Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  “No,” he said, not really sure why he felt the need to confirm this verbally, “settling down was never part of the plan.”

  Soki laughed again and ran her fingers across the thick spines of her hair, sending another strong wave of mint across the table. It was the fire mint she had always worn – without noteworthy success – to hide the corpse-scent. “I guess we both avoid complications in our own way,” she said.

  Moskin had never met Soki’s husband, if met and husband were remotely applicable terms. He smiled, remembering the first time he’d smelled the powerful herb and learned what it had meant. Had it really been a hundred years?

  Soki was a deadlover. Her paramour was the carefully preserved corpse of a man who had breathed his last some six hundred years ago. Embalmed by the rigorously thorough and antiseptic Botane method – Moskin had read a little about it – the body was sealed and tanned and upholstered, and was perfectly capable of maintaining solidity and good health30 for another two thousand years.

  Moskin didn’t actually mind the smell that crept out beneath the mint, and permeated the house when it wasn’t prepared to host social events. It was an earthy smell, musty and sweet. After all, it wasn’t as though she lay with rotting carcasses. And he had liked Soki right from the week he’d moved in next door – liked her a great deal. This was less despite and more because of the fact that – as he’d joked to her back in the early days of their friendship – he was resigned to the idea that their relationship would not deepen beyond close friendship until he had grown out of his infuriatingly immature breathing, brain-functionality, and associated distasteful bodily habits.

  This was a joke, of course, that betrayed a charmingly – or hopefully-charmingly – outdated attitude towards deadlovers. And indeed, on Moskin’s part it had been intentionally so, and Soki had known that. Deadlovers never formed relationships with the bodies of those they had known, let alone been friends with, while alive. They considered it grotesque.

  But friendship was enough.

  “Complications are overrated,” Moskin said expansively, and that was when the vision hit him.

  This was like no vision he had ever experienced. Usually, they ran a pleasantly woolly spectrum from slightly-heightened-daydream to enjoyably-persistent-hallucination, and they always involved cascades of light, the bright and beautiful silhouettes of Pinian Disciples or even God, and the conjoined sensations of turning, attending, opening, and a movement as vast and ponderous as the missing worlds themselves. They left an exultant chord ringing in his mind’s ear, and always fitted themselves seamlessly into his daily routine – the narrative expectations, in short, of his faith.

  This time, darkness fell from his periphery inwards, with a strange hissing, ringing sound and a piercing pain across the inside of his forehead just above his eyes. There was a sickening, oppressive feeling like some part of his brain was pressing down on his eyeballs, and then the ringing hiss separated out into words.

  Moskin. I am coming, Moskin. Prepare yourself, and come to me. I rise. Moskin. Moskin? Moskin, are you alright?

  “Moskin?”

  The ringing receded and was replaced by Soki’s concerned voice. Moskin blinked, winced in pain – the heavy feeling around his eyeballs was lessening, but still uncomfortable – and looked around.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “Was I out long?”

  “You weren’t out,” Soki replied. “You were sitting there with your eyes bulging out of your head, making an eeeeee noise like a badly-calibrated gravity pad. It was the eeriest Goddamn thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “I had a vision,” Moskin said, rubbing his brow.

  “I’ve never seen a vision do that to you,” Soki squinted. “Usually they just make you grin like a moron and lean sideways a bit.”

  “This was … something else, then,” Moskin said, “but definitely a vision,” he repeated what the hissing voice had said, reciting the words as though each one was a nail of ice stuck into the front of his brain. “A signal from somewhere,” he said, and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “A signal,” Soki said doubtfully, “through your brain? Last telepath we had in Fade was a Molran, she couldn’t do Elves.”

  Moskin shook his head. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “It didn’t feel like a…” like a living thing, he wanted to say. It hadn’t felt like a Molran, or an Áea, or a Lost Disciple or the Voice of God. It had felt like a stone, if a stone could talk. “It was somehow inorganic.”

  They didn’t have long to wonder about it, not that their speculation and bafflement would have achieved anything if they’d had another hundred years to process it. Early the next day, the Elevator arrived at Thrabney Point.

