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

  A juice run. Bass would be back in less than a minute.

  “We’ve got to go, people!” Del said.

  “I’m not leaving anyone behind,” Webberly said. Giselle screamed.

  “It’s growing!” Giselle’s hand, contaminated by the unknown juice effect, was indeed growing.

  The radiotelephone squawked. “That’s élan contamination. Cut it off or it’ll kill her!” The Crow.

  Webberly didn’t stop to argue. She practically flew over to Giselle, metasensed for a moment, and then used Giselle’s sword (dropped by Bass before she retreated out of the loading dock platform) to cut off Giselle’s upper arm at mid-bicep level. Giselle dropped to her knees, her eyes all white, attempting to fight off shock and unconsciousness.

  “Where the fuck is Mona?” Webberly said, her right hand gripped tightly on Del’s collar, her face in Del’s face. She wasn’t sure how Webberly got back to Del so quickly. Del suspected she was drifting in and out of consciousness.

  Del closed her eyes. “She’s on the barn roof, by Ma’am Keaton’s emergency static generator.” The one that could protect someone from inexpert metasense locating. A smart place for a student Arm. Del had been the one to tell Mona about the place.

  “Merry, go get her.”

  Merry retrieved Mona and deposited the whimpering student Arm next to Del. A moment later they left. Bass’s crew, in their two vehicles, followed them, less than a mile back. They left most of Keaton’s records behind.

  Del took a deep breath and concentrated on what wound healing she had the juice for, only to be brought back a moment later by a string of purple invective from Merry. Apparently, the military surplus vehicle couldn’t go faster than 45.

  Bass and her crew hung back, following them, hungry.

  Carol Hancock: December 21, 1972 – December 22, 1972

  I meditated that night, in the early morning hours before dawn, and let my metasense range out into the world. There was a restless feel to things as positions shifted for the coming battle. I was here because I needed answers to my worries. Some, thankfully, were good answers.

  I found Webberly and Debardelaben, both alive, though both badly wounded. They were somewhere, out on the road. The hounds of war chased them, or at least that’s what my Dreaming shit gave as an interpretation.

  I was actually able to pick up a third Arm among the crew, one of the student Arms. Damn, I was impressed. I couldn’t pick up Duval, Kent or Bartlett, even though I knew they were right there with Webberly and Debardelaben. So, we had finally thrown an Arm as good as one of the top end Focuses. I worked out age differences, and how age affected Focus leadership, and decided I probably had about five or six years before this student Arm progressed enough and got enough experience to have a shot at heaving me out from my leadership position. By then, we would have too many Arms for a single hierarchy, anyway. I would need to use her carefully in the meantime, but she wasn’t an immediate problem.

  Unlike my other far-too-many immediate problems.

  Los Angeles was already no longer Keaton’s. Patterson had somehow disrupted her claim. I wondered if Keaton knew she had lost her territory, and suspected she did. She would be much easier to break without a territory and so Patterson would surely make sure she knew.

  Chicago looked good, and firmly mine. My territory possessed the dangerous feel of a place on the front lines. Detroit was still faintly mine, but it radiated the ravaged feel of a place where the fight had been and gone, and left only devastation. The territories of my Arms were in good shape, but an air of anticipation hung over them, waiting for the fight.

  The Hunter territory was quiescent, but filled with hungry eyeballs. They played no part in what we did with Patterson, but they would pounce on the survivors of the Patterson fight.

  I couldn’t find Bass. She didn’t have a territory and I couldn’t tell if she was Patterson’s captive or not. The same for Rayburn.

  Pittsburgh, though. Pittsburgh screamed weakness, panic, and terror. All a sham. Behind the sham, the damned place was lying in wait, an inky dark trap with monstrous jaws. I couldn’t sense any individual people there, just the waiting, and the hunger. Patterson knew we were coming.

