“‘Definitely’?” Moskin asked cautiously.
“Well, alright, there’s a strong possibility,” Bayn said a little huffily. “Look,” she replayed the sequence. “One of them is moving around in a tiny area here. The other two–”
“I see,” Moskin said, and deep inside him he felt an uncontrollable excitement rising, fanning the flames of his ever-present exultation. This was no vision, and yet it bore all the psychological hallmarks. “They … for some reason I thought the three of them would be together.”
“I thought so too,” Bayn said. “It is possible they’re separated in order to cover more ground and keep things running – rather like the Angels are. But yes … historically the revered Firstmades do their greatest work in unison. If they were going to be separated to cover territory, indeed, I would have expected each of them to be on a different planet in the system – which would have been wonderful, because it would have allowed me to locate those planets and begin plotting them – but no such luck, apparently. There’s simply no rhyme or reason to this,” her tone and words indicated the crazed scribble of the Lost Disciples’ destinies, even if she lacked hands to do so.
“Okay,” Moskin said, “maybe there is and maybe there isn’t. How about you start by explaining how you used my sacrifice and visions to fuel your Disciple detector.”
THE WAIT
To Moskin Stormburg, already accustomed to patiently waiting for the way forward to be revealed to him in a searing flash of divine inspiration, life on board the Flesh-Eater was almost ideal. He was comfortable, he had his hand on the sizzling current of the Pinian Brotherhood’s disappearance, and every aactur of his being told him he was exactly where he needed to be.
Elf and Flesh-Eater got along, for the most part. There were moments of tension that were equally shared out between the frazzled nerves of a tired or overstressed organic and the … the whatever it was that Bayn had, that made her occasionally erratic and moody. They always sorted it out, and it was unusual for Moskin to go to bed worried about his chances of waking up intact and not pickled in an interface pod alongside Blacknettle.
It was after one such moment of discord – time on board the Flesh-Eater was easy to lose track of, even more so than in Fade, so it was difficult to be entirely certain just how long after his arrival it was – that Moskin noticed the ship’s interior had returned to its default gleaming white-enamel finish.
It hadn’t happened as a result of the disagreement, he was sure. That had been a minor thing, a discussion about biospheres and group behaviour that had turned abruptly acrimonious and judgemental, but had swung back just as quickly. It had, he thought, perhaps made him aware on a deeper level of the psychological and environmental needs of organisms as opposed to an entity like Bayn, and that in turn had caused him to pay attention to the ship’s environment.
He thought back, though, and was almost certain he remembered eating at a pristine white gastroclave on several occasions in recent day-equivalents. Maybe going back months. Had it happened one night-shift when he was sleeping, and he hadn’t noticed? Or had Bayn been phasing the decorations out slowly for some time?
And Moskin realised it didn’t matter. He wasn’t as bothered by the dental white smoothness now as he had been when he’d come on board. In fact, he thought about the forest backdrops and other decorations, and almost snorted. Tacky, gloomy, artificial self-deception. Signs of a dependent mind.
The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that this must have been a result of his increasing mental unity with Bayn. They were thinking more alike because, on a deep physiological, chemical level, they were calibrating themselves with one another. Every step took them further, and even looking at it as emotionally and reactively as he could Moskin couldn’t really see a downside to it. He wasn’t being integrated into the ship – they were just synchronising. He couldn’t pin down any particular way he had changed. If he went back to Fade at that moment and walked into Soki’s or Scad’s house, he was fairly sure there was nothing physically or behaviourally different about him.
Time continued to trickle by. They lived, or so it sometimes seemed, by the spinning and looping of the intangible planet that somehow occupied the gulf in which they floated. Its time was their time, and that shouldn’t have made any difference because both spheres apparently operated according to the Firstmade calendar, but of course everything they experienced of the Earth-planet came through Bayn’s analytics and the assorted sensors. It could be slowed down, sped up, played back, and frozen. And that warped Moskin’s comprehension of time as well.
Once, Bayn raised the possibility of finding Elves using Moskin’s mental patterns.
Moskin shook his head. “There haven’t been any Elves on Earth for a long time. Maybe the other realms, but from what I gather, humans and Elves didn’t get along.”
“What about the Burning Knights?” Bayn asked. “They were on Earth.”
Moskin shook his head again. “They were in Hell, in some deep underground storage. That was what the records in Fade and Heaven say. At least a couple of garrisons.”
“Yes,” Bayn agreed, “yes, they’re the ones I’m thinking of. I actually made a few sweeps attempting to contact their technology – they flew Category 8s, you know.”
“The Ladyhawk,” Moskin smiled.
“Quite so. I thought there might be some compatibility, some echo – but no such luck. Perhaps if you reach out to the Knights, and I reach out to the ships–”
“We can look,” Moskin said doubtfully, “but I think it’s pointless. The Burning Knight garrison we read about in Fade was ancient.”
There were plenty of stories about the Burning Knights and their resting-place, but they were little more than legends. They’d been lost long before the Disciples and the Pinian realms had vanished.
