Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  “She’s talking about glorification,” Dagab answered calmly.

  “We can embody your soul, your echo in glorified flesh,” Bayn said, “provided you are capable of providing the energy and the quasi-divine authority required. It’s somewhat above my pay-grade – I only know the raw mechanics of it.”

  “I am capable,” Dagab said, “but it is unlikely to work.”

  “You can make a Pinian Disciple into an Angel?” Moskin choked.

  Blacknettle shook her head, her strange linking with Bayn once again making it hard to tell where ship-voice ended and Angel-gestures began. “The shade of a Disciple,” Bayn corrected him. “And a somewhat specialised Angel, perhaps, but it is theoretically possible. And we can use the ghost trumpet to project it back the way it came, straight back to Earth.”

  “Ghost trumpet?” Dagab echoed in amusement.

  “A crude mechanical analogue of the artistry that performed the exchange with the Farrendese Elf,” Bayn said, while Blacknettle looked mortified. “The point is–”

  “Yes, it’s possible to glorify the energy you have captured here,” Dagab said, “and convert it to specialised undead matter like Blacknettle. We actually did a fair amount of experimentation with that sort of thing, back when we first started the whole glorify-diabolise arms race with the Darkings.”

  “That one evidently didn’t make its way into my religious education,” Moskin apologised.

  “It was a very brief arms race,” Dagab said with a chuckle. “God and the Adversary quickly realised that it ended with two armies of a few trillion near-mortals cancelling each other out and making a huge sticky mess, and Limbo turning up and making that tired face He makes, and not letting either side of the Brotherhood have worshippers anymore.”

  “And I would imagine making Angels out of your previous incarnations would be even worse,” Moskin said, looking narrowly at Blacknettle since it wasn’t possible to glare at Bayn herself.

  “Oh yes,” Dagab replied. “We mutually decided not to glorify or diabolise our previous incarnations, capture and use our past souls as energy sources, any of that. That way lies madness. We want to be more or less intact for the work we have ahead of us. It’s a long way to the Tenth Age if you have to walk there dragging a couple of thousand broken souls behind you. Anyway, the point is yes, we can try this, but it’s not quite the same as a simple glorification like Blacknettle here. The starting points are very different.”

  “But you could make it work?” Moskin asked. “Even through the veil?”

  “You three know more about the veil than I do,” Dagab said. “As for making it work, it’s not really a question of whether you’ll be able to. It’s a question of whether you’ll be allowed to. You spoke of the Heaven-folk forsaking the Lost Realms and paying lip service instead to Limbo … but you haven’t had the Vultures after you so far? You have heard no wings?” the pillar of fire chuckled again.

  “No,” Moskin said, suddenly uneasy. “Is this the sort of practice the Vultures would normally … descend upon?”

  “No,” Bayn said firmly. “It’s perfectly legal in that sense.”

  “There’s another problem, though,” Dagab said. “And I apologise in advance for the unwelcome complication.”

  “Very well,” Moskin said, bracing himself.

  “Glorification is limited to the promotion of mortal agents,” Dagab said. “It’s a direct result of that mutual agreement we came to with the Darkings, preventing us from making near-mortal copies of all our old incarnations. The only reason it would work with me, now, is that I am basically human.

  “Don’t you see? When you glorify me, I will return to Earth as a glorified version of Barry Dell. The human. Nothing less, and nothing more. I will have none of my Pinian memories, abilities, or knowledge. I will have only the knowledge that a truncated lifetime as Barry Dell has fed into my soul. And I’ve got to tell you, that’s really not a whole lot of knowledge.”

  “So … the result will actually just be a new Angel like Blacknettle,” Bayn said.

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” Moskin added loyally. Blacknettle gave him a smile.

  “Nothing wrong with that at all,” Dagab agreed, “but it won’t help us.”

  “Gabriel knows that this is happening,” Bayn suggested. “He will at least be able to find you. Or find Barry.”