  The black pit called to me, oh so alluring. It sang to the beast, and the beast loved the dark. Come and dance with me, the darkness sang. Serve me and I will feed your desires. Dream with me and I will make your dreams reality. A siren’s call. A glimpse of heaven.

  I pulled back and dropped out of my trance. I needed two quick breaths to stop my shaking. Patterson and the beast. They were sisters of the heart, something she had nurtured in me from the start. What she offered was something that at heart, I wanted.

  This was a problem.

  I thought for a while, weighing options. None of them were good, and the original plan – attacking Patterson’s stronghold – remained the best. Back into my trance, I made one last pass over Chicago before my meditative vision shattered around me into a kaleidoscope of visual noise. For a moment, as the fractured images whirled past me, I feared I was being attacked and my adrenaline level spiked. Then I caught a vision of the Madonna and Child, a remembered image from some old painting, and I relaxed. Not an attack then, but some half-assed attempt to communicate with me by the Madonna. I let the images wash over me, willing myself to understand, but unwilling to fully open up to whatever now wandered through my mind.

  Pine trees. Snow. Running from a black cloud with eyes. A mountain brook in springtime. A goddamned Chimera face – a polar bear with antlers – and his Chimeraic terror roars strong enough to make the black cloud pause. Dark clouds and sleet. An old gray-bearded wild man with a bloody knife in his hand, fishing around in some dead woman’s guts and pulling out a baby’s leg. The Madonna and Child again. Something fast fighting a Monster dragon. Sky and Armenigar improbably standing shoulder-to-shoulder, fear in their eyes. Pine trees. The crack of a rifle, a blood splotch appearing on the chest of a woman Transform, a vacant-eyed Armenigar leaping at the Transform and sucking her juice as she faded from the gunshot wound. A dark haired Focus I didn’t recognize, who I knew had to be the Madonna of Montreal despite the changes to her appearance, being held by Sky, tears flowing down her face. Rain. Endless cold rain, endless cold gray clouds.

  I pushed it all away; whatever the message was, I didn’t understand. I stood, trance over and rubbed my temples. Besides the people I knew in the vision, it didn’t mean anything to me. Save for one thing: I did recognize the black cloud with eyes. From Haggerty’s description, the black cloud with eyes was the terror disguise of the European nutcase Crow, the Purifier, at least what he wore before Haggerty scragged his ass. What the fuck did this history lesson have to do with anything going on in the here and now? I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  I had a war to fight.

  Dolores Sokolnik: December 21, 1972

  “Ignore the Crow hiding behind the boxes,” Webberly had said. Del couldn’t ignore the order. However, the order didn’t cover the situation where the Crow didn’t ignore her.

  Besides, all the Arms were too busy coping with the one big thing, each in her own way. Juice hunger. Bass and her crew still followed them, according to Mouse, hanging four miles back. Bass was waiting until their juice hunger drove them into one stupid decision or another. Then she would pounce. Arm Bartlett drove the slow military surplus vehicle, the only one of them without critically low juice from the fight and the healing afterwards. True, Mona hadn’t done a thing during the fight, but the attack on the first Focuses had delayed her latest assisted hunt, and she was too new as an Arm to be trusted to hunt on her own.

  Of the Arm crew, only Arm Webberly and Del possessed the willpower to ignore the low juice issue. Arm Debardelaben, the worst injured, asked to be tied up, and after being tied up she allowed herself to fall into a waking hallucinogenic state in which, if Del’s ears weren’t mistaken, she suffered through flashbacks of her training from Arm Armenigar herself. Accord
ing to Ma’am Keaton’s records Arm Armenigar wasn’t supposed to be a sadist or torturer, but the eldest Arm apparently didn’t have any scruples about situational sadism, such as dropping an Arm naked in the Canadian wilderness in the winter to toughen her up. Even tied up, Arm Debardelaben looked half-likely to either thrash her way out of the truck, or through it.

