He didn’t stay in his house for all those decades of waiting for more information, of course. He walked the length and breadth of Fade, but that didn’t take long. He visited the scarcely-inhabited step-slab above Fade, which the locals called Petrovane for some reason. And when a small group of Molren and Gróbs commissioned a tourist vessel to perform random plunges through the empty vault between Fade and Rise, Moskin took a tour on that as well.
It wasn’t the first time a group had tried to popularise journeys into the nothingness. Indeed, at any one time there were between five and twenty-five independent organisations actively working to discern what had happened to the three enormous flatworlds and their all-important inhabitants22 by studying the space they’d once occupied.
The ship, a cosy old subluminal barge that had been decked out and renamed the BaLoi,23 had carried them down into the dark, hung there for a short time, then bobbed back up to her dock near the top of Carved Face. They didn’t quite descend to the centre of the gulf, and they certainly didn’t go all the way to The Godfang’s Landing. There were ideological gulfs far wider than the physical one between Fade and Rise to consider, and treaties had been in place for some centuries.
They’d seen no sign of any falling, floating, frozen or otherwise unfortunate leapers, although the crew of the BaLoi insisted that they’d encountered a few drifting remains in the course of their visits to the gulf. Gravity in the region was something Moskin thought he was never going to understand, and was linked inseparably with the physical law of the odd universe that was the Void Dimension. Stellar space above was beholden to one type of physics, the obscene edifice of Castle Void below to another. And Heaven floated in the middle, stubbornly refusing to fall crashing to the Rooftop even though anyone foolish enough to leap into the gulf almost certainly would – gravitational pockets and eddies notwithstanding.
There was no sign of the fabled Elevator, and there was certainly no sign of the Lost Disciples. For the time being, Moskin gave up on actual physical examination of the emptiness as a solution to the founding mystery of his life.
He also began to socialise carefully with some of the Heaven-folk who had moved to Fade, and even ascended into the Holy Realm for a visit.
This, obviously, was not a simple matter of climbing the Eden Road from Fade to Petrovane until he reached the great flatworld hanging above. It was one thing to give it all away for a little plot of land on Heaven’s literal back steps, and quite another to actually set foot in the home of God and the seat of the sundered Brotherhood’s very-much-unsundered power. Indeed, for the first fifty of his eighty-four years in Fade, Moskin was on the waiting list to join the Petition.
The Petition itself was a shorter waiting list, a sort of official standing invitation to join a holy pilgrimage. Moskin wasn’t entirely sure who tracked and approved such things. He wasn’t so naïve as to believe God actually did it, but it was some high-standing department in the theocracy. The Heaven-folk of Fade said it was an Archangel, but even that seemed a little unlikely to Moskin. Anyway, after he’d initially signed onto the waiting list for the Petition, he’d practically forgotten about it. It, like everything else about his calling, was a long-term commitment and would happen when it happened.
Once his application reached the head of the queue and he joined the Petition, Moskin spent another ten years as an absentee Petitioner, and almost two years living in Axis Mundi, the teeming megalopolis that filled the stair directly beneath Heaven itself, as a non-absentee Petitioner. He hated Axis Mundi with a passion, but had tolerated it as a necessary evil. Finally he was permitted to ascend – with a million or so other Petitioners from a thousand worlds and a hundred Dimensions – into the Kingdom of Heaven.
It was almost immediately disappointing, and Moskin was certain on an instinctive level that he would take no real steps forward in his quest here. He wasn’t entirely without a sense of wonder and respect, since even the Eden Road Petitioners’ Centre and the small, tightly-policed tourist districts within a day’s travel of it were stunningly beautiful, but he didn’t get that spine-length tingle that told him the Hand of God was guiding his steps. Or if he did, it was probably just because the Hand of God was all around him. There was actually a gift shop called The Hand of God. It mainly sold gloves.
