The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) (4 page)

“I could do that,” Tiamat said.  “I should probably renew my tags on everyone I’ve tagged, as well, and renew my tag on Sylvie the same way.”

“What about me?” Sky said.

“Keaton had such a fit about my mutual tag with Gilgamesh that I’m not about to repeat that mistake.”

“That will weaken…”

Tiamat glared at Sky, bloody meat cleavers in her eyes.

“Pretend I didn’t say a thing,” Sky said, Crow quiet for once.

“The situation is too delicate for me to be carrying any more tags.  I don’t like this any more than you do, and I do want to exchange tags with you, Sky.  The more Crow tags I carry, the better my chances of survival feel.”  She sighed.  “For the moment, though, we’re just going to need to accept our limitations.”

“So, what’s the urgency?” Gilgamesh asked as they reached the door.  Tiamat had practically dragged him to his maze-infested room in the Branton. She turned and gave him a hot glare that almost melted off his clothes.

“I see.”

“There’s a hidden benefit to this household crap we’ve been doing that I want you to keep quiet about,” Tiamat said, as she opened the door, yanked him inside, and shut the door with a single motion.  “After I refreshed the tags and tagged Connie as the embodiment of Inferno, I suddenly felt far stronger.  Not physically stronger, but stronger in stature.  It doesn’t fully outweigh Keaton’s strength that she gets from her Arm entourage, but with my Arms…”

Ah, an echo of Lori and Gail’s newfound combined charisma.  “You’re thinking of challenging her?”

“No,” she said, stroking her hands up his sides.  “Ever since I joined up with Gail’s household, even before I flipped Haggerty, I’ve been able to break free of Keaton and make it stick.  Doing so would just split the Arms, so I didn’t even bother to bring it up.  Now, thanks to my beating Haggerty, and what you and Sky did, I’m even stronger.  Unfortunately, I’m still not strong enough to flip the dominance and make her a subordinate.  However…”

“You’re wondering what you could do to get more stature?

Tiamat nodded.  Gilgamesh barely blinked and Tiamat had his clothes off him.  “Yes.  You weren’t trying for this, but you and Sky’s trick combining the households is worth a lot to me.”

“There’s always Hargrove and Newton.”

“Hargrove!  Adding in someone that weak is not going to
add
to my stature.  Besides, all Hargrove and Newton are doing is screwing each other silly.  There’s nothing real there to add until Newton moves in and starts improving Hargrove’s household.”

Gilgamesh nodded.  “Not any time soon.  The Newt still says he’s too scared.”

“Fine.  Hargrove isn’t up to my standards, anyway,” Tiamat said.  “Now, shut up and pay the price…”

Pay the price for making me horny as all get out, Gilgamesh finished for Tiamat.  He metasensed Van and Sky paying similar prices in different rooms in the Branton.  No, Tiamat wouldn’t be doing much talking for a while.

Tonya Biggioni: December 9, 1972

“You have a supplier?” Lisa Rippel said.  Tonya suppressed a grimace; although Focus Rippel was part of Tonya’s Philadelphia corporate Focus circle, her taste in scents and colors always made Tonya wince.  Yes, on Lisa, muted mauve and orange did look good, but Tonya’s gut said nobody should wear that combination.  Ever.  And where in the hell did she get her perfume?  Skunk cabbage smelled better.  Gerry’s common room would take days to air out.

“That I do,” Gerry said, smiling from her throne-like chair, the gracious hostess.  Tonya had made a point of finding a different seat in the large room, declining to claim what was obviously Gerry’s personal chair.  Focus Geraldine Caruthers wore a heart-stopping short black dress and Chanel #5, and it was glaringly obvious what she had been doing with her life ever since she mastered access to her juice buffer.  “They’re called Perfect Size units, and they’re a side product of, of all things, One Stop, the parent company behind the One Stop Dry Cleaners chain.  Washers and dryers too large for standard residential use and too flimsy for large commercial use.”

