The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) Read online

  Van set her beside him on the couch. The news coming from the television chased away her memories, replacing them with fresh worries. Van reached over to turn up the volume.

  “—excess of seventy dead, mostly police and FBI. Authorities are still retrieving the dead, and the names of the fallen will be withheld until the families can be contacted. Let’s go to our reporter in Washington. Dan?” The image changed to the intense face of a cold reporter standing in front of a smoldering building, a line of police officers milling around between him and the building.

  “Walter,” the reporter in Washington said, “we don’t have any information yet on what led to the shoot-out with the Arm, but it began in the abandoned building behind me, which is now rubble, as you can see. According to rumor, this was supposed to be some sort of trap for the Arm. The fight went wrong somehow, but we don’t have more than rumor, as most of the people involved in the supposed trap seem to be among the victims.

  “We do know that the Arm involved is supposed to be the one named Amy Haggerty, known improbably to the Transform community as ‘the Hero’, the Arm giving the FBI such trouble over the last several years. Several of the survivors claim that she was wounded in the fight, but again, we don’t have confirmation on this. With me is WPD Captain Perry Boniaby. Captain Boniaby, what can you tell us about…”

  “Shit,” Gail said, as they watched the story unfold.

  “What’s Haggerty doing attacking the FBI?” Van said. “I thought the Arms were going after the first Focuses.”

  Gail nodded. “So soon after the dominance fight, she wouldn’t be doing this without an explicit order from Carol. Not that Carol’s saying anything on the subject.” Damn the Arms and their excessive secrecy. She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to push thoughts through her current mental morass, attempting to put herself in Carol’s position. “Oh. Carol was afraid the Firsts would sucker in the FBI to protect them, and sent in Amy to make sure it didn’t happen. I hope Amy’s okay.” Gail carried a soft spot in her heart for Amy Haggerty. She was so good at combat and tactics, and so bad at resisting Gail’s charm.

  Seventy dead, likely a major fraction of the FBI’s Arm Task Force. Haggerty wounded. Perhaps this would delay the attack on the Firsts.

  A sudden wave of pleasure washed over Gail, banishing her headache and nearly driving her unconscious. She moaned and collapsed further into Van’s arms. “Hey, Van,” she said, her voice rolling with the sultry. “How’d you like to go somewhere darker and more private. I know just the thing to take your mind off this crap.”

  ---

  Gail held Van and rocked, locked in endless pleasure and orgasm. They had finished long ago, but the sensations didn’t stop, all-consuming and inescapable. She had screamed, and the scream twined with the pleasure until her mind echoed with it. She cried until she had no tears left.

  The Inferno Friday night orgy. She never imagined it could devour her this way.

  It hadn’t before. Something had changed, likely when Lori tagged her and cuddled with her in her impromptu darkroom, when they chased Patterson out of Carol’s mind in the Dreaming.

  Gail was still astonished that the Inferno people did this every Friday night. This was more intense than she had imagined, far more than the Inferno tall tale. This was something out of a nightmarish hedonist household.

  Too many links. Her household linked to Carol. Carol linked to Lori and Inferno. Now Gail linked to Lori through a temporary tag enabling her and Lori to share juice buffers, a tag now degraded into a permanent low-level tag, completing the circle. Gail wanted to scream, but the last scream still echoed madly in her mind. Even Lori participated in her household’s orgy, filled with juice from her own juice buffer.

  Years ago, Lori had stood apart from the Inferno orgy, but that was before she learned to draw juice from her own buffer. Worse, except for Sky, Lori’s attraction and amorous dalliances were exclusively with women, something Gail previously only suspected, and Gail wasn’t sure what to make of the smooth skin and joyous avalanche of sensations as they kept pouring in.

  She had seduced Van, no problem there. She had worn him out and wanted more. Needed more. The stimulation never stopped. Van tried to calm her, but his words failed.

  Now, because of the acuity of her metasense and all those links, Gail was present, in the room with the Inferno people, immersed in all their sex. Part of the time when Van had been banging her, he was Lori, Lori’s doing. Gail hadn’t minded at the time, as she enjoyed herself more than ever before, but now she worried about what this had done to her, and to Van. To Van, who wondered why, during part of their love, he said Gail appeared like Lori.

