In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (32 page)

He hadn’t had such a fun fight in years.  This time, he was the wolf on the chase.  No fleeing, not today.

“If I can’t hunt them down, I’ll go to their home base,” Enkidu said.  The Law obliged it.  No enemy was to know of them and live.  If possible.  “Detroit.  Flat Rock’s a town just south of Detroit, on the way to Toledo.  I’ll cause so much pain and suffering that they or their backers will have to show themselves.  If I get even the slightest scent of them and they don’t show, I’ll burn their fucking home town to the ground!”

“Get us healed and we’ll join in,” Elisa, Hoffman’s pack alpha, said.

The semi filled with Gal howls, grunts and snorts.  Their blood was up as well.  Hearing all the healthy blood-lust brought a joyous feeling to Enkidu’s heart.

Yes, the blood was going to flow tonight.

The Law required it.  The Hunter Empire required it.

Earl Robert Sellers: November 12, 1968

“I can’t,” Master Occum said.  Sellers whined.  He had half-expected Master Occum’s response after the Commoners had fallen apart, weeping and huddled together, a quarter mile away from the trap.  Light dusts of snow fell from the dark grey sky, frosting the tufts of the taller brown grasses and pine needles, but melting when they hit the ground.

The trap, and the trap’s victim, lay in the middle of a thousand foot wide clearing, all on hard rock.  Sellers didn’t think much of the Arm and Focus who found this place and failed the rescue; they hadn’t considered the fact the trap sat on bedrock worth putting in their report.  The élan zone generated by the trap extended not in a circle, but instead followed the edge of the boundary between the bedrock and soil, its shape a preschooler’s attempt at drawing a freehand circle.  Also not in the report.

No trees grew within a thousand feet of the exposed bedrock, and the closest pines were small, gnarled and sickly.  One particularly noxious smelling pine grew morning glory vines and now-wilted-flowers from the ends of its branches.  The idiots hadn’t mentioned that in the report either, dammit.

Of the Nobles, only Earl Sellers was in his combat form, the great black pony-sized dog.  The Duke and the Count remained in their human forms, their strong-enough-to-dig-a-basement-volume-of-gravel-in-a-night forms, while Sir Dowling now looked human for the first time, save for his blond furred bear ears.  Sellers wasn’t sure whether Master Occum or the Great Enabler was at fault, but something in their procedure definitely had a problem with ears.

“We’ll take it from here,” the Duke said.  He stood with his arms cross and glowered at the wide expanse of the trap.  “Let’s go, Nobles.”  Pause.  “Not you, Dowling.”

The three of them ignored Dowling’s cursing response to the Duke’s rebuke, and edged toward the élan boundary.  “The barrier metasenses like élan we can use to me,” Count Knox said.

“Earl?  Opinions?” the Duke said.  Hoskins had been much more respectful toward Sellers ever since he had taken down the dragon Monster.  Sellers felt more like a true peer of Hoskins as well, with much less need to prove himself.

He wondered if his earlier need to prove himself, his feelings of his inadequacy, had bothered Hoskins, and had been the root of Hoskins’ annoyance with him, and his with the Duke.  Bah, too much thought, he decided.

The snowflakes dusted Sellers’ black fur as he finished his metasense analysis.  “We can use it, but it’s to real élan as dog food is to cow.”

“I thought this place was contaminated?”

“The contamination, the dross exhaust, is over by the captive, and goes up.  Far up, but enough of it falls back down to affect those pines.  Some sort of trick.”

“So is this some sort of élan feeding station, built by some ancient Crow?”

“Perhaps.”  The Duke was always coming up with these strange ideas.  Sellers had learned, months ago, never to argue with one of the Duke’s strange ideas.

“Let’s be cautious and have only one of us taste this élan,” the Duke said.  “You’re up, Count.”

“Yes, my Duke,” Count Knox said.  He ambled forward, arms crossed, the Viking warrior demigod in action.  If Occum had been present, Sellers knew the Master Crow would have made some comment about boneheaded Noble politics in action.  He didn’t like their hazing, bullying and fighting.  Occum’s dislike said a lot about Crows.  The constant jostling felt perfectly natural and appropriate to Sellers.