  THE ELEVATOR

  Moskin had done his best to obey the vision, or the voice, or whatever it had been. The voice of the Elevator, he was forced to assume after the fact. He’d done his best to do as she had instructed him. He’d done his best to prepare. In a way this had been easy, because he was always prepared. He had packed up his anthologies and notes and a few random personal items, and added them to the mulluck-wrap he habitually kept in the front room of his little house. For the past sixty years, he’d had the go-bag ready and he refreshed its contents every six months or so, just in case, adding or removing items as more effective and useful variants became available. If he needed to leave, he’d been ready to do so at a moment’s notice. For most of his time in Fade, really.

  Beyond adding some last-minute supplies and personal items, there was little else he could do to prepare himself without knowing what exactly he was supposed to be preparing for.

  When the word spread throughout Fade that the Elevator had arrived, he was one of the first people out the door and Soki was close behind him from her own place. They weren’t the first people to Thrabney Point since they didn’t exactly live close, but they joined a crowd of maybe two thousand people gathering on the wide, gentle slope that ran down to the weathered grey bluff. Later arrivals would have to be satisfied with a distant view along the edge of the step, but Moskin and Soki had an excellent vantage point.

  “We should have brought food,” Soki grumbled, looking around and absently petting Merion, the current matriarch of the Thalaar family Gyrlei.

  Moskin stopped frowning down at the sight at the tip of the Point, and smiled around at their near neighbours. Several of them had set up picnics and were already enjoying breakfast. A small family of Heaven-folk – they were Vorontessæ, he now recognised; lean brown Áeaoids even taller than the Elves and Molren in attendance – were actually roasting an ambrosia duck on a small portable shrine. They were eating it as well as offering it up as a kind of semi-sacrifice, and it looked and smelled delicious.

  “I brought food,” he told her, hefting his mulluck-wrap. The heaviest thing inside it was a carefully-etched slab of Fade-rock that he had purified as a small portable Daja-stone, but the consumables also added a certain heft to the bag. “But they’re mostly dry rations and a water recombiner.”

  “Is this because of your vision?” Soki asked, lowering her voice. “Do you think this is what it was telling you to prepare for?”

  “I have no idea,” Moskin said comfortably. “That’s sort of what being prepared means.”

  Soki looked at him sourly, then admitted, “I guess it would be a bit of a coincidence to receive a message saying I rise, come to me, and then the very next day come to an ancient starship that’s just risen out of the gulf of Lost Realms.”

  “I don’t think she is a starship,” Moskin said quietly, returning to his study of Thrabney Point and its strange new arrival.

  The Elevator’s full name was Category 9 Convoy Defence Platform Destarion, and the Áea-folk had historically never really crewed anything above a Category 7 in service of the Pinian Brotherhood and their mighty military. Oh, the Burning Knights had flown Category 8s like the fabled Ladyhawk, but that was ancient legend. Everyone in Fade knew the Elevator would never allow Elves to board her
, but it didn’t stop them from trying to track her down anyway. She was a strange subchapter in the ongoing tale of the Lost Disciples.

  As far as Moskin had managed to learn in the past century, the Destarion had never actually come to Fade. And that had always made sense to Moskin. He’d assumed the Elevator would be docked at the stair that had taken her name – The Godfang’s Landing, also known as Rise, way down where the Eden Road met Castle Void. There wasn’t any evidence that she was down there, however, and aside from an abundance of rumours and uncorroborated sightings in the gulf, there was no real proof that she even existed at all.

  Category 9 Convoy Defence Platform Destarion had been around for tens of thousands of years, maybe more. The official record stated that she’d been commissioned back when the Worm had invaded from Beyond the Walls of the Corporation, sending the inhabitants of whole universes fleeing into The Centre. That had been so long ago, and so much had been forgotten and lost in the intervening time, that it might as well have been a myth.