Nevertheless, he decided to pay his respects, open himself to the possibility of enlightenment, and ignore the tacky commercialism. It was Heaven, after all. He couldn’t see the Divine Palace from the Petitioners’ Centre but damn it, Heaven had to count for something. There were Petitioners who actually sat in deep ascetic contemplation in Axis Mundi for their entire waiting periods, awaiting the invitation to join the chosen in the final climb. Moskin, in contrast, had filled out some paperwork and gone on with his life, and while he did think that the people who meditated for half a century were fucking idiots, he had to admire their commitment.
So he spent his strict bureaucratically-curtailed month of Heaven-time as wisely as he could, seeing everything he was allowed to, recording everything he could, admiring the admirable and trying to find a good light in which to view the things he deemed in poor taste.
And his typically-aggressive Áea tourist ethic and vision-fuelled fanatical piety paid off. Heaven hadn’t been a total loss after all. On the contrary, when it came to steps forward in his quest to find the Lost Disciples, Heaven provided him with arguably the greatest and most important step of all.
It was in Heaven that he learned that the Áea-folk weren’t the only Elves involved in the tale of the missing Pinian realms. And the story behind this fact provided him with the starting point he needed to begin work on his Theorem.
It was almost like divine providence.
THE STRANGE CASE OF THE OTHER ELF IN THE FOURTH CENTURY
Nobody was quite sure of the Elf’s name, but it had been given the codename Dagab24 by the authorities responsible for writing up the reports that Moskin had been allowed to see. Even the authorities had been left unnamed in most of these reports.
Calling them reports at all was a stretch, since they were all about a thousand years old, hopelessly stylistically antique and almost wholly composed of hearsay. It had happened, as near as anyone could tell, about four hundred years after the disappearance of the Pinian worlds. And the fact that it involved an Elf that wasn’t an Áea was about the least complicated part of the whole thing.
The story went like this.
Once, on a distant and totally unrelated world called Farrendohr, there was a practitioner of unspecified and frowned-upon arts. A wizard, or a mage, or a hyperphysicist or unphysicist or whatever label he chose to go by. He specialised in … a kind of necromancy, just to keep it as straightforward as possible. In simple terms, although there were no simple terms involved, he used the souls of sentient beings as a source of power. Their essences, minds, personalities and memories, everything that made them into self-aware and conscious entities.
He stole the souls of his fellow Farrendese natives, fed them into a hyperphysical meat grinder, and extracted fuel out of them.
As of the Fourth Century post-vanishing, this wizard’s fuel source of choice and necessity was ‘Dagab’, the soul of a Farrendese Elf he had captured centuries, maybe even millennia previously, and had been draining ever since. Moskin had read some of the more detailed accounts of how this was done, and although he hadn’t come close to understanding the mechanics of it he knew an afterlife of eternal torment when he saw one on paper. This was, after all, how Dimensional-scale Hells generated their power.
Dagab had finally begun to fail, and the wizard had gone looking for a new source. And that was where it had gotten really weird.
The wizard claimed he’d found a wandering soul. A journeyer, an astral projection, a mind roving far afield of its resting flesh. It had drifted into his nets, attracted to Farrendohr for reasons that were far too complicated to get into. He’d snagged it, stuck it in his grinder, and sent the tattered, crazy remains of Dagab-the-not
-an-Áea-Elf back along the trail of the unfortunate journeyer. When the dreamer awakened, it would be as the ruined mind of an Elf in the body of … whatever the wanderer had happened to be. Dagab would go even more comprehensively insane, and probably not last an hour. Possession, after all, required training. You had to do a lot of practice in order to make one’s soul capable of operating another’s body, and it helped if one’s soul was intact and not suffering the depredations of centuries of relentless astral bleeding.
And this was the point at which it all went to shit for the wizard, because he claimed the soul he’d ended up with was a Pinian.