Soki had liked talking about the Burning Knights, he remembered, because of the preservation and enhancement methods the mythical Áea-based warriors were said to have undergone. They were, she’d said, the only breathsuckers with the potential to turn her head.
They searched, but it was fruitless. Aside from the endless silent death-scream of the Earth-planet, and the frozen slumbering mote that was the Destarion, there didn’t seem to be anything else at all.
More time passed.
Then, one night, Moskin had a dream.
FIRE
He had been dreaming more intensely of late, although he could not have said when the trend began.
Indeed, they had stopped being dreams at some point, and flawlessly merged into his waking cycle of visions. He was certain he hadn’t soul-journeyed himself, because he was incapable … but Bayn was convinced that he was capable of folding some part of his consciousness into the sphere to which the Disciples had been exiled, as long as he had some sort of anchor on either side. Perhaps that was what he had done.
If he had, it had been wholly unintentional. He’d seen streets, shadowy buildings, a dark vault of sky. And he’d seen wheeling stars that were nothing like the emptiness of the gulf or the incandescent wheel of Cursèd’s Playground.
He’d seen cobblestones, and dust, and he’d smelled soot and rotting food and animal waste. Only for an instant, but – like the twisting scrawls of the Lost Disciples on the Earth-globe display, it lingered. He’d seen a humanoid figure, and at the same time – as so often happened in dreams – he’d been the figure.
He’d recognised the surroundings as a city, even though it was like no city he’d ever seen. It was nothing like the cities of Earth and Hell that he’d seen in old records, nothing like the community of Fade or his old home of Orbonyville, certainly nothing like Axis Mundi and the citadels of Heaven. Ramshackle and rough, it was more like something out of an ancient text. It was alien, gloomy for more than just the fact that it was night-time. He knew, with that same rock-solid dream-certainty, that he was standing in the seething mass of living and dying humanity in which one of the Disciple-threads had been loiterin
g and coiling while the other two criss-crossed landmasses elsewhere on the globe.
He was in the presence of a Lost Disciple.
And at that, the moment passed. He felt himself float, felt the eyes of some invisible behemoth light upon him, felt a jarring chord of exaltation and shock run through him. He felt a fury of heat, saw a blossoming of flame inside one of the ill-constructed buildings. He saw ovens, smelled fresh bread and searing meat. Heard screams.
And then he was back in the Flesh-Eater, awake and gasping for air as though his lungs had just been sucked empty by a storm of fire.
He ran to the observation deck. Bayn didn’t have to hear his requests aloud anymore – she knew where he was headed and opened the passages for him by instinct. The globe lit up, turning as peacefully as an object picked out in deathsparks could. Easily, Moskin found the little shape of the landmass where the Disciple dwelled.
It was impossible to see a difference, with the data they were receiving and the scales at which they were operating. Bayn later managed to establish that a conflagration had swept the city, but it hadn’t noticeably or immediately increased the death toll. More people had died in the aftermath – a panicky backlash all too common in humans, Bayn hypothesised, with foreigners blamed and homeless trampled – than had perished in the fire itself. It was the destruction of infrastructure, as far as they could see from their strange perspective, that had been most spectacular.
The fire destroyed thousands of homes and buildings, including most of the region’s churches, forever extinguishing the lights of almost ninety Angelic shelters that Bayn had managed to map. There had not been any Angels in the city at the time, thankfully, although within a few days four of the six had come – presumably to assess the destruction, and to see whether any of their precious holy ground remained accessible.
It was an old city, and had plenty of Angel-friendly structures. It wasn’t so old that it had any corresponding marker on Bayn’s maps of Earth’s nations – it was no Rōma, no Athênai – but it had been around for almost the entire duration of the exile. The little landmass had been inhabited before that, but this city was one of many that seemed to have sprung up in the wake of the exile.
Moskin was haunted by the thought of the Angels crouching in the charred ruins of their churches, of the devastated homes and buildings all around. He was haunted by the feeling of shock and recognition, and the raging burst of fire that had done so much damage. And he was haunted by the idea that he had caused it somehow.
Bayn, in predictable contrast, was excited by the idea. Not only that something had happened, but by the very fact that it had been so violent. It was, in her opinion, exactly the breakthrough they’d been waiting for. Violent meant undeniable. It was unfortunate that there seemed – seemed – to have been some kind of resultant damage to the Earth-planet city, but according to the deathlights it seemed actual casualties had been light.
Moskin’s vision was, as she said, their first actual look into the exiled sphere, and that was a stunning revelation. The signals, and the display she had assembled from them, that was one thing – it was quite another to confirm that somewhere on the other side of that invisible veil was an actual world, a planet just like they’d predicted. A planet teeming with life, a planet on which the past centuries of exile had brought unforeseeable changes … and a planet, above all, on which the Lost Disciples were very much alive and well.
“The important thing,” she said, “is that you made unprecedented sensory contact with the other side of the veil. The first in sixteen centuries.”
Moskin sat on the edge of the observation platform and ran his hands over the spines of his hair with a frustrated rattle. “It didn’t go the way I was hoping it would,” he said.
“The first time seldom does,” Bayn replied. “Even for us transcendently superior inorganics.”