  “He’ll be thrilled,” Dagab said dryly. “Gabriel loves looking after greenwings. Still, I suppose he can blame himself, since apparently he was the one who killed me…”

  “Wait,” Moskin said. “What about the spark?”

  “The spark?” Dagab inquired.

  “You said, when I brushed with you in 1666, that it set off some spark of awareness in you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we’re both here now,” Moskin said, “together in the same sphere for once. Before we glorify your immortal remains and send them back through the veil, what if we had a look at that spark of yours?”

  “You think you might be able to send back a version of me with an Angel form and Pinian power?” Dagab asked.

  Moskin shook his head. “I wouldn’t know where to start,” he said, “and our time is limited. But we can perhaps achieve something with this. We’ve had centuries to map the sphere on the other side of the veil. We started with human deaths, we added Angelic signals, and we culminated with a brief glimpse of the Disciples’ paths – and yes, that ended with a nasty fire,” he admitted, “but that was the result of a desperate blind stab.”

  “And what are you saying we can achieve here?” Dagab asked. “A stab with our eyes wide open?”

  “Well … yes,” Moskin faltered. “You make it sound like a bad thing.”

  Dagab laughed.

  TAGGED, AND RELEASED BACK INTO THE WILD

  If what Moskin was planning actually worked, it would change everything. It wouldn’t provide the Second Disciple with full power and awareness – they’d already established that it would be dangerous to try, and the Dagab they were thinking about glorifying wasn’t really the Second Disciple anymore anyway – but it would light the spark.

  Once back on Earth, Dagab would be Barry Dell. A nobody-in-particular, albeit an Angelic one. And Gabriel would know more. With the continuing help of Moskin, Blacknettle and Bayn, and in the hopefully continued absence of interference from the Archangelic court, Gabriel would be able to use Barry Dell’s spark to locate similar sparks.

  Bayn was confident that with the information they’d gathered over the past few days, the authorities of Heaven would no longer be causing them any problems. They essentially had Second Disciple sanction to continue their work, something the Archangelic court had been hesitant to cross back when it had only been a vague stricture Bayn had lobbed at them from the depths of her mission brief. The only escalation point from there was God, and if God was going to do anything about the exile – Dagab pointed out not unkindly – it probably would have been done already.

  Still, if Moskin’s feverish theorising held up, Gabriel would finally be able to track down the Disciples. And who knew what else? With careful tracking and manipulation, Moskin could see them directing the Disciples back towards one another. Physically at Gabriel’s end, and metaphysically at theirs. Take control of the random soul-wandering and get the Lost Disciples reincarnating in the same times and places.

  And once they were back together, that was when they would be at their strongest. Their signal would boost. Maybe – just maybe – their power would begin to manifest. In a manageable fashion. They would come out of hiding, at last, and do what they were supposed to have done all along.

  “So you’re going to tag my shade,” Dagab concluded, “dress it up in an Angel suit and send it flapping back to Earth, with no memory and no idea what is happening, and hope Gabriel can use it to lead him to the Disciples?”

  “Yes,” Moskin said firmly.

  Dagab burned for a few moments in hissing near-silence.

 
; “Alright,” it said, “I’m game.”

  “What about your arms race with the Darkings?” Bayn asked. “Will they have anything to say about us making an Angel?”

  “It’s fine,” Dagab said airily, “remember, I’ll really only be a normal human Angel once I get through the veil.”

  Bayn seemed unconvinced. “But–”

  “If you want to be sure, you can always let this other soul become a Demon. There’s a system for it, and the natural balance might actually make the whole process work more smoothly,” Dagab said. “The Demons on Earth – Mercy, Odium and Fury, I believe they were named, they were around before the exile but not long before – they’ll take care of it. Of course, my exiled incarnations had no interaction with them so I have no idea if they’re still–”

  “Wait, hold on, what?” Moskin interrupted.

