interested parties who dismissed it as more of the same conventional fare, and encouraging those who saw it as another quasi-scientific28 link in the evidence chain supporting the simplest and dominant explanation for the vanished worlds. Its very link-ups to existing theories made it more plausible, and less exciting. And Moskin was happy enough to go along with the generally staid and sensible cross-section of experts this fact brought to his door. In fact, he was relieved.

  The months went by, seeming to gather momentum as they went. And when he wasn’t summoned up the Eden Road in a blaze of divine radiance, when he didn’t stand on the awning shield of the Carved Face express chute and call the Lost Realms back into being with some long-forgotten Pinian incantation, when he didn’t even seem to know what he was supposed to do next, gradually Moskin Stormburg’s fame receded. This, too, was frankly a relief.

  Moskin’s adventure may not have ended with him stepping arms akimbo out onto the misty plain of Uterña and vanishing forever in front of hundreds of applauding spectators, but it had had style. Ritual sacrifice was old school, and the overwhelming majority of Fade’s denizens didn’t consider any other school worth attending.

  That was how a week after the threefold sacrifice became a year after, then two years. And when public interest died down, Moskin went back to waiting. And so two years became ten. And ten became twenty.

  And nothing happened.

  Moskin developed his ideas, wrote a rambling series of electro-vellum pages and assembled the sort of anthology of notebooks that were a demi-yachut29 a dozen in Fade. He had occasional visions when he inhaled the steam from a fresh cup of tea or when he was bitten by one of Soki’s Gyrlei or when he saw a Molran walking past a Grób on the street, but low-key uninformative visions were something of a background state for Moskin, and he continued to function regardless. He waited. And prepared himself. And the years ticked by.

  He wasn’t impatient, and never experienced doubt. He was serene in his knowledge that he’d been led to this point, and would be led to the next point if and when it came to that. Whatever happened, he was a mortal man and knew that he had as much say in it as a dry leaf on a river. When the time came for that leaf to contribute to the river’s course, it would not just become possible – it would become impossible for him to do otherwise. Until then, he waited.

  “You’ve been here a century,” Soki told him one day, out of a companionable post-lunch silence. They were sitting, as they so often did, in her back yard enjoying the short hours of direct sunlight from Heaven between the flying farms. “Did you know that?”

  “A century four, by my count,” Moskin agreed. “Almost a century five.”

  “We should have celebrated your hundred,” Soki complained.

  “I’m not even sure when it was a hundred, exactly,” Moskin chuckled. “I still remember the flight, and the arrival procedures and orientation. It was almost a month before I was fully settled in and my stomach felt right again.”

  “It was easier for me,” Soki agreed. “When I moved here, it was like moving home, just … separated by a generation. I had denizen’s precedent working for me, and a home here with Grandmother.”

  Moskin nodded. His friendship with Soki had steadily deepened, into something very like siblinghood, after the sacrifice. Far from resenting him for killing Gyre, she admired him for doing her a difficult honour. It was, as their Gróbi friend Scad liked to say, very much an Elf thing – although Scad and her family and friends also appreciated what Moskin had done for Grodnak Gradd.

  “Still,” Moskin went on, “the point is, I’m not sure what part of that whole unpleasant period was my official arrival, so it’s hard to say when my hundred years would have started, and therefore when its closing ought to be celebrated.”

  “At any point in that month, obviously,” Soki said in exasperation. “Or even better, we could have performed the Daja, then have had a month-long celebration of red tape, inoculations and explosive diarrhoea before the next one.”

  “I’m almost sorry to have missed it now,” Moskin laughed.

  “The invitations could have been eight pages long,” Soki added, “and required guests to provide character witnesses, genetic markers, samples of every fluid and secretion their bodies were capable of producing … and of course a half-dozen conflicting times and places for the party to actually be occurring.”

  “You do enjoy throwing parties,” Moskin remarked fondly. For someone who doesn’t like sharing her house with the living, went unsaid.

  “You know me,” Soki shrugged. “I’ve never been the quiet-contemplation type,” she paused for a long time, until Moskin decided she’d finished her thought. He was about
to ask her if she’d like some tea when she spoke up again. “You never considered settling down?”

  “I am settled down,” he said, amused and surprised.

  “With a partner,” Soki clarified. “It’s not really my business,” she added casually, “Lord knows lots of folk around here don’t have it in them. It’s just that…” she laughed. “Who are we kidding? I’m perfectly aware that settling down isn’t part of your grand plan. Not even sure why I asked, to be honest. It was that or scratch myself.”

  Moskin laughed again. It wasn’t an unreasonable question, just one that had gone unasked and undiscussed for many years between the two of them. And it wasn’t as if he had gone wanting for the intimate company of others, over the years. He’d always had physical companionship when he wanted it, and – vitally – privacy when he needed it. Indeed, the brief years of relative fame following his threefold sacrifice had provided him with more opportunities for fun, which had been welcome and had contributed to the pleasant passing of the time.

  On some level he’d realised that for his own part of recent liaisons with assorted Elven women and men, he’d been saying goodbye. In his heart, in his blood and his bones, he’d been doing things for the last time. For twenty years – ever since the ceremony – he’d been doing a lot of things for the last time. A lot of them, yes, he’d been doing repeatedly for the last time. But it had still been a sort of holding pattern as he ran out the clock.

  “Ah,” he said eventually, in response to Soki’s unanticipated line of thought, “you know I’ve only ever had eyes for you, my dear.”

  “Your eyes are either failing or insane,” Soki grinned.

  It might have been nice to insist that Moskin had stuck to casual relationships because his only preferred serious one – Soki Thalaar – had been unattainable. But it would be a sweet, pointless little lie. The truth was far more elegant. A serious relationship had never been in the stars, because that wasn’t the way Moskin Stormburg’s cosmos was arranged.