Moskin chuckled. “I’m worried that we made things worse, not better.”
“Perhaps,” Bayn said, “but if we did, then we did so only in the short term. It is a setback, not a failure. The steps forward we can take as a result are far greater than the step your fire represents.”
“Can we maybe agree not to call it ‘my fire’?” Moskin asked with a wince.
“We can call it whatever you like.”
“I hope we can study what just happened without further … fumbling attempts at initiating contact,” Moskin smiled. Then his smile faded as he fixed on something the Flesh-Eater had said. “Did you say sixteen centuries?”
“Well, there is a margin for error and some confusion surrounding the immediate event,” Bayn said, “but I am counting roughly from the moment of the exile, and consider that to be Year Zero–”
“Yes, I … we do the same in Fade,” Moskin said, feeling cold. “The post-vanishing calendar is almost as prevalent as the central Dajan standard and Corporate calendars, since they both use the Firstmade…” he shook his head. “But it was fourteen centuries, give or take a few years, when I joined you and left Fade.”
“Yes, it was.”
Moskin laughed, but the cold feeling would not go away. “I haven’t been in the gulf with you for two hundred years.”
“Two hundred and sixty-five,” Bayn said, sounding apologetic. “I thought you were aware of this. I understand that organic comprehension of linear time is–”
“It’s not messed-up enough to allow us to mistake two hundred and sixty-five years for … for ten or fifteen,” Moskin exclaimed, but heard the hesitation creeping into his own voice. It had definitely been longer than ten or fifteen years, now he thought about it.
“Is that how long it has seemed to you?” Bayn asked. Now she sounded quite pleased. “I’d like to take that as a compliment.”
“No … it feels like longer,” Moskin admitted. “But not two hundred and sixty-five.”
“We had a small celebration when you told me you had spent half of your life with me,” Bayn said. “I made you half a powderhoney cake.”
“And first you only used the first half of the ingredients list, and it was a horrible slurry,” Moskin said, frowning. “Then you used half the amount of ingredients from the standard set, but you argued that that was just making a smaller cake, and then we had a long discussion about the difference between half a cake and a whole cake made in the shape of half a cake,” he looked up. “Was that why…?”
“Why else would I have tried to make half a cake?” Bayn said in amusement, then grew sombre when she realised Moskin was shaken. “I’m sorry if this was distressing news. I thought you were aware of it, but obviously our increasing immersion in this study has given you something of my skewed experience of time without also passing along my inorganic timekeeping capacity. There have also been several occasions where you have gone into deeper modes of reflection and engagement with the data, and I was required to assist you nutritionally and in terms of your musculature and … well, it is fortunate that you are from a hardier species than most. You did not require much preservation. But on four separate occasions you have entered practical fugue states lasting over ten years. A fifth one lasted eighteen.”
Moskin shook his head slowly, thinking about his time with Bayn. Yes, it made sense the more he reflected. He had gone into deep resting states and had lost track of the passing hours – the passing months, apparently – as he focussed on his work. And yes, often Bayn had been required to remind him to eat, or sleep. And sometimes, he realised, she’d done so with what had seemed like annoying frequency, and then stopped.
Moskin found that he wasn’t shocked, wasn’t really all that hurt or saddened by the knowledge that he had been away from Fade, away from his friends, for centuries. He felt a mild pang at the thought that the Gróbi friends he had made were all likely to have died by now. But even that was tempered by acceptance of the fact that he’d known this was the next step he was going to take, and that there were no steps backwards. He even recognised – again, it only filtered through when he turned his attention
onto it specifically – that Bayn had shared some information about Fade with him. It had been a constant stream of events and census data, comings and goings, larger-scale community changes and decisions.
If he’d just cared to follow it, he could have seen the years, the decades, the centuries ticking by on the stub of the Eden Road.
He shook his head again. “Well,” he said, “that’s … a long time with frustratingly little to show for it.”
Even as he said this, of course, he knew it wasn’t the case. That was typical mortal impatience, mortal hubris. What had happened to his serene understanding that such Firstmade-and-Infinite events could span millions of years and the evolution of entire species? What had happened to the Moskin Stormburg who had been happy to sit and wait for the next step to be revealed to him, even if it took the rest of his life?
“Nonsense,” Bayn said, even as – probably not by coincidence – Moskin formulated the same dismissal in his own thoughts. “This was an enormous step forward, and your work – our work – over the past two hundred years has shown steady progress. If it hadn’t, rest assured I would have scrapped it by now.”
“That’s not as reassuring as you might have wanted it to sound,” Moskin said dryly. “And I have a feeling I must have grown lax in my Daja observance. I certainly haven’t performed it over three thousand times, as I ought to have over the past two hundred and sixty-five years.”
“If you mean the glass of water, the shouting, and the unnecessary praising of that chunk of Eden Road stone you brought with you–”
Moskin had known Bayn long enough – far more than long enough, apparently – to ignore the instinctive sting of indignation that came from her belittlement of the ritual. He remembered a time when similar mockery had goaded him to sacrifice a morchi-bird. That had, ultimately, led him to this place.
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