  “Oh, God doesn’t like having Demons at large in the Four Realms,” Dagab said, “but the situation calls for a certain pragmatism, and this exile is at risk of falling apart completely. If the Disciples aren’t brought back together so they can help rein in the humans and provide some alternative power structures to the stuff they’re using in there right now … well, political expediency has always–”

  “No, no,” Moskin interrupted again, urgency robbing him of courtesy, “no, I mean about the other soul.”

  “Oh,” Dagab said. “I thought you knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “I’m not alone in this tube.”

  OF ANGELS AND DEMONS

  There was nothing to do but wait after they’d delivered their payload.

  It was Bayn, at once predictably but oddly, who had taken to using such military frames of reference for the ‘solid-state energy forms’ they’d sent through the veil to the slowly-choking planet Earth. The Flesh-Eater was having difficulty coming to terms with the breaches in standard operating protocol she had committed, and was escaping by retreating into a more official and according-to-spec stage in her personality’s development. Sometimes, though, the fragile façade slipped and the frightened intelligence beneath was visible.

  “We just created a Demon,” she said once, “and unleashed it on a sealed world we were supposed to be trying to help.”

  There was nothing much Moskin could say to that, except to remind her that there had already been Demons on Earth and that it hadn’t been the Demons who had messed the exiled world up so badly. One more, and a clueless rookie to boot, would not make much difference. Instead, he tried to get to the bottom of who the Demon had been and where its source soul had come from.

  Of course, his immediate and panic-inducing thought had been that it was the mysterious interloper, the thing that the Angel Athé and her Vorontessæ soldiers had warned them about. Something so unspeakable it was worth choking three entire worlds to death rather than let it out. But this fear seemed unfounded – the soul had apparently just been that of a normal human. Bayn had been able to contain it easily for that brief period, which suggested that while it had been as terrifyingly powerful as any other soul, it hadn’t been any sort of intangible fugitive entity. And now it was safely back on the other side of the veil in any case.

  The soul, as far as they could ascertain, had died at the same time as Dagab, or Barry, or whatever they were supposed to call the Disciple-echo they’d picked up. Whether it had been an innocent victim of Gabriel’s death-trawl, a coincidental fatality from elsewhere in the folded space-time event, or even another Pinian Disciple, there didn’t seem to be any way of figuring out. Dagab had mentioned that its last incarnation, Barry Dell, had died in an elevator with five other people, but of course it had no idea if the soul they’d scooped up had been one of them, or even if any of Barry’s fellow elevator-riders had died in the ‘accident’ that had killed Barry.

  They were reasonably sure the second soul hadn’t been a Pinian. Bayn was of the opinion that they might have accidentally scooped up two Disciples as part of what she was calling Moskin’s formula, but it would probably have introduced itself if they had.

  In time Gabriel sent them word, if you could call it that. But his messages were few and far between, and hopelessly obscure even by the standards of veil-communication. Bayn and Blacknettle had never really recovered full function after Blacknettle’s disconnection and the disastrous battle with the Gorgoña. They gathered from Gabriel’s communiqués that the new Angel had successfully manifested, with no knowledge of its former identity, and the Archangel didn’t deign to enlighten them as to what had happened to the new Angel since then.

  Moskin asked Bayn and Blacknettle about Demons. He’d never really taken them into account in his philosophies but apparently they were a variable he should be considering.

  “There isn’t much to tell,” Bayn replied. “A Demon is the Darking equivalent of an Angel. Most of them are diabolised mortals from Castle Void, and not of human stock at all. They live and administrate the Darking realms, while the Angels perform their duties in the Pinian worlds. As above, so below, as they say.”

  “But what about the ones that are on Earth?”

  “I don’t know much about them,” Bayn said. “It’s as Dagab said – their presence in the Pinian realms is generally frowned upon, but it’s a matter of political expediency. The Demons of Earth are something like ambassadors, special delegates. For that reason, humans were assigned to the roles.”