The Count reached the élan edge, drew some, and came back.  “Yup, it’s élan dog food, all right.”

“Let’s have Master Occum check you out before we try anything else,” the Duke said.  They went back, and as far as their Master could tell, the Count was fine, and the élan dog food contained no contamination.

“Let’s find out if we can pass through the élan,” the Duke said, when they returned to the élan edge.  “You first, Count.”

Knox gave the Duke a heavy glower, and then walked slowly through the élan zone, quivering all the way.  “Easy peasy,” Knox said, now standing on the bedrock on the other side of the barrier.

Yah, right.  Sellers signaled to the Duke, got permission, and walked into the élan zone.  The zone itself turned out to be paper-thin; its metasense feet-wide appearance some sort of built-in illusory protection, or the metasense equivalent of a mirage.  The élan zone played with Sellers’ mind, and he had to remember his drumming to pass on through.

“It’s a barrier, built to stop a Beast-Man, but not a Noble.”  Probably not a Hunter, either.  Sellers metasensed around the inside of the enclosed zone, now wary.  He had heard too much about Wandering Shade’s experiments.  Was this something he had built, or was the Madonna of Montreal right about her crazy Predecessors idea?

Now, with the élan barrier no longer blocking him, he metasensed two complex dross sources, one buried underground, a third of the way along the élan barrier from him, and the other underneath the captive.

The captive stared at him, intelligence and madness in her eyes.  She looked emaciated, nothing more than skin and bones, so desiccated he could count her spinal vertebrae
from the front
.  Ugly as well.  He couldn’t believe she was alive, and he was horrified that she was conscious.  However, her body overflowed with juice, throbbing juice that metasensed as inhuman. 
She
was the dross engine he had distantly sensed, all those days ago.

“Look up, Earl,” Duke Hoskins said, from where he still watched on the other side of the barrier.  “Something’s going on.”

Sellers looked up, and, yes, above them an aurora had appeared in the twilight, a crudely drawn arrow in the sky, pointing down at them.

“This is ridiculous,” the Duke said.  “Nothing of us Transforms has the power to affect the Earth’s magnetic field.”

Sellers shrugged.  “Uh, Duke, I know this looks like what the Madonna of Montreal described, when Arm blood got on the baby walrus skull item of hers, but this isn’t real.  Close your eyes.”

The Duke did, momentarily.  “I can still see it.”  He paused.  “Oh, it’s a metasense illusion.  A very powerful metasense illusion.”

“I wonder if the Madonna got fooled the same way,” he said.  “We know the Focus metasense is tuned to Transform care, and gets easily fooled when dealing with the real world.”

“Perhaps.  It is connected, in some strange fashion, to the magnetic field.”  Which the Duke could sense, having some sort of built-in crabby magnetic compass in his skull, even in human form.  “Why don’t you go try and rescue the fair maiden, my good Earl.”

And trigger the next stage of the trap?  “Only if you promise to rescue me, afterwards, if this fails,” Sellers said.

“Of course.  I give you my solemn word.”

Sellers walked over to where the Sport shivered in the center of the bedrock.  The rock itself, which had looked flat and featureless from farther away, now showed ripples and small changes of elevation, with small seams running through it.  The Sport sat on a higher section, maybe a foot higher and a darker color than the nearby rock, surrounded by reeking remnants of snowshoe hares and piles of dried human waste.  Sellers snuffled at the Sport while she watched him with mad wide eyes and shivered.  When he gently picked her up with his gentle oversized mouth she didn’t do more than struggle weakly.  He padded back to the élan edge, walked through as quickly as he could manage, and deposited the Sport at the feet of the Duke.  He couldn’t repress the urge to wag his tail and loll his tongue.  Hoskins glared him back into proper Noble behavior, not appreciating Sellers’ humor.

“Too easy,” Sellers said.  “Something’s not right here.”

Count Knox, who had followed Sellers out through the élan barrier, picked up the Sport to comfort her.  “She’s trying to slither her way back into the trap.  This thing still has her under its control.  Our rescue is not yet complete, my peers.”

“But what is it?  Where is it?” the Duke said.