This was serious stuff, and naturally he’d travelled to Heaven immediately to report his colossal, hideous fuck-up. The ‘reports’ were unspecific about what had happened to him, and Moskin took this to mean he’d been quietly divested of his head by means of flaming Angelic sword and nobody in the Infinites’ great wide urverse had missed his sorry soul-harvesting arse. The theoretically missing soul had not been recovered, but that didn’t mean much on its face. A Firstmade soul, like that of a Pinian Disciple, would have been un-grindable by the means at the wizard’s disposal. Next to worthless. And with the originator’s body now possessed by the remains of a mad Elf, and probably dead besides, there was nowhere for it to go back to. The wizard had hastily released his captive, turning it into just another Farrendese ghost.
For the hapless Pinian incarnation, and the wizard who had unwittingly captured it, that was the end of the story. For the authorities of Heaven, however, it was just the beginning.
For a thousand years, researchers and magi and soul doctors and metaphysicians had been studying what little there was of the case to study. For reasons of divine politics, Farrendohr was out of bounds. Nobody would debate the wizard’s arrest and highly-probable execution for assault on a Firstmade, but further study of the evidence in situ would be impossible. And there was nothing left for them to study there anyway. And at the Heaven end, of course, there was even less to see. Just a giant broken staircase dangling over an abyss.
But despite the lack of evidence, the conclusion was inescapable. Somewhere down there, hidden in the emptiness, the Pinian Disciples were alive. And at least one of them had soul-journeyed out through some sort of conduit. So far no soul-journeyer had succeeded in getting in, with the dubious exception of the poor demented former Elf – and many had tried, even some of the other Firstmades of various Brotherhoods. And yes, the Pinian escapee had died in the process, this was true … but the thing about Firstmades was this.
When they died, they came back.
The bundle of identity that the Farrendese wizard had captured and relegated to ghosthood had just been one incarnation of one of the Lost Disciples. Somewhere in the emptiness below Fade the eternal Firstmade had endured, shrugging off the slight hiccough and – presumably – launching into its next incarnation. It had been reborn into a new body, and had grown a new mind and self.
Whether that new incarnation was a glorious elemental form as the Pinians were classically portrayed, or a seething clump of paramecia, nobody knew. And it didn’t really matter. The Disciples were in there. There was a passage out.
And if there was a passage out, there was a passage in.
SACRIFICE
Taken over an eighty-four-year period, the modest collection of outings did not provide much variety to Moskin Stormburg’s generally staid and domesticated life. For the most part he lived in his little house, participated in community events, pulled his weight, kept his head down, didn’t fly into a zealous theistic rage more than a couple of times a month, and all in all lived into his neighbours’ and friends’ opinion of him as the boring one on the street.
But behind all that, he’d begun to wake up again. He’d settled in, learned how things worked in Fade, and had readied himself. He’d been waiting, from the moment he arrived. And when he returned from his trip to Heaven he’d started ramping up to the next step. He just wasn’t sure what that was meant to be yet.
Áea-folk, for all their patience, were ultimately aggressive and action-centred, active rather than reflective. But sometimes, sometimes an Elf found something worth sitting back and thinking about, and that was when most sensible beings moved to a safe distance.
Moskin Stormburg was no soul doctor, of course. Most of what he had learned in Heaven had been the most frightful mumbo-jumbo and he knew he had no hope of parlaying any of it into a new theory, let alone plan of action. The condensed and simplified version of Fourth Century events he had taken away was that the Pinians lived; that one of them at least had retained the ability to project his consciousness out of the space where Earth, Hell and Cursèd had once floated; that he had done so and been inadvertently intercepted; that his displaced soul had been switched with that of a Farrendese Elf; that he and the Elf had both perished or were otherwise unreachable once more; but that some sort of interplay between this plane and the plane on which the Lost Disciples now dwelt was possible…
And that was the crux of it. That the Pinian realms, and the Pinian Disciples, had been relocated to a separate sphere by the craft and power of the Infinites – but that it was still extant, somewhere. Probably right there beneath the very feet of the denizens of Fade … but intangible to them.
