Greyblade stood for a time, looking at the shifting cityscapes and the worryingly intimate human-eye-views from across Earth, and considering his options. His gaze kept coming back to the boiling red map of suffering that the Drake said was the leavings of the human weaponry they’d brought to bear on the last day of the war. And had been strolling around with on their hips ever since.
And it didn’t surprise him in the least. If those weapons had a visual representation, it wasn’t a glossy pale-bronze gun barrel. It was this boiling open sore that they’d made of the Earth.
“The Áea-folk and the Brotherhood are still on good terms,” he began cautiously, “and the Burning Knights got their honourable retirement. But the war … yes, the Pinians have given up on Earth. The humans fought for independence against the rest of the urverse, and that included the Brotherhood that had sworn to house and protect them. The Pinians turned their backs in disgust,” he went on, caution giving way to anger, “and Jalah petitioned Ith9 to … to basically restrict the humans to Earth and disavow all involvement with them. They’re part of the Brotherhood’s dominion, but only because they live here. Their actions are only the Pinians’ responsibility if they leave the Interdict, and that doesn’t seem to be happening in difficult-to-manage numbers. Otherwise, as long as they stay on Earth … whether the Interdict is locking the aliens out or the humans in is just a matter of perspective. Ith granted the petition, Gabriel,” he realised his voice had risen to a near-shout. “This is literally a godforsaken world.”
Gabriel looked suddenly a million years old. Well, he was a million years old, give or take, but Greyblade had never seen such weariness and defeat in the Archangel’s posture. And, as he’d reflected earlier, he suspected a lot of it was defeat that Gabriel had already admitted to himself.
“What about the priests?” the Archangel said. “Jalah’s fire…”
“Frankly I was surprised to see an active priest down here,” Greyblade said. “I mean, the fact that she’s working as a security guard at an establishment that – nice though it is,” he nodded to the Drake, “is not a place of worship … well, that’s less encouraging – and less surprising, to be honest. But it means hope might not be completely lost. The Brotherhood has abandoned humanity, though,” he felt compelled to add. “When the humans started using the souls of their own ignorant and disenfranchised as weapons, the Firstmades could no longer just laugh it off as a foible. They couldn’t be a part of it anymore. And the priests’ power couldn’t stand up to it, so when Jalah withdrew from most of the bad ones, it didn’t make much difference. You may not be able to heal with a gun, but you can’t carve a hole through a warship with prayer,” Gabriel looked as though he might argue with this, but Greyblade added, “not anymore.”
“This does not really surprise me to hear,” the Drake said. “It fits what I’m seeing in the data. The main religious establishments and governments have retained their power, but there is little evidence of the sorts of good deeds they’re famous for. Most of their holy enforcement is done with the guns. Sister Bazinard upstairs does more work as a medic than she does as a bouncer.”
“Only Ith’s protection is preventing full Corporate censure,” Greyblade told them, “and that’s just another reason for them to be kept safely inside Snowhome.”
“Sounds to me as though putting the veil back up would be the best thing for everyone,” Gabriel said huffily.
“I’d probably agree with you,” Greyblade pushed his sympathy for the Archangel aside, “if it weren’t for the not-inconsiderable number of innocent bystanders involved. I thought soul power was supposed to be clean,” he added, his anger bleeding away and leaving him close to despair.
“It is clean, for the amount of energy it puts out,” the Drake said. “What that oversimplified selling point doesn’t take into account is the efficiency of the interface. And these weapons, the things they call living guns, are mass produced and enormously inefficient. Even more importantly, it fails to account for the nature of souls. The power is dirtier – and again this is an oversimplification – if it is put to dark use. Souls are, after all, conscious minds and memories, the immortal parts of living beings. They have laws of their own.”
Greyblade nodded slowly. If you believed the myth about the Power Plant in Capital Mind running on souls, then it managed to supply power to ten million universes and only produced enough pollution to poison a comparatively small wedge of land and air in The Centre. He wasn’t sure if he did believe the myth, but the living guns were dreadfully inefficient and it was one of the most profane uses to which souls could be put. The Burning Knights hadn’t walked away lightly.
