No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) (40 page)

As Tiamat had predicted, the Beast didn’t even notice them.  Definitely an untrained Beast.

Quick as a breath Tiamat burned juice, sprinting forward to grab the chain and yank.  The chain slithered through the tow hook and got the Beast around the middle.  Tiamat circled a foot-thick sycamore, fixing the chain to it, and barked predator at the Beast, getting his attention.  The Beast charged; Tiamat backed off to just behind her second loop of chain.  The Beast reached the end of the chain, which pulled tight, bringing him up short.  Tiamat then pulled on the second chain, catching the right arm of the Beast.  She ran in, looped her end of the chain around the Beast’s neck, and pulled.  The Beast tried to rush her, stopped, held by the first chain and the anchor tree, and then fell with the crack of vertebrae breaking.

The Beast’s harem proved next to useless; of the Beast’s five captives Tiamat had to kill three.  The other two women needed help, one because she was wounded, recently captured, and the other because her mind was gone because of the insanity of the situation and because she was within two days of going Monster.  Tiamat shot both with tranquilizer darts and had Gilgamesh tie them up.  “They’re not mine.  Not mine.  Never will be mine,” Carol said.  He read ‘hopefully’ in her glow.

Carol backed the truck in as close as the underbrush allowed, unloaded the baby fork-lift from the back of the truck and fork-lifted the weighty Beast inside.  Then after securing all three captives, they headed off toward Baytown in the large panel truck.

Two phone calls later, they stopped the truck in a copse of woods along a bayou about a mile north of Baytown.  To Gilgamesh’s surprise both Sinclair and Hephaestus waited for them; the other Crows, quieted by Sky, huddled fighting panic two miles away.  Hephaestus stayed back, in whispering range, but Sinclair slowly walked forward through the trees.

“Ma’am, I’m Sinclair,” he said, stopping about fifty feet away.  Nervous.  Panicky.  Gilgamesh thought calm thoughts and tried to lend his support to his friend.

“Glad to meet you.  I’m Carol Hancock, commonly referred to as Tiamat by you Crows,” she said.  “I understand how stressful this is for you.  How can I help?”

“If I talked to Gilgamesh for a few minutes, ma’am, while you unload your cargo, this would help a lot.”

“No problem,” Carol said.  She had quieted her Tiamat nature down to nearly nothing, but both he and Sinclair knew this wouldn’t last.  There was a Beast to move.

Sinclair knelt to the ground when Gilgamesh reached him.  Gilgamesh knelt beside him, well away from the remnants of the dirt road where the truck sat.  “Thanks,” Gilgamesh said, in his quietest whisper.  “The Beast’s neck is broken, but that’ll heal soon.  Neither of us know how long, though.”

“No problem,” Sinclair whispered.  Gilgamesh heard Tiamat cursing at the Beast, which snapped at her despite his paralysis.  In a moment, he heard her dragging the Beast and the wooden pallet underneath him over toward the back of the truck.  “Any idea how this happened?  I thought Beast Men had to be taught how to draw élan in a way that kept their captive women alive.”

“I have a theory,” Gilgamesh said, falling back into the cadences of Philadelphia.  He told Sinclair the story Focus Teas had told Tiamat, about how Focuses had learned, untaught, how to metasense juice levels and keep their Transforms from going into Monster or going into withdrawal.  “Because some of the Beast Men have been taught this, the others may know how it’s done without having to be taught.”  Behind them Tiamat started up the delivery truck’s forklift and lifted the pallet and the Beast out of the back of the truck.

“It’s terrifying what we don’t know about our own abilities; it’s even more terrifying to realize how deep the juice has all of us in its grip and how we can get information from the juice itself,” Sinclair said.  His mind engaged on the mystery, and his panic receded.  It was like old times in Philadelphia.  “You’ve become a Crow legend, you know.  You and this Arm are changing everything.”

“Yes,” Gilgamesh said.  “That’s the whole point.  Has Focus Rizzari sent you her article on the Cause?”

Sinclair nodded.  “I sent it back to her, with corrections and additions.”  His eyes twinkled.  “I think we’re going to end up collaborating on a formal Focus slash Crow viewpoint piece about the Cause.  Oh, and household Transform viewpoint as well, because much of the document came from The Anthropologist.”