“Come inside, and I’ll show you.”  Duke Hoskins nodded at Sellers’ suggestion, and followed him in.  “There’s something buried in the center, and over there, at the élan edge.”

“If you say so.”  The Duke walked toward the center, which appeared to be solid stone.  “Ah, I can metasense the center thing now.”  He crossed his arms and glared downward.  “All dross.  Which means we can destroy it by consuming it.”

“Do you think we should?”

“Well, we can’t leave it here, if we want our captive freed.  And…” pause “…are you volunteering to unearth this foul thing and carry it back to civilization, my valiant Earl?”

Sellers sighed, his doggy whine.  “When you put it that way…let’s destroy it.”

They walked the rest of the way to the center, the Duke kicking hare carcasses out of his way as he walked.  Sellers found a moderately clean bit of rock and sat on his haunches while the Duke resumed his glare, now at the ground beneath his feet.  They drew down the dross, scattering it about in the normal style of all Chimeras.  Five minutes in, the dross thing flashed in their metasense and died, taking the élan barrier with it.

“It wasn’t an object we could have carried, anyway,” Sellers said, after they had finished.  More dross dog food, but it would sustain them.  “The dross thing was the rock itself, or in the rock.”  An interesting trick, as the rock didn’t have any of the incised metal the baby walrus skull had.  However, the rocky knob had dark bands, with tiny crystals, not the usual granite or gneiss.  Sellers suspected it might be a banded iron formation, magnetically active on its own.

“Nobody will ever believe this story,” the Duke said, unhappy.  “Far too fantastic.  I’m not sure I believe it myself.”

“I’ll bet the intended target was a Monster, not a Sport,” Sellers said.  “Our rescued Sport wouldn’t have lasted the winter, where a Monster wouldn’t have had any trouble.”  He padded over to the location of the second metasense source, no longer glowing in his metasense.  Here, the bedrock inside the barrier had given way to an intruding finger of rocky soil.  He pawed at the ground, throwing the dirt behind him, through his hind legs, and clawed his way down a foot into the rocky soil before he reached bedrock again.  Lying on the buried bedrock, he found a three inch long ivory carving of a Monster or Beast-Man.  The same sort of narrow lines of metal inlays that decorated the baby walrus skull belonging to the Madonna of Montreal decorated the tooth.  To Sellers, this piece of Predecessor Transform work felt inactive.

He picked the carving up with his mouth and gave it to the Duke, who looked it over and stuck it in his jacket pocket.  “Thank you, Earl.  This will do fine as proof of our quest.”

“May I comment again, my good Duke, that this rescue went far too easily for my paranoid tastes,” Sellers said.  He wondered if the ivory Monster carving was too dangerous to take back to civilization, or if there was another trap here, waiting to spring on them when they let down their guard.

“Easy?”  The Duke laughed.  “It’s clear that the Madonna of Montreal was right – the Predecessors did exist, and they did leave behind still-active artifacts.  So, put yourself in the place of these ancient Major Transforms.  It’s clear they knew how to deal with Monsters and Beast-Men, and that they didn’t have anything like us Nobles, or even partly civilized types like the Hunters.  As you said, no Beast-Man could have passed the élan barrier; we already know that Transforms, our Commoners, and our Crow, Master Occum, can’t even approach the place.  Plus, from the failed rescue we know that Arms and Focuses can’t pass through the barrier, either.  This dross device was proof from harm from anyone those ancients knew about.  The only ones who could get in probably had some form of proper dross construct or juice pattern.  Keys.  Something the ancient makers or guardians possessed, and gave to whoever had permission.  As Beast said, to abuse the word ‘said’, the guardian dragon Monster was the real threat.”

The Duke looked especially proud of himself right now.  He smiled, and walked with a large bounce in his step back across the bedrock toward Knox, and to what looked like a now unconscious Sport.

“So, was that dragon Monster a Predecessor, or was it modern?” Sellers said.

“I was going to ask you that, oh farsighted Earl.”

Sellers thought, and remembered.

“She recognized the Monster rifle as a danger.  We can check to see if anyone had run into her before, but I’ve never heard of a Monster so big.  Given her absurd size, I suspect the world would have heard if we weren’t the first to encounter her.  I think she was modern.”