Gods, indeed, utilised the souls of Their worshippers for a lot of Their power, or at least to augment the power They already possessed. They did this in a clean and harmless manner10 that was unachievable by mortal science … and yet, if any evidence was needed that humans were capable of replicating the abilities of the Gods …
“ … never had a chance to examine one of their guns, much less one of the big vehicle-mounted cannons,” the Drake was saying.
“Me neither,” Gabriel said. “Aliens aren’t allowed.”
Greyblade was struck, once again, by the injustice of the Drake – let alone the Archangel – being considered aliens on Earth. “Don’t look at me,” he said, realising they were both watching him. “We wouldn’t have been allowed to get anywhere near weapons like that, even if we wanted to.”
It was debatable as to whether disembodied souls were a greater source of energy than Bharriom – Bharriom was certainly less problematic to harness, albeit far more difficult to find – but whether the God stone or a captured soul had more power depended largely on the efficiency of the extraction methods. Both were very much in a league of their own and made more conventional generation methods look feeble.
Before the Last War of Independence, the most famous case of soul-capturing as far as anyone in the service of the Pinian Brotherhood was concerned was the case of Dagab.
Dagab wasn’t really a name. It was just a term in Ancient Pinian that meant unintended. It was a code-word of sorts, for the event which had taken place. It enabled the lost and baffled experts in Heaven to fill in a few blanks in their reports. A few centuries into the Flutter the Pinian Second Disciple-in-exile had managed to soul-journey out through the veil. Leaving his or her human body behind on Earth, the Disciple had drifted in intangible astral form, as the Firstmades had learned to do aeons ago.
It had not gone well. After drifting to a world called Farrendohr – or maybe even intentionally soul-journeying there, since Farrendohr was home to the Ghåålus Ith11 – the Pinian soul was captured by a practitioner of forbidden magic or comparable higher physics. It was swapped out, like a battery, for the tattered remains of a Farrendese Elf’s soul, and set to work in an immensely unpleasant manner.
The Elf’s soul followed the Disciple’s trail back and was briefly returned to a body, but it was a human body on exiled Earth, and it didn’t survive for very long. Such was the nature of the capturing that the Pinian Second Disciple was cauterised, the soul trapped in Farrendohr while a new incarnation-in-exile began behind the veil. It was all extremely complicated, but the upshot was that the perpetrator realised his grave mistake, freed the soul to continue its hereafter in relative peace, and was duly chastised by the Heavenly authorities. The Second Disciple had carried on as always, with a brief-human-lifespan-sized gap in his or her memories … but since the Pinians were going from human life to oblivious human life at that time, it didn’t make a lot of difference. The experiences of a dirt farmer in 4th Century wherever would not have added noticeably to the wealth of knowledge the Second Disciple possessed, once all those exiled memories but one were restored.
Nobody was quite sure why the Pinians hadn’t tried to do it again after that. The prevailing opinion was that the incident with the soul-burning wizard had been something of an incentive to stay put, even if it was only a subconsc
ious one thereafter. Still, the only other case of soul-journeying during the exile had been the Second Disciple again, and that had been orchestrated by Stormburg and Gabriel.
It had only lasted a short time and the researchers had only tried to communicate with the Firstmade, not take energy from the intercepted soul. And the experiment had not resulted in any gaps in the incarnation-chain, since they’d technically been talking to the shade of the Disciple after the incarnation’s death. No actual permanent removal of a soul had taken place, although that was fairly shaky moral high ground to stand on … furthermore, it had resulted in the creation of an Angel named Barry, which had always tickled Greyblade for some reason. In the history of scientific endeavour, there were few accidental byproducts to compare with an Angel named Barry.