“But we don’t need dry cleaning units,” Debbie Barilleaux said, frowning and making Tonya wince as she hit the crew with an inadvertent bleat of Focus charisma.  Young Focus Barilleaux made up for the strength of her late-developing charisma with the weakness of her mind.

“The One Stop chain pairs a dry cleaning establishment with a mini-laundromat,” Lisa said, physically looking down her nose at Debbie.  Tonya had thought such a thing a figment of the English language until she ran into Lisa.  “They’re going…”

Tonya forced herself away from the conversation and went back to her reading, in this case a two-inch thick binder containing her household’s newest emergency escape plan.  In specific, how to go gypsy without losing all their assets.  The details of Marty’s plan made her extremely nervous, and she played through one disaster scenario after the other, testing the plan.

“Tonya?”

Tonya realized Gerry had said her name twice.  She glanced up at the now empty room, save for her and Focus Caruthers.  Tonya took a deep breath and calmed her nerves.

“I did it again, didn’t I?” Tonya said.  “I hope you don’t mind my offloading more of my local corporate household duties on you, Gerry.  I’m sorry.  After making you the head of new Focus mentoring in the Northeast Region, I’m not exactly being fair.”

Gerry eased her tall frame down in the chair beside Tonya, not bothering to smooth her short black dress over her long legs.  Gerry’s household didn’t mind when the Focuses took over the Caruthers’ household common room for their group strategy meetings, despite the stress this dropped on Gerry’s shoulders.  All the Philadelphia area Focuses in Tonya’s corporate Focus group were skittish these days because of external Transform politics.  All it would take would be one stray screaming two year old child to set them off.  “Perhaps you can make it up to me by telling me what’s going on?”

“I’ll do what I can,” Tonya said, slipping the documents into her briefcase and closing it.  She took a deep breath.  “Which won’t be everything.”  Gerry nodded.  “Arm Keaton’s on the warpath, and the first Focuses are her target.  She’s hit Focus Schrum once already.  One of her flunky Arms, Bass, killed one of Suzie’s Transforms.”

Gerry inhaled sharply.  “Why?”

“Just to prove such a thing is possible.”

Gerry leaned back in her chair and nodded slowly.  “So, that’s why Suzie’s all nasty and shooting at shadows, and why her people and Sarah’s people have been brawling.”  Gerry shook her head over a typical bit of Focus Sarah Teas’ idiocy.  “And why it’s spreading.  Apparently, yesterday, Focus Bentlow and Focus Claunch tried to bribe the same federal lobbyist, by rumor a defector to the Commander’s service, and one of Bentlow’s people drew a pistol on Focus Claunch’s people, and they got into a fight and one of Bentlow’s people got shot.”

Tonya hadn’t heard of the episode, but it didn’t surprise her.  The hot-blooded south region Focuses had always been more prone to violence.  “I’m sure you heard about the problems the Commander’s been having this past year – losing rank to the Hero and ending up humiliated by Keaton.”  Gerry nodded.  “I think that’s been taken care of.  A few days ago the Commander challenged the Hero, and won.  She’s back to being the number two Arm again, and she’s come out of this with twice as many Arms following her.”

Gerry turned away.

“Gerry?”

“I know about Focus Rickenbach and Focus Rizzari’s moves to Chicago,” Gerry said, her voice a Crow whisper.  “Insane, from a parochial point of view, but if you think about the big picture, I understand what she’s doing.  The Commander’s protecting her people from the first Focuses, Arm Keaton, as well as the Hunters.  She’s putting together a Transform army.”

Tonya hadn’t thought of the Commander’s actions as putting together an army, but it made sense.

“You’re worried she’s going to call on you, and you won’t be able to resist,” Tonya said.

Gerry nodded, but didn’t say anything.  Gerry and the Commander shared many links, going back to when the Commander kidnapped Gerry so she could witness Crow Wandering Shade’s kidnapped Focus, Frasier, in captivity.