This wasn’t, of course, a revolutionary or ground-breaking theory by any means. Moskin had long since learned that most of the people studying the vanishing had already come to similar conclusions. The realms hadn’t been destroyed, after all, and the Pinians hadn’t been killed. If they had been, they would have come back by now and complained about it. God would have had something to say about the whole issue. The fact that God didn’t have anything to say, at least in public, suggested that yes – they were looking at another of those famed cases of Infinites-punishing-Firstmades for some embarrassing transgression. You couldn’t just smite a Firstmade to dust and make its next of kin behave, after all – when dealing with immortals of that grade, there was a certain necessity for creative punishments.
And there was the mythical element to consider as well. Firstmades tended to commit misdemeanours of literally epic proportions, and simply arresting them or executing them was not a response of suitable magnitude. The punishment had to fit the crime. And that was how you had Firstmades flung Beyond the Walls of the Corporate urverse in a castle of burning stone, and Firstmades sentenced to possess colonies of amoebas until they evolved into responsible members of society.
No, none of it was new by any stretch of the imagination. But it was new to Moskin, and it was the starting point he needed. The first steps along his path.
As to the next steps … well, that was the question.
Gyre Thalaar invited him to visit one afternoon about a week before her one thousand, five hundred and sixty-third birthday. It wasn’t a significant birthday, really – the number had no intrinsic value – but Soki had apparently decided to make a special celebration of the event. Moskin had wondered why, but shortly after he’d sat down in the severe little kitchen opposite Gyre and exchanged sips of rum-laced keá tea with her, he found out.
“I’m dying,” she told him.
He finished his second sip of keá, giving this announcement the consideration it deserved. “I assume,” he said, “you’re talking about something more concrete than the usual ‘every day brings us a day closer to the grave’ philosophy.”
“This is more your ‘every day brings me one day closer to the day after my birthday party, when I am going to wash myself out and then die’,” Gyre agreed easily.
“That seems considerate.”
“Soki’s making goldenfire pies and boiling fury sticks.25 I wouldn’t want to deal with a body that had soiled itself with that sort of final meal.”
“So Soki knows about this?” Moskin asked.
“Of course,” Gyre said. “She dealt with all the formalities and paperwork and witnessing and such.”
Moskin didn’t know quite what to say to this, so he took
another contemplative mouthful of keá.
“That was considerate of her,” he eventually said, aware that he was essentially repeating himself.
“We’re a considerate family. And Soki’s a good girl,” Gyre said stoutly. “But those are details for you and her to worry over,” she added with a dismissive wave of her withered claw. Before Moskin could ask why he would be involved – he and Soki manifestly didn’t have that sort of relationship – she continued. “Now. To business.”
“Business?”
“I was going to take some thunderberry wine, a mouthful of my granddaughter’s fire mint, and cut some veins in a nice warm bath,” Gyre said. “But we were thinking that maybe instead, you could take those beautiful old knives of yours, cross them with my gnarly old stickers, and sacrifice me as God intended,” the ancient Elf squinted at him. “That’s what you’ve been wanting to do, isn’t it?”
“I thought it was,” Moskin said, overcoming his actually-quite-minimal surprise and deciding to match her candour. “Now, I’m … well, I suppose I’m still undecided. It’s something I think needs to be done, so the next step will make itself clear to me.”
“No knowledge without sacrifice,” Gyre said with a grim black smile.
“In this case literally,” Moskin agreed. “But not with any real immediacy.”
“Well my lad, immediacy is back on the table,” Gyre said, her smile turning into a cackle. She laid her pair of blades on the tabletop between their teacups, as though to make her choice of words literal.
“I see,” Moskin said.
Gyre’s birth blades were notched ebony things, as dark and full of character as she was. He wasn’t sure how old they were, only that they were older than their owner by several lifetimes. Like Moskin’s, Gyre’s blades were heirlooms – the Áea birth blade custom was a complicated one, and an Elf’s blades weren’t necessarily always passed down. Sometimes, as dictated by a growing population, newborns got newly-made blades. That was just the way it went.
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