  The orgy didn’t stop with her and Van. Half the Transforms in Gail’s household screwed like minks, caught up in the orgy as well, because of their connection to Gail. The rest curled in corners, shaking, beyond panic.

  Gail couldn’t block out the sensations. Her household superorganism and the Inferno household superorganism were screwing. Right through Gail. She pulled Van back into her, making him horny enough to continue. Unfortunately, real sex was no longer good enough, not enough to block out everyone else who was screwing. The overstimulation rolled through her mind, the slow beat of ocean waves against the coast, and dropped her again into sensory overload. She was everyone who made love. She couldn’t even think of anything except sex.

  “This is not good.” Gilgamesh, in the same room with her and Van. He, at least, remained in control. Now. The emotions had drawn him and Melanie together, no shock, but he hadn’t realized the problem until after he wore out Melanie. “Something’s wrong in the way Gail and Lori and Carol set up the two households.”

  “Can you do something about this?” Van asked. Wasn’t he inside her? No longer. Just her imagination. That was just, um, well, embarrassing but pleasurable. “Get down here.” He patted the bed. “She needs you.”

  Gilgamesh? Having him inside her sounded good to Gail. She reached for him, but he backed away, leaving her moaning in frustration.

  “If I fall into this, then what’s going on will have grabbed all the households’ Major Transforms.”

  “Carol, too?”

  “She’s here, with Daisy.” Yes, there she was, going way overboard with Van’s younger sister. At least Carol was able to heal any of the damage she caused, unlike Gail, who had left bleeding gouges on Van’s back. She hoped Daisy’s mind survived, as the Arm wasn’t holding back tonight. “I’m going to need to think on this. It’s a major glitch in our household redefinition project. Households in close proximity should be able to function together without such issues.” He paused. “Would you mind if I put Gail to sleep?”

  Gail shook her head ‘no’. “I think you need to,” Van said.

  Her eyes met Gilgamesh’s and connected with a promise for more personal time together after the orgy ended. She wouldn’t fight his attempt to put her to sleep. A little recovery time wouldn’t hurt at all. Gilgamesh touched her head, and Gail didn’t think another thought until morning.

  Gilgamesh: December 9, 1972

  “Gilgamesh, are you responsible for this?” Sky said. He pushed a brochure across the table, one of Shadow’s. They met in a small room on the second floor of the Branton, tucked in behind the elevator shafts. Every few minutes, the entire room rumbled as an elevator passed.

  Gilgamesh nodded. They had been meeting on household issues once every three or four days, ever since Inferno’s arrival in Chicago, but so far today they skirted around the real problem, last night’s orgy debacle. They had done so much fruitless brainstorming last night that they had gotten on each other’s nerves.

  Old habits. For years he and Sky had both courted Focus Rizzari. Although that was now settled, their old jostling habits hadn’t ended.

  “Stupendous,” Sky said. “‘Crows and Focuses share common goals’. Bah. ‘A combined Crow & Focus household can support perhaps twice as many Transforms’. Bargle! This is even worse than your housecleaning
service. What are you and Shadow trying to do, get us all killed?”

  “I’m not sure I understand your objections,” Gilgamesh said. “My statements are factual, if anything, understated. Shadow said he needed something to put in his brochures regarding the household redefinition project. I sent him a couple of paragraphs worth, after apologizing that the real meat of the project wasn’t ready to be released until you came up with documentation a standard Crow could use.”

  Sky stood and paced around the undersized meeting room, dodging the small table and several chairs. “Shadow, then, is the one pushing the issue. Damn. I’ve talked to enough older Crows to know how inflammatory this is. To put it in American terms, this is like burning a United States flag in front of a Veterans Association meeting.”

  “Veterans of Foreign Wars.”

  “Whatever. Shadow’s inviting another series of attacks on his Crows. What Chevalier and his crew did to Sinclair isn’t the only horror that one group of Crows can do to another.”