“We all have our ties, and the Commander, I hope, is not our enemy.”

“Tonya, if she’s putting together a real army, she’s going to need a logistics expert, and she knows of my talents in that area.”  The Commander had chosen Gerry to run her logistics in the Clearing of Chicago battle, and Gerry had done an excellent job.

Tonya shrugged.  This wasn’t exactly new news.  “There’s more, isn’t there,” she said.  Gerry’s tension far eclipsed her stated worries.

“Two things.  When I think about what’s going on among the Focuses, I keep thinking ‘who is in charge of this mess?’  It’s almost as if someone wants the Focuses to fall apart.”

“Well, the Crows, the Arms and the Hunter Chimeras all do,” Tonya said.  Her blithe comment drew a glare from Gerry.  “The reality of our situation isn’t anything any of us wants to think about, but consider this: some people would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

Gerry blanched after drawing the necessary and obvious conclusion from Tonya’s comment.  “You can’t mean…”

Tonya cut her off with a charismatic yank.  Gerry didn’t fight Tonya’s charismatic command.  “As I said, don’t think about it too hard.  Or say anything.”  Tonya had put together, in her mind, far too many of her old repressed conversations with her former ‘owner’.  Although she didn’t possess any proof of her assertions, her gut feel for the real problem behind everything going wrong among the Transforms did fit the evidence.  “I could be wrong.”  Pause.  “So, what’s the second thing that’s worrying you?”

“Success,” Gerry said.  She took a small Wedgewood cameo, likely one of her family heirlooms, from the drawer of the small occasional table beside her.  She gave it to Tonya.  “I got one to work.”

Tonya scanned the cameo with her metasense and sensed the embedded juice pattern.  “It’s the ‘someone is hiding from my metasense’ pattern,” Tonya said, and whistled.  “But how?  That’s way above your juice pattern capabilities.”  They had talked about this many times; Gerry possessed only minimal personal capabilities, compared to the other Focuses of her age, but obviously possessed hidden power.  She was damned difficult to charismatically affect, her metasense acuity was legendary, and she shrugged off juice patterns like a pro.

“I know.  Crow Gilgamesh was right when he told me he recognized the same problems he had, in me.  The pattern was so much easier to stabilize when I attached it to a physical object and could build it up incrementally.  Of all the things, I’m an object-oriented witch.”  She sighed.  “And now I told you.”  The first Focuses would go after Gerry as soon as they found out about her newly awakened talent, the same way they had crushed all the other amulet and potion-creating Focuses down through the years.

“You’re only going to get into trouble from me if you
don’t
develop this,” Tonya said.  “My opinion about Focuses is ‘the stronger the better’, especially now.  Just watch out for side effects.  One of the reasons why we generally dissuade Focuses from fast ability development is the effect this sort of thing can have on their household and their personal life.”

Gerry nodded.  She and Tonya had already exchanged horror stories about the side effects of their newly learned access to their household juice buffers.  For a Major Transform, any new trick always carried far too many risks.  “I’ll be careful.”  She paused.  “I just can’t guarantee I’ll be able to give you any warning if the Commander calls and I need to leave town.”

“I understand,” Tonya said, using her own charisma on herself to keep from spitting figurative nails in anger.  “I understand.”

How In The Hell Had Gilgamesh Done It?

Faith Corrigan – Focus #5 – June 1955.  Although known to suffer from occasional bouts of depression and the occasional day where she cannot rouse herself from bed, Focus Corrigan is the oldest of the first Focuses who is still active in the world of Focus politics.  She managed the mentoring program for young Focuses until 1968.  “Young Focuses should be thankful for the risks we took to keep us all out of the hands of the doctors and bureaucrats, and should listen closely to our advice and comments on the proper way to run a household.”

“Lives of the Focuses”

Carol Hancock: December 10, 1972

What the fuck?