  Since her commissioning, she was put in an assortment of roles and had fought in an assortment of campaigns on behalf of the Brotherhood. In a lot of these, either factually or according to lurid and fanciful accounts, she had suffered damage and massacres of terrible proportions. She’d always survived somehow, and had earned a fearsome reputation, becoming a sort of go-to setting for folktales of haunting and bloodshed. Presumably there had been other Category 9s – the Pinian Brotherhood were Firstmades and thus commanded practically infinite resources – but there were only occasional highly-questionable stories about the Destarion’s kin.

  In recent millennia, as a matter of less esoteric historical record, the Destarion had been placed on humdrum civilian duty in the Pinian realms of the Void, rising and falling from Heaven to Earth to Hell, Hell to Cursèd to the Rooftop of Castle Void and back up again. This assignment was what had earned her the nickname ‘the Elevator’.

  Her specifications, which were a matter of public record and fairly consistent, made it quite obvious to Moskin that what they were looking at down on Thrabney Point couldn’t be the Destarion. The Destarion was at least a hundred kilometres tall – bigger than one of the steps of the Eden Road itself – and shaped something like a Molran’s eye tooth, with a long curved lower hull and four tower-like upper extensions. The Category 9s had been dubbed ‘Godfangs’ long before the last of them had been dubbed ‘the Elevator’.

  The vessel down on the point, unless the vast majority of her hull was somewhere beneath the craggy drop-off with only an extension sticking up to Fade-level, was far smaller, and nowhere near the right shape. And it didn’t look like there was anything but the tip of her tapering lower section extending behind the edge of the step. If you squinted, and really really wanted the vessel to be the Elevator, the shapes were vaguely comparable. The newly-arrived craft was a smooth white inverted teardrop maybe eight hundred metres tall and five hundred across at her widest point. A baby Godfang, perhaps, without roots.

  “…admit she doesn’t look much like the Destarion from the stories,” Soki was saying. “But maybe that’s intentional? Maybe all the dark myths have made her bigger and more impressive, the artists’ impressions altered to make her look more like a tooth to explain why she’s called a Godfang? Maybe this is the truth behind the fable.”

  “That would be disappointing,” Moskin admitted, “but it seems at least somewhat plausible…” he trailed off as a ripple of excitement went through the crowd – ripples, he noticed, spreading from groups centred on Molren or Gróbs bearing communications equipment. Something was coming, something Moskin’s simple comms array wasn’t picking up.

  A moment later, they didn’t need to wonder anymore. Just as the ripples reached them, with whispers of Angel, Angel, an Angel is coming, the high and clear sound of a trumpet rang across Thrabney Point. All eyes turned upward, towards the pearlescent overhanging mass of the flatworld of Heaven, and the opening through which Heaven’s sunlight bathed Fade. The trumpet sounded again, and its source – the single, tiny, achingly beautiful shape of an Angel – descended towards the ground.

  The Elevator, if that was what she was, was hanging silently in the air against the tip of the point, a wide semicircle of empty space surrounding her and marking the closest point that the boldest and most ardent viewers had dared to venture. Between the throng of denizens and the smooth white hull of the ship, a scribble of thin grass and lichen sheathed the grey stone of the Thrabney Point slab-edge. Into this empty space, serene and confident and tucking her gleaming silver trumpet under one heavily-robed arm with military crispness, the Angel dropped. The masses who had gathered on the slopes let out a soft collective aaaahh as she landed and stepped up to the pale hull.

  Even from his relative distance, Moskin could see the Angel clearly. She was … magnificent. She was Áeaoid – or he supposed, since Angels were raised from human stock, she was humanoid – but relatively tiny in comparison to an Elf or Molran, let alone the mass of a Grób or a towering figure like one of the Heaven-native Vorontessæ kneeling nearby. Even standing apart from the crowd and with the great sweep of pale wings spreading from her shoulders, she seemed small and frail. But magnificent, nonetheless.