  Gilgamesh sucked air. “Could you stop pacing, please, Sky?” Sky sighed, and planted himself again. “What horrors are you talking about? And don’t tell me that I don’t want to know.”

  “Okay,” Sky said. Pause. “I won’t.” Longer pause. The shrieks of pre-teen children penetrated the walls of the room, in what sounded like a multi-floor game of tag. “In any event, when you’re thinking about defending our little household menagerie, don’t forget to think about defending them and yourself from the senior Crows.”

  “I would consider that to be nearly impossible,” Gilgamesh said. Sky was being his usual unbearable self, and he wouldn’t be telling him about these supposed horrors unless Gilgamesh sat on him. He doubted the effort would be worth the results: information on older Crow capabilities he wouldn’t have a chance of stopping anyway.

  “Only if you think about stopping them directly. So don’t. Stick close to our women Major Transforms. Use dross constructs to enhance your metasense. Put up more metasense shielding. I’ll get more of the local dogs and cats to be watching out for strange things. Talk our security people into pushing out our defensive perimeter. Neither of us can do much to protect ourselves against the top Crows, but if we can put up enough chaff to make them think twice, make them think the risk trade-offs are bad, maybe they’ll back off from a direct assault. They may be ultra-powerful from our point of view, but those old Crows are still Crows.”

  “I can do that. However, I see one problem.”

  “Yes?”

  “To convince the security people to extend their perimeter would require them to listen to me. The inter-household tension is bad enough to make my suggestions suspect in their eyes.” They needed to return to the real issue, the orgy debacle. “Gail’s people aren’t at all happy about how they and Gail got sucked into Inferno’s activities last night. They were quite loud about the issue at breakfast this morning.”

  Sky scratched his forehead, and leaned back in his chair to study the ceiling. “I guess we’re not going to leave well enough alone, I take it?” Gilgamesh didn’t respond, and after a moment, Sky continued. “Do you know why Carol decided to stick our households in the same building?”

  “She said that one location was easier to defend than two. Actually, what she said was two was easier to defend than three. If feasible, I think we would all be living in Littleside now. I don’t think she ever gave any thought to the idea that physically combining Focus households might be a problem.”

  “The fact Focuses don’t normally combine households wasn’t clue enough?”

  “We know Focus Patterson does.”

  “But how? Knowing the psychology of the Firsts, and Patterson’s capabilities, my bet is that she’s got the other Focuses tagged and subordinate. I can’t see either of our two gracious ladies being willing to be subordinate to the other.”

  “We could get them to tag each other,” Gilgamesh said. “Mutual tags.”

  “Right,” Sky said. As if Gilgamesh was being an idiot for making a suggestion like that.

  Gilgamesh shrugged.

  “I’ve heard Lori talk about the dangers and disgust associated with Focus-Focus tags. Convincing her’s going to be a steep hill to climb.”

  Gilgamesh shrugged again. “Necessity will outweigh disgust, if we present the case correctly.”

  Sky snorted. “Consider, my friend, that we don’t have each other tagged.”

  “Crows don’t do that!”

  “Oh, that’s going to be a wonderful argument point, mon frère.”

  Gilgamesh turned away and winced. He could just hear the argument in his head between the two Focuses: juice experimentation is too risky and might endanger the households, you never know what the juice is going to do, yak yak yak. He could also hear Carol’s response if they asked the Arm her opinion: no way, never, nuh uh, no new juice crap when we’re all stuck in deep deep shit…

  Yet, Gilgamesh knew of one example where Major Transforms of the same type coexisted within a single household. He smiled, thinking about it, and Sky returned the smile. Improbably, two white rats ran up Sky’s leg, leapt on Sky’s sleeve, and studied both of the Crows, noses twitching. So, Dan Harper’s rats were out again, eh? They had always seemed to be out whenever he and Sky held one of their tense confrontational conversations back in Inferno’s old Boston home. However, the ten year old Inferno kid and his rats weren’t Gilgamesh’s problem anymore.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, old friend?” Sky said.

  “Noble households.”

  “Yes. They even call it a tag, these days.”