This brought forth a low Crow laugh from Gilgamesh.  “If you don’t watch it, Sinclair, you’re going to become as much of a Crow legend as I’ve become.”

“As long as it’s in the publishing industry, I won’t mind.”

The forklift wobbled as it went over a rut, spilling the blond bear Beast to the ground, eliciting a vicious round of curses from Tiamat and a loud whimper of agony from the Beast.  “Duty calls,” Sinclair stood.  He strode right up to a powerful Tiamat-aura Carol and dropped a tuned sick-up on the Beast, robbing it of its juice and sending it unconscious.  Gilgamesh stayed back.  Hephaestus crept forward and joined him.

“She’s doing it, isn’t she?” Hephaestus said, while Carol and Sinclair cautiously chatted, mostly talking Beast Man business.

“Doing what?”

“Winning us over one Crow at a time,” Hephaestus said.  “For good or bad, it’s because of you this is happening.  Watch your back.”  His comment wasn’t a threat.  It was a warning about the senior Crows.

“I understand,” Gilgamesh said.  From the Crow perspective, Tiamat already had one Crow pet.  Why would she need more?  From the senior Crow viewpoint, Gilgamesh had upset their favorite apple cart, the one saying the Crows couldn’t trust the other Major Transforms.  “But doing nothing is far riskier.”

Hephaestus took a step back, catching Gilgamesh’s implications about the coming demographic catastrophe.  The older Crow’s forward and back motions were a perfect metaphor for the Cause, Gilgamesh decided.

Despite the progress, they had a long long way to go.

Carol Hancock: July 14, 1968

“They’re here,” Gilgamesh whispered.  “No Shadow, though.”

Unfortunate, because he was the Crow I most wanted to meet.  I didn’t know if he was Wandering Shade, and the possibility bothered the hell out of me.  Odds were against it, because there were at least six senior Crows and only one Wandering Shade, and because of the help and friendship Shadow had offered Gilgamesh.  My estimation of the odds went back to one in six because Shadow hadn’t showed.

Of course, if Shadow had showed and he was Wandering Shade, my odds for survival or freedom weren’t high.  Given Wandering Shade’s suspected impersonation talents, however, this risk existed when talking to anybody.  I had to count on his Crow paranoia.

I had to count on something.

We had agreed to meet in a dark and secluded corner of Memorial Park.  The calm of night was best for a meeting like this, for the Major Transforms owned the night.  As much as they owned anything.  I didn’t mind the heat or humidity of the Houston summer, but its monotony already wore on me, and months of summer remained.  A chorus of frogs and cicadas surrounded us, as well as far too many mosquitoes.  Arm predator didn’t work on mosquitos.  Dammit.

Gilgamesh glided off, vanishing from my metasense.  He was getting better at that.  I wished I knew enough to properly train him, but I wasn’t Keaton and I didn’t have her instinctive feel for the strengths of Major Transforms, what they needed training in, and how to best train them.  I sat at the base of an old live oak, utterly cool and calm, a perfect statue, trying not to exude any Arm-ness at all.  I heard distant whispering but couldn’t understand the words, drowned out by the critter chorus and the faint rustling of trees overhead from the slight breeze.  I smelled the faint remnant of charcoal from someone’s afternoon picnic and smiled, happy to catch the small bit of normalcy.  Mirroring what he had done for Keaton, Gilgamesh kept me always juiced up.  No juice monkey problems for me.

“Tiamat, I am Hephaestus.”  His barely audible whisper came from the trees to my left.

“So the Tiamat name is not just Gilgamesh’s?” I asked, already knowing the answer.  “Do all the Crows call me that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“No need for the ma’am,” I said, with a chuckle.  “Tiamat is just fine.  Have the Crows decided whether my boss is better named Kali or the Skinner?”

“Sky is persuasive and the name does fit her personality.  Kali has many hands in many schemes, and, um…”  Hephaestus let his voice tail off, having already said more than was politic.

“My boss is dangerous, true.”  More than I suspected the Crows understood.  For one, she had started her false-Hancock robbery spree today.  Her spree hadn’t made the national news.  Yet.  For another, she wasn’t happy with Crows in general except for Gilgamesh, and had nothing but contemptuous dismissal for my meeting with them tonight.  I had a bad feeling her attitude about Crows was going to be a big problem sometime soon.  “I’ve been told you’re a new Guru, which makes you the senior Crow here.  Does this make you in charge?”