Figures something like this would show up while Gilgamesh and I were making love, Major Transform style, and while Gilgamesh was using my Monster talisman as a sex toy in our lovemaking.

Given where the toy was now, this was most embarrassing.

Gilgamesh froze as well.

“Normally Monsters don’t drive
cars
,” I said.  I didn’t know yet the full potential of my carved bone Monster talisman, awakened three days ago by a crazy apparition of a dead Crow shaman in the Pheromone Flow, but I already knew, when in contact with my body, it enhanced my metasense range as far as metasensing Monsters was concerned.  I metasensed our car-driving Monster at two miles.

“She’s not a Monster,” Gilgamesh said.  Focused on his metasense, his face turned vacant, his eyes seeing nothing.

“She?”

“An Arm, and not one I recognize, wearing a Monster skin cape.”

“Business, then.  I need to get cleaned up.”

Gilgamesh did the manly honors and retrieved the Monster talisman without a word.  He joined me in my quick shower, helping me soap myself up.  Teasing me.  Nasty man.  “I’m going with you, Carol.  Remember Sinclair’s story?”

The one where Chevalier lured Sinclair out of his household and shut down his metasense with a senior Crow trick, nearly leading to his death.  I opened my mouth to object, but Gilgamesh pulled on my tag and I cut short my objection.

The psychology of the Crow tag involved ‘having each other’s backs’.  Of course he would want to serve as backup in a situation like this.  I wouldn’t need him if this was what it appeared to be, a confrontation with another Arm – but what if this was a scam?  Who was to say this wasn’t Chevalier fooling our metasenses?  Or a new and unexpected Hunter trick?  Or, worse, Bass and Crow Echo, who possessed the capabilities to run this scam whenever they wanted.

Backup would increase my survival odds if this turned out to be a trap.  And if Echo was involved, Gilgamesh would get a chance at the revenge he had been lusting after for months.  He wouldn’t be turning down a chance at Echo, no matter how slim.

I rinsed him off and carried him out of the shower.  “Stay safe and bring your weapons,” I said, throwing on my gear at Arm speed.  As we dressed, the unknown parked her car about a half mile from my house and came in on foot, at a slow walk, and not directly toward my current residence.  “New Arm contacts often turn bloody.”

My name is Carol Hancock, and I’m an Arm.  I’m a Major Transform and a victim of Armenigar’s Syndrome, and to stay alive I need to kill Transforms for juice every two to three weeks, juice being the substance all Transforms produce and require.  Arms don’t produce enough juice.  Crow Guru Gilgamesh, my lover and close companion, is a male Major Transform juice-byproduct scavenger, and professionally paranoid.  I’m often called the Commander because of my military command talents, talents I didn’t get to use as often as I wanted to these days.

Gilgamesh and I currently walked on the thin edge of disaster, as my Arm boss, Stacy Keaton, had turned on the Focuses, the third variety of Major Transform, the variety that keeps the male and female Transforms alive.  At the moment, Keaton was gunning for the ruling first Focuses, a move against a deserving group of scumsuckers that would have made all the other Major Transforms happy, except for their legitimate fear that they would be Keaton’s next target.

Unfortunately, while we plotted our violent attack on the first Focuses we turned our backs on the Cause, the effort that we hoped would save us from the coming Transform Apocalypse, when nearly everyone would transform and civilization would fall.  We also turned our backs on the threat from the rival Hunter civilization; they wanted to enslave the lot of us.  Even worse, Keaton’s top strategist at the moment, Arm Bass, was a mortal enemy of mine.  Cunning and devious, I wouldn’t put it past her to arrange an attack on me of this nature.

We were all in deep deep shit, and there was nothing I could do about it at the moment.