  His observation of the Heaven-folk gave Moskin cause for a brief double-take, and he realised the majestic Vorontessæ really were kneeling around the remains of their ambrosia duck barbecue. Noble heads inclined reverently, the gold-plated rings and clusters of horns atop their skulls gleaming in the sunlight, they knelt before the servant of God with a respect ingrained in their species for aeons. Most of the rest of the throng had begun to follow suit in their own anatomically-applicable ways, and Moskin and Soki lowered themselves to one knee in the Elven manner.

  Old Granny Gyre had fondly recalled the time she’d seen an Angel. There were none living permanently in Fade, of course, but there was enough corroborating evidence in the public accounts to confirm that she was telling the truth – one had passed through Fade, and made a personal appearance in Gyre’s neighbourhood, some nine hundred years previously. Whether she had been telling the truth about anything the Angel had said or done, or the way it had looked at her and smiled, or plucked a feather from its wing and given it to a sickly Elven child three doors down who had miraculously regained her health and then gone on to ascend into Heaven and never return … well, all that might just have been tall tales. But Moskin knew, now, that she had definitely seen one. Because the way she had spoken of its brilliance, of its delicate beauty and heartbreaking flawlessness … she could only have been speaking from personal experience.

  The Angel, silver trumpet tucked under her arm and wings spread wide, took another step towards the broad white overhang of the vessel’s hull. Everyone on the slopes heard her voice ring out.

  “On the command of the Archangels and the Pinian Disciples in absentia, I am ordered to request the immediate return of the Angel Blacknettle,” she said. Moskin blinked in recognition, and heard a low murmur run through the crowd. Blacknettle, sure enough, had been the name of that last Angel to visit Fade, all those centuries ago. The stories referred to her as The Black Nettle, but it was apparently a name twisted by years and retelling rather than a fanciful title. “I am ordered to request your return to your home defence platform, and the return of said defence platform to the shipyards of Central Nirvan. There, you shall be subjected to examination and judgement from the Archangelic court, for–”

  “I’m afraid I cannot comply, little one,” the voice that reverberated from the white vessel was nothing like the painful hiss that had sounded in Moskin’s head, but he had no doubt it was the same entity. It was at once gentle and firm, warm and powerful, vaguely matriarchal. “Convoy Defence Platform Destarion is currently disabled and as beyond my reach as she is yours.”

  There was another murmur, louder this time, and Moskin and Soki exchanged a look while they – along with many others in the crowd – started to climb back to their feet. Not the Eleva
tor, then. Was she a shuttle or exploration pod from the defence platform? A lower-echelon fighter previously attached to the Category 9’s squadron?

  “In this case,” the Angel continued smoothly, “you are requested to make the ascent and–”

  “My mission brief does not recognise the overruling authority of the Archangelic court,” the Elevator’s presumed subordinate interrupted again. “Only the direct orders of the revered Firstmades can override the existing brief, and until such an override is provided I must continue to carry out my standing orders with as much consideration to the balance between efficiency and respect for the lives of the Brotherhood’s subjects as is allowed by my programming.”

  “Your interpretation of the balance between efficiency and respect for the lives of the Brotherhood’s subjects has come into question,” the Angel said, “and your presence at the shipyards of Central Nirvan is required to make an accounting for the disappearances of no fewer than one thousand, seven hundred and seventy-three citizens of the Four Realms over the course of the past fourteen centuries.”

  “Even the least astute observer will have noted that the Four Realms is a laughably fallacious concept at this time,” the vessel said, “and as such, just as legally null and void as the Archangelic court. My remit is the missing realms and the missing revered Firstmades, and as such I am afraid it outranks you until … higher … authority proves otherwise.”

  There was a long pause, during which the vessel floated in silence and the Angel stood defiantly before her, and Moskin couldn’t help but imagine both entities waiting to see if God was actually going to show up and settle this jurisdictional deadlock once and for all.

  God did not show up, and after a moment the Angel spoke again. “The abduction of the Angel Blacknettle–”

  “If you want Blacknettle, I invite you to come and retrieve her in person,” the white vessel said, and suddenly a great arched portal opened in her hull directly adjacent to the edge of the bluff. It gaped like a mouth, like an invisible stone dropped into a surface of cream, and the crowd went aaaahh again.