“No, ma’am,” he said.  This one would take work to unbend around me, I realized, despite the fact enough talented Crows hovered close by to turn me into Monster Hancock ten times over.  “I teach, not command.  Most other Gurus follow the same pattern.  And I do wish to correct your earlier supposition – Sky is senior here, although not a Guru.  Few enough over the years have been interested in what Sky teaches for Sky to need formal Guru status.  At the moment only your companion Gilgamesh is his student.”

“Not true,” a musical voice whispered. This also came from the left, near Hephaestus but farther away. “I’m his student also.”

“Mademoiselle Arm, that would be Newton, who would run at the mere mention of the name of your boss if I weren’t here steadying him.”  Sky.  Also at whispering distance.  Sky was behind me.  The skin on my back crawled uneasily, but I resisted the urge to turn.  Calm, I told myself, the Buddha seated at the base of my own Bo tree.

From what I gathered, nobody directly commanded the Crows.  A Guru’s suggestions, however, often were taken as orders by other Crows.  I hadn’t realized Guru status was real, at the juice level, and required formal recognition.  Interesting.

“Thank you,” I said, speaking to the cluster of trees twenty feet in front of me, where as far as I could tell, there were no Crows.  I heard the nighttime hum of passing cars on the nearby freeway, but at this late hour the park was otherwise empty.  “I’m looking for help in capturing Rogue Focus.  Not in combat or fighting, but in information gathering.  Metasense use.  Lifting the fog of war as you Crows can do best.  I’ll supply the walkie-talkies, if you agree.  Understand that there will be ally Focuses and their households involved, but I won’t ask you to contact them in any way, unless you volunteer to do so.”  Would I need to negotiate with all of these Crows individually?  Gilgamesh had intimated I might.

“Ma’am, off the shelf walkie-talkies are too easily intercepted,” said Hephaestus from his safe distance.  He would probably want me to provide acid vats to dispose of them afterwards, too.  “However, my training as a Crow includes modern electronics, and if you supply the walkie-talkies I would be willing to modify them so special equipment would be needed to intercept our messages.”

My eyes lit up.  “Wow.  Thanks.  I certainly accept.”  I had talked over the next with Gilgamesh, and despite my trepidations he said my offer wouldn’t be considered crass.  “I’m not asking for volunteers for my battle.  I’ve learned of the problems hindering Crows, and so I’ve decided to donate ten thousand dollars to each Crow who helps me in this endeavor.”  I would be cooking and cleaning for Keaton for the next year if my offer got accepted by a hundred or more Crows.  I was counting on Gilgamesh’s view that for Crows, money was good but didn’t hold the importance or social meaning cash did for normals, and wouldn’t attract them like dried pancake syrup attracts flies.

“Few would turn down such a generous gift, if they understood the evil of Rogue Focus,” Hephaestus said.  “I recently made a trip to visit Guru Shadow in New York and Occum in Boston, to learn more of the history of the situation and the stakes involved in your work.  From my visit I learned of Gymnast, um, Focus Rizzari, and her Cause.  I did not find myself converted to her Cause, but neither did I find the Cause objectionable.  Gymnast, on the other hand, is an amazing Focus, which gave me the idea for a gift to you and your companion.”

“What sort of gift?”

“Artwork.  Dross art.  I tuned my creation so it’s visible to all with a metasense.”

“I’d love to see it.”

For the first time I metasensed Hephaestus, standing only fifty feet from me, to my left, as I had thought.  Unmasked, his metapresence was bright enough to drown out everything else around me.  He waved his hands and a fountain of dross sprang into the air and settled toward the ground, dancing and glowing, ever changing.  The dross art arranged itself into a representation of Lori and her beautiful juice structure.

“When you settle on a Houston headquarters, if you wish, I can recreate this in your headquarters and make it last.”

I smiled and relaxed against my tree, taking in the beauty.  “This is beautiful, Hephaestus.”  He stepped forward, visible, to stand beside his artwork, a big smile on his face.  I realized what I had done – I had relaxed enough to react as a normal person, not as an Arm holding herself back in a negotiation.