  “So what do we do?” Gilgamesh said. “Create this oversized Affinity bond, then what? Get the households to tag each other? These are Transforms, not Nobles. How do we convince a household to create a tag? Who would we talk to? What is there to talk to?”

  ---

  “You two are doing some large scale dross manipulation,” Connie said. “I can sense it. What are you two idiot Crows up to, anyway?”

  “We’re trying to get your two households to work together better. I assume you understand the dangers associated with last night’s problem?” Sky said.

  Connie nodded, as did Sylvie, Helen and a still pale and shaken Van. The two Crows had maneuvered them into the common laundry room, by way of manipulation and simple leverage of rank as household Major Transforms. Connie stood at one end of the warm room, and the three people from Gail’s household stood at the other, with the two Crows between them. Three of the dryers and two of the washing machines provided a background ambience of thumping, sloshing, and whirring.

  “What we did was only the first step,” Gilgamesh said. “For the rest, we need your help.”

  “What sort of help?” Connie said. She set her jaw and crossed her arms, and Gilgamesh wished that he hadn’t gotten sucked into this particular problem. There were far too many difficult women in his life already.

  “The next step is for the households to tag each other,” Sky said, then spread his hands flamboyantly. “Wait, wait, I know what you’re about to say. You aren’t Major Transforms, you can’t tag anything. Yet, you do direct the household as a group.”

  “This isn’t making any sense to me, at all,” Sylvie said. She shared Connie’s crossed arms and set jaw. One washing machine finished its drain cycle with a clunk and began to spin, vibrating loudly.

  “What you’re suggesting is that we get our household superorganisms to tag each other,” Connie said. “What did you two do, anyway? Technically speaking.”

  “We tagged each other, as shamans, and did the same symbolic dross manipulation that a Crow shaman does to stabilize a Noble household,” Gilgamesh said. “For the moment, at a low level, the households are one.”

  “Although this is just an analogy, think of it as the households being one, now, at the dross level. It’s up to you to build it up at the juice level.”

  “It sounds like magic,” Helen said, radiating distrust. Helen didn’t even need to
cross her arms be forbidding. ‘Forbidding’ came so naturally to her that all she needed to do was stand there. A middle-aged holy terror with orange hair and blue eye shadow. As the only woman in Gail’s household who hadn’t minded last night’s antics, the sexual charge from last night made her even more forceful than normal. He suspected that if they pulled off this household merger she and her husband, Roger, would be angling for an invite to Inferno next Friday.

  “Chemical magic, Helen,” Sky said. “What Gilgamesh and I did was reduce the number of odor cues in the Branton telling you that Gail’s household and Inferno are hostile tribes. Alas, this has a much bigger impact on a Noble than a Transform, but there is ample evidence – written up by Ann Chiron of Inferno – that Transforms react to a wide range of juice and dross based chemical cues, even if you can’t consciously smell them all. Household tagging will get rid of even more of these hostility-inducing odor cues.”

  “Do it,” Van said. “If that’s what’s going on, you need to do this.” There, finally, stood the one person who wasn’t hostile.

  Connie nodded. It was grudging, but it was a nod. “Any idea how, Sky?”

  “Nobles, when they create a Barony, make pledges to defend each other to the death and then hug each other. In the presence of a Crow shaman keeping a particular mental image of oneness and the Noble household in his head. With a Noble, it’s always at the household level.”

  “You two aren’t Crow shamans, are you?” Sylvie said.

  Gilgamesh smiled. “Remind me to tell you about a recent long trip I took with Duke Hoskins, Sylvie. Sky and I both know the basics and can do them, and this is real basic stuff, compared to manipulating the Great Enabler.”

  “All right, I’m willing to give it a try,” Sylvie said. “It’s damned clear we need to do something.”

  Sky and Gilgamesh stood and faced each other, about a yard apart. “Go give each other a hug, and proclaim the households as one,” Gilgamesh said.

  Connie and Sylvie grimaced, and they both moved slowly, but they hugged. One of the dryers celebrated the occasion by completing its cycle, making the laundry room quieter by a minute amount.