Barry had gone on to become an Archangel, at least in a quasi-posthumous sense, and had been composed entirely of the human parts of the incarnation he’d represented. No Pinian memories, no powers … well, nothing beyond those that a glorified human normally inherited.
Still, that was the defining incident that had formed one of the bases of Stormburg’s Theorem and had allowed the visionary veil physicist to communicate with the exiled Earth. And, unfortunately, it also seemed to be one of the stepping stones humanity had used to create their unspeakable weapons.
The Second Disciple, in his brief period of communication with Stormburg, had referred to himself as Dagab. After the veil had been lifted and the exile ended, the Pinian had once again taken the term as her name. Her mystical designation, Dagab the Unintended, at the time had really been little more than an acknowledgement of what had happened to that long-gone and excised incarnation … but not many people really appreciated that. And it did sound nicely portentous and Firstmade-y. It took a special kind of academic mind to point out that it essentially meant Unintended the Unintended.
And then Dagab the Unintended had lived her life and continued into the next incarnation of the Second Disciple as Ildar. And that series of events … well, suffice it to say the Pinians had a certain amount of patchwork in their eternal tapestries.
Little was understood about the pollution a burning soul gave off, because the very process was so horrifically outlawed and taboo. Like the things enabled by soul power, though, its fallout could manifest in an assortment of places along the matter-energy spectra known to science. That, on the Drake’s screen – that was just a shadow of the real thing. Greyblade knew he could look down on Earth from the Eden Road and see no sign of the cancerous monstrosity spread over the face of the world. He could look with all of his sensors, as could the humans themselves with their cunning machines, and see no hint of trouble. Whatever tangible leavings the weaponry might have been causing were evidently hidden, contained – perhaps even lost in the general filth encrusting the flatworld. But the invisible damage was clear to the devices the Drake had at her disposal.
“How has this not become common knowledge upstairs?” he asked. “Pollution like this … they’d spot it from Axis Mundi.”
“There’s a strict information blockade through the Interdict,” Gabriel told him, “and they have the … smog … under wraps, sort of.”
“And Osrai does its part,” the Drake added. “Do you know about Osrai, Sir Knight?”
“Vaguely,” Greyblade said. “What’s the artificial intelligence got to do with it?”
“It controls the flow of information,” the Drake shrugged, “even extending in here. The I-Spy, maybe one or two of the more organic and higher-magic devices, are immune to assimilation into its systems. And I know for a fact that the Destarion baffles it completely … but the rest, I have to assume are compromised.”
“That doesn’t worry you?” Greyblade asked. He’d had his share of run-ins with machine intelligences in his time, and had yet to encounter one he couldn’t shut out … but the idea of one quietly watching through his senses, or even altering what his senses filtered through to his brain … it was not something a cybernetic soldier liked to consider. The coexistence of sentient organism and sentient machine was one of the oldest-standing culture-clashes still capable of levelling civilisations on a Dimensional level.
The Drake shrugged again. “It’s yet to give me reason to distrust it, and I have little choice in the matter,” she said. “I do not understand artificial intelligence very well but I know it is connected to others elsewhere in the Four Realms, the Void proper, maybe beyond. It is not malicious – I truly believe that its efforts here are intended to minimise harm to humanity and the world. If the Earth has a soul, Sir Knight, it is Osrai.”
“And it’s not like Heaven doesn’t know,” Gabriel added. “There’s concern about the issue, from certain quarters of the Archangelic court.”
“Are they going to do anything?” Greyblade asked.
“The Archangelic court?” Gabriel replied sourly. “Why would they start now?”
“Then it doesn’t really matter if they know, now does it?” Greyblade retorted.
“According to what I have learned, the pollution will bring an end to life on Earth long before it’s a threat to Heaven or the seared realms,” the Drake overrode Gabriel’s response calmly, “with a solid window of a century or two between Earth becoming unlivable and the rot working its way up and down the Eden Road or making pieces of Earth break off.”