I walked out of my remodeled warehouse as the other Arm entered my metasense range.  The blustery northeast wind almost lifted me off my feet, my current Chicago stronghold in the Rogers Park neighborhood being close enough to Lake Michigan to be subject to its stiff wind.  I glared at the flakes of blowing snow and snarled, but as usual my predator effect didn’t part the flurries.  This year’s hard and early winter refused to retreat, and the temperature had dropped close to zero again tonight.  I would be stuck in this shit location for another week before I moved into a real house and turned my warehouse into a backup residence.

I focused on my metasense, attempting to get a good read on the Arm intruder.  She stopped her approach when I walked ten paces from my home, remaining in Leone Beach Park.  She had gotten me with
her
metasense, despite my standard metasense masking tricks.  Not shabby.  The fact she didn’t charge meant this wasn’t an overt Arm-style dominance challenge.

My Rogers Park home wasn’t what it appeared to be on the outside, that being a grimy unmarked two story former warehouse and storefront complex a block from the ‘M’ line.  Inside, I had set up the place as a fortress, and inside the fortress I had set up a relatively luxurious faux-home.  I walked under the El, Gilgamesh at my back, and turned southeast toward the beach park.

“I don’t believe she’s a senior Arm,” Gilgamesh whispered, after a few paces.  I nodded, as I pegged the Arm as a middling-age mature Arm, similar to Arms Naylor and Sibrian.  I didn’t trust my observations, though.  I also metasensed multiple tags on her, eight by my count, all Focus tags.  This wasn’t Armenigar, but someone who recognized the stature benefits of wearing the tags of established Focuses.  She carried the stature of Bass or Rayburn, as us Arms measure such things, stature far beyond her years.

Eissler could pull off this trick, only I thought I knew Eissler’s metasense signature from the Dreaming, and this wasn’t her.  Still, this Arm’s metapresence did feel a little familiar, and information from the Dreaming was notoriously unreliable.  Why would Eissler come here, though, without a word of warning first?  Not to challenge me; pffht, I would find out about such a challenge only after Eissler pasted me into next Tuesday.  She was that good.  As to why the masquerade, well, we did have a war on.  We were all being paranoid.

“Anything besides the one Arm?” I whispered back to Gilgamesh.  We were now only five hundred feet from the beach park.  The wind howled off the lake, blowing the snow pellets sideways and cutting visibility to near nothing.  I swore three quarters of the streetlights in this part of town were out, as well.

“Nothing,” Gilgamesh said, whispering from safely upwind of me.  “Carol, if I’m not mistaken, she’s an Armenigar-trained Arm.”

His comment clicked open one of my memories.  I recognized her now, a Montreal Arm I once metasensed in the Dreaming, an Arm I had a good feeling about.  I relaxed a bit, my wariness reduced to the Bass and Echo scenarios.  This sort of crap would be just like Bass.

I relaxed a bit more, fifty paces on, when I saw the Arm through the blowing snow.  Sheltering in the wind shadow of the park’s fifty-year-old bricked-up boathouse, she stood five ten and possessed the heavy muscles of a power Arm.  She wasn’t the far shorter Arm Bass in disguise.  Hell, she carried more muscles than any five-ten human
man
; this was an Arm who would have a hard time walking around in public in any disguise without attracting attention.  Gilgamesh, invisible, eased away from me when he decided the situation was what it appeared to be, a tense Arm meet and greet.

When I became visible thirty feet down the beach from her, the Canadian Arm didn’t bow to me, her obvious superior, eliciting an instinctive growl from me.  She did put down the last of her weaponry, most of which already lay at her feet on the snow covered sand (she liked big swords and big guns), and she did turn her gaze to my feet and fill her mind with humble thoughts to match her posture.

I readied a charge, to knock her back a bit and take her measure, but the quiet soft voice in my head I normally ignored, the one that always wanted me to act in a civilized manner, began its hopeless pleas.  Did I need to turn everything into a fight?  Alone, this bulky and likely glacially slow Arm was no more of a physical threat to me than, well, Gilgamesh.  I was armed, juiced-up, and fast.  I could take her unarmed whenever I wanted.  She reeked of humility and humbleness; she knew she faced the Commander, and these days my reputation was darkest black, beastly and bloody.