  Arm Duval, who wouldn’t let anyone sew her back together – she needed to do so herself – blocked out the world and her juice hunger by talking to herself, composing the story of their fight with Bass, which Duval entitled ‘the Great Loading Dock Fight’. Dottie Kent wanted to donate juice she didn’t have to Del, who didn’t have low juice issues ever. Or to Arm Webberly, who said ‘things aren’t that bad yet, calm down’. Or to Arm Bartlett, the only Arm who didn’t need juice. This was Dottie’s first real fight, the same as for everyone save Webberly and Bartlett (Arm Debardelaben had apparently been sent to the Commander in part to get herself blooded by real at-risk-of-your-life combat before the expected war against the Hunters), and Dottie’s reaction was extreme. She would now do anything to save her life and freedom, and her logic, not good to begin with, had taken a large nosedive. Unable to give juice, Dottie now compulsively took apart their weapons, cleaned them, and put them back together. Theresa, shot during the fight, but not badly, kept picking at the wound and marveling that she was still alive. Without the steadying influence of the other Arms around her, Theresa would have gone into instinctive ‘hunt until I find juice’ mode and gotten herself captured by Bass.

  Amid all this chaos, nobody paid any mind to Del when she spent her time moving her lips and not speaking aloud. Del had learned much about Crows from Mouse, though she did distrust the sample size. Nor was she sure she wanted to acquire a Crow follower of her own. Mouse appeared to take quite a bit of maintenance, and he still hadn’t ever physically met with Arm Webberly.

  “You too would submit to being tied up?” Mouse said. Del was sure she couldn’t actually hear his whisper with her ears. Her test – turning off her metasense for a few seconds while Mouse chattered – showed her that in this case, her ability to ‘hear’ Mouse indeed involved metasense use, at least in part. She doubted this was a conscious juice trick on Mouse’s part, and she knew it wasn’t one of hers. She took mental note of this, socking it away for some later emergency payment need, in the mental compartment containing similar Transform foibles nobody else appeared to know about.

  “If necessary,” Del said. She leaned against the side of the truck, on the other side of the truck from the small stack of boxes that only sort of hid the Crow. The vibrations from the truck echoed through her bones from her toes to her skull. “All Arms fear confinement, but it’s far less than the fear of humiliating yourself in front of another Arm. I would never trust anyone but an Arm to do so, though.”

  “Arms trust other Arms more than indicated in my studies. I find myself surprised, given Arm competitiveness.”

  “We have inhuman social instincts, as I suspect all Major Transforms do,” Del said. “In a situation where normal women bond and get along well, Arms without a tagged relationship are all snarl and spit. Or worse. When we’re wounded, in danger, or have low juice issues, the snarl and spit goes away and we instinctively help each other.”

  “Wouldn’t a situation like this be a perfect time to grab dominance?”

  “Much the opposite. It won’t take. Dominance is all about proving yourself better than the other Arm. What do you prove if you try something in this situation, besides that you’re an idiot for threatening everyone’s survival? It’s wrong at such a deep, fundamental level that it would take more willpower than I possess to override.”

  “Arm Bass is thus waiting until too many of you are disabled by low juice to be able to fight her off.”

  “Yes. She has the juice on us. All she needs to do is find a way to maneuver us away from Chicago – which, given this vehicle’s speed, shouldn’t be too difficult – and she’ll win without needing to take any risks.” During every gas station stop they wondered if this was going to be ‘it’. Arm Webberly got more nervous with each stop. “Say, Crow Mouse, you mentioned or implied several times that you were taught to deal with Arms. How does such a thing get taught?” And what do they teach? Del found all she needed to do to get along with a Crow was listen to her instincts. Such as not ask the question about what they teach. Didn’t the Crows have such instincts? Why would someone need to teach them about dealing with Arms, anyway? Unlike the other Major Transforms, Arms were eminently reasonable.

  “I learned the Arm following methods from Guru Gilgamesh, before he became a Guru.”