“That’s true,” Gabriel admitted. “Actually, I understand the largest lobby is in favour of waiting for the humans to ask for help, then coming down to fix things for them. It’s like they’ve never even met a human,” he concluded in frustration.
“Can this even be fixed?” Greyblade asked.
“Not without a lot more killing,” Gabriel replied. “And that’s just to get enviro-mystic sandals on the ground down here.”
“There are temporary solutions,” the Drake said a little more productively, and pointed at the screen. At another series of taps, the view centred in on one of the suppurating pockets of higher density, of which Greyblade had noticed perhaps seven across the face of the flatworld. “These are collection and storage points,” the Dragon went on. “The locals – not that there are many in these regions – call them sinkholes,” she hesitated. “Or soulpits,” she added. “The true extent of the problem and its connection to the guns is hidden from the general population, but the name has endured as a modern myth of sorts.”
The filter switched to show the mundane view of the facility, which to Greyblade’s eyes seemed to be an innocuous structure like an open-cut mine about two hundred metres across, its uppermost tier ringed in a gleaming bronze collar. There was a faint haze of heat playing over the opening, but no smog or other visible output. The pit wasn’t deep – you could see the bottom of it, a pale surface of hardpan that looked dry and sterile but not outwardly toxic.
The land immediately surrounding the soulpit was similarly arid, but the geolocation data on the feed told Greyblade that this particular sinkhole was in the central region of Old Meganesia, over a thousand kilometres from where they were now standing. That part of the continent was desert anyway. The sandy ground was dotted with tough, scrubby little bushes which didn’t appear sick or mutated.
“How does it work?” he asked.
“I had a feeling you would want to know that, Sir Knight,” the Drake replied. “I, of course, have only the most general idea. The individual mechanisms that form the weapons each include a similar converter to the ones that used to channel power from the Power Plant through the Destarion, only these channel the waste energy-forms out of each gun and beam them to the nearest sinkhole, where relative density pulls them in like a siphon and – more or less – contains them. Here,” she crossed to a large, scarred interface that had clearly seen heavy use by the Drake in her natural form, and pushed on a few controls. A discreet little contact marker raised its metaphorical hand in Greyblade’s periphery. “I’m sending you a data packet showing the waste management specs for the living guns,” she said. “Most of it is classified,
of course, but that is as much as I have been able to unlock.”
Greyblade opened the packet. It was sizeable, and included two new lexicon-sets to enable him to even approach an understanding of the information contained inside. “Hmm,” he said, as the reams of data swept and sometimes spiralled by, “converters. Waste energy-forms. Relative density. By gum, you’re right.”
Gabriel chuckled.
“The sinkholes will contain the majority of the pollution for … well, there are different schools of thought on how long,” the Drake said. “But there are signs that it is already tainting the structure of the world and its biomass. They are small signs, easily dismissed with other explanations. I am still collecting data points,” she stepped back towards Greyblade and Gabriel. “But I have derailed your quest,” she went on. “You came here for information and you’ve done nothing but satisfy my curiosity and listen to my agenda ever since.”
Greyblade shrugged. “I think this is all related, one thing a symptom of another and vice versa,” he said, “and I’m not sure what I’m looking for, so the more you know about what led me here, the better you can help. And like I said, you definitely know more about what’s going wrong on this world. I came here on a hunch, I suppose you might say. I wasn’t expecting the hunch to be right in all its details. It’s enough that it seems to have been right in its broad strokes.”
“Except this is less to do with humans making a new veil,” the Drake said, “and more to do with them poisoning themselves to death.”
“Maybe,” Greyblade mused. His tactical and scenario-crafting systems were spinning tapestries. “Maybe.”
“Perhaps whatever shit-storm the humans have kicked up, we’re each just focussing on separate little facets of it,” Gabriel suggested. “Because it’s all that will fit into our heads at any one time.”
“You could be right,” Greyblade said. “So the question is, do we focus on one or another of the facets, or do we attempt to step back to see the big picture?” he gestured around them. “I imagine this setup might help with either approach.”
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