  “Does that mean there are non-human Angels acting as ambassadors down in Castle Void?” Moskin asked. “Some glorified Vorontessi representative, an Áea, a Molran?” he smiled, briefly distracted by the thought. “Ogre? Grób? Gyrlei?”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure,” Bayn said. “It’s well above – or rather below, heh – my jurisdiction. These accords were arrived at long ago, when different forms of undead and near-mortal first began to emerge from the mortal populations. I can tell you, though, that Demon and Angel are not in fact equal.”

  “No?”

  “The necessity for Angels to be on holy ground does not apply to Demons,” Bayn said, “for obvious reasons. There is by definition no holy ground in Castle Void, unless there is some designated for our hypothetical Angelic ambassadors. If there is a comparable classical undead weakness for Demons, I do not know what it is.”

  “That’s quite an advantage.”

  “That’s not all,” Bayn said. “It’s said that Demons are capable of moving through God-space.”

  “God…?” Moskin frowned. He’d heard of this, on a superficial level, in the course of his studies in Fade. “The special sphere that Gods are supposed to be able to access, in order to travel at will across the urverse?”

  “In essence, yes,” Bayn replied. “Of course, the key here is the prohibition against instantaneous travel. The Gods skirt this by use of God-space, which is merely near-instantaneous, and involves some complication around Portals and inter-Dimensional–”

  “I thought only Gods could use it,” Moskin exclaimed. “It’s right there in the name.”

  “Well, yes,” Bayn said. “There are ways for mortals to access the sphere, but they’re very risky – in fact, they’re generally fatal, and very difficult to control. Demons are said to be more capable, but they too tend to succumb after a time. They can only take advantage of the talent for a limited period, before they become unable to navigate.”

  “Still – to have such a skill, even for a short time…”

  “If they could use the God-sphere to get out, they probably would have already,” Bayn said, “but it is still very interesting.”

  “Interesting!” Moskin repeated. “No offence to you, Blacknettle, but what do Angels have that comes close to matching full daylight autonomy and near-instantaneous transportation?”

  “It’s actually not the Angels that balance the Demons,” Bayn said, and Blacknettle smiled patiently. “Angels and Archangels are powerful, but the main counter-advantage on our side is the priests.”

  “Brotherhood Priests?” Moskin asked, puzzled. He re
membered the handful of holy men he’d wasted his time with before realising his faith was stronger than theirs and that they hardly ever had visions. “Really?”

  “The human ones,” Bayn said, “those of higher standing, have a direct line to God’s power. Or had, I suppose, before the veil cut them off. Dagab mentioned that the priests lost their power when the realms were exiled,” Blacknettle grinned in disturbing synchrony with Bayn’s artificial titter. “I wonder how long they lasted after the general population found out.”

  “I had no idea that was even possible,” Moskin admitted.

  “I take it Barnalk Low mythology isn’t quite as colourful as the mythology of the Four Realms,” Bayn remarked. “It’s amazing, what a couple of thousand berserking quasigods are capable of doing to a body of mythology.”

  “Isn’t it irresponsible to give humans that much power?”

  “Oh, it’s hideously irresponsible,” Bayn agreed cheerfully.

  Moskin digested that, but acknowledged that it had little bearing on their current situation. “I assume the Demons can’t be tracked the way the Angels can?” he asked.

  “Well, now that you mention it,” Bayn replied, “I hadn’t really looked before because I wasn’t entirely certain there were Demons active on Earth. It’s outside my jurisdiction, as I said. Demons can’t be tracked in the same way, no … but, knowing what we do about the Demons’ usage of God-space, it might just be possible to search for signs of that.”

  “How long have you been searching?” Moskin asked wryly.

  “Since Dagab mentioned the Demons,” Bayn said. “I wasn’t going to tell you until it turned something up, or definitively didn’t. But it could take time. And obviously there is a risk.”

  “A risk?”

  “Well, soul-interference is frowned upon, even outlawed,” Bayn said, “but playing around with God-space … that really could bring the Vultures down on our heads,” Moskin must have blanched, because Blacknettle reached up and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry,” Bayn went on, “we’re only looking at it. Looking at it isn’t against the rules.”