So, instead of punishing this Arm for her effrontery, for barging into my territory without prior permission, I heeded the soft voice and decided to save my righteous wrath for later, and only if needed.  She was a foreign Arm, following different Arm protocols, and although she wasn’t showing the proper humility a Keaton-trained Arm would show in this situation, she wasn’t being personally aggressive.

“Why are you here, Arm from Montreal?”  I didn’t hold back on my predator, though.

She shivered at the force of my predator and almost ran, but caught herself and showed decent self-control.  “Ma’am.”  Well, at least she knew
something
about proper submission.  “Commander, my name is Giselle Debardelaben, and I am here to offer you alliance.”

I spent a moment reading her and metasensing her and the truth of her words.  I did appreciate her Monster-skin cape.  Her trophy belt and its myriad pieces of skin I appreciated less, but it did explain where Duval, exiled from Canada as a baby Arm, got her quirks.

“I hear you,” I said.  I walked toward her, not a charge, and took my time, testing her nerves.  Would she flee or hold her ground?  Would she panic and pick up one of the weapons at her feet, to defend herself?  Would she offer me the excuse I needed to beat her silly?

She held her ground, but I sensed the effort involved.  I terrified her.  Good.

“You tried to train Arm Duval and failed,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am.”  I didn’t tell her with words to tell me the story, but did so with my predator effect, and she complied, able to read my signal with ease.  This was a well-trained Arm, despite the fact she spoke English as a second language, with a noticeable Quebecois accent.  “I caught her after she poached a Transform from one of my Focuses.  She wouldn’t accept either my tag or those from any of my Focuses, and I was too weak to hold her mind and keep her from disobeying my orders.  I faced the choice of killing her or exiling her, and chose exile, hoping she might find her way to Arm Keaton, whose ability to train difficult Arms is well known.”

I snorted, as I was one of those ‘difficult Arm’ trainees.  “Duval is currently being trained by Arm Rose Webberly.”  An Arm with less than six months more experience than Debardelaben, and who possessed nowhere near Debardelaben’s stature.  “If you are to serve me in any way, you will need to vacate all claims to Duval, as Duval is Webberly’s, and Webberly is
mine
.”

“Ma’am, I renounce all claims.”

I circled Debardelaben, impressed with both her simple quitclaim, stated without hesitation, and her musculature, which for a two and a half year old Arm was fucking amazing.  “Who else, besides Armenigar, trained you?”

“Focuses Annie of Montreal and Larson of Toronto.”

The former explained both her poise and her stature.  Annie of Montreal aka the Madonna of Montreal had a reputation for decorum and politeness, as well as a tendency to enforce both with her charisma.  As Crow Sky, a confidant of the Madonna’s, said many times: ‘Her, you don’t challenge.’  I stopped behind Debardelaben’s left shoulder and stood in silence, letting the Arm squirm in discomfort at my implied threat.  At my back, Gilgamesh took to the roof of the boathouse, ignoring the wind and searching for enemies.  With me distracted by an Arm-style meet and greet, this would be a perfect time for one of my many enemies to show up and make my life more miserable.

“Why are you here, now?”

She paused to focus her mind in the face of my daunting predatory presence.  The wind chose that moment to blast snow from the roof of the boathouse across my face.  Both of us ignored it.  The snow slowly found lodging on our coats and hair, camouflaging us to suit the white beach.  “Ma’am, I am here to serve you in the coming fight I do not know how to properly and politely reference.”

“Something told to you by the Madonna of Montreal, perhaps?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I told Keaton the Focuses would learn about her planned attacks in the Dreaming, but she didn’t care.  Now I got to deal with another piece of fallout resulting from her disdain for strategic-level secrecy.  “Why are you interested in this fight?”