  Gilgamesh. The Commander’s Crow partner, and if the sneers from Ma’am Keaton, Arm Bass and Arm Rayburn were correct, the Commander’s lover, as well. There were times when she wondered what went through the minds of the senior Arms. Didn’t they understand the many psychological benefits of sex, not to mention the stature one would gain from having another Major Transform as a lover? Del waited and let Mouse continue at his own pace.

  “Guru Gilgamesh learned on his own,” Mouse said, with pride in his metasense voice. Hmm. Among Crows, learning a technique from its discoverer conveyed stature. She wondered if they knew, or did it only instinctively. Another useful nugget to horde away. “Many Crows trust the Arms. Even your teacher, Arm Keaton, has never abused a Crow, though her spare time activities and her compulsion to teach looks like abuse to many a Crow.”

  Mouse didn’t continue. Del thought it time for her to tell him something useful. “The urge to teach isn’t a compulsion. It’s an Arm survival instinct, although not as strong as many of the other Arm instincts. I suspect it’s part of our necessary role in the greater Transform society.” Something to pay back the appalling costs of having an Arm be a member of the Transform society in question. “The urge is like many Arm instincts. It can be twisted into…” things such as Bass’s belief that torturing her underlings helped them.

  “Ma’am,” Mouse said, interrupting in sudden agitation. “I beg your pardon for interrupting, but Rose has told me many times that Arms require such interruptions. There’s something close by you need to know about, and also something Rose needs to know about.” Arm Webberly’s ‘Crow name’ was her first name, apparently, and the thorns and bloom metaphor did fit. Del hoped the Crows would come up with something better for her than the ‘robotic Arm from Hell’ nickname the other Arms tended to use. “Two very very very senior Crows are signaling, from the rest stop up ahead, that they want to help. Could you tell Rose for me, please? Even thinking about Crows this senior is panic inducing.”

  Arm Webberly was going to fillet my ass for this, Del thought. ‘Ignore the Crow behind the boxes,’ Arm Webberly said. And ‘Don’t bother me,’ she meant. Del snorted as she moved to clamber out of the back of the truck into the rain, along its wet canvas side, to the cab, where she politely knocked on the passenger side window, surprising Arm Webberly. Arm Webberly would need to get used to Del’s craziness. Stepping neck deep in problems too big for her britches was one of her better personality traits.

  The rest stop was barely a rest stop, just a couple of picnic tables and an under-maintained outhouse, deep in the high plains of north Texas. The rain had turned to sleet, and Del suspected they would be dealing with ice on the road as the night grew colder.

  Arm Webberly exited the passenger seat of the truck with a slam of the door, giving orders at Arm speed. The last, to Del, could have been worse. “Come with me and be attentive; if these senior Crows demand a payment I’ll just give them you,” wasn’t too bad for a punishment. Del expected more later. At least she wasn’t on call as the last ditch combatant protecting the other wounded Arms, as Arm Bartlett was. Not given her uselessness in combat against any senior Arm. Rigging a catapult and flinging her at Arm Bass as dead weight would be more useful.

  They faced a grizzled Crow in a cowboy hat and a person-sized blizzard, partly concealed by the outhouse and fifty feet back
from the road. The blizzard blended well into the miserable weather, and became almost invisible. “Crow Guru Snow,” Arm Webberly said to the blizzard. Both Arms ignored the icy water soaking their clothes, cold and wretched even for an Arm, especially wounded, and with low juice. Merry did the same from the roof of the truck as she took a defensive position. Del noted with interest that Guru Snow, one of the least known Crow Gurus, already had a relationship with Arm Webberly. “Sir,” Arm Webberly said, to the Crow in the cowboy hat, who looked like he belonged on a dusty ranch working cattle, not a soggy highway picnic area. “I’m Arm Rose Webberly, and this is my charge, Student Arm Dolores Sokolnik. May I ask why you flagged us down?”

  “Restitution,” the blizzard said. “And a favor to ask of you.” The blizzard’s voice vibrated deep and low.

  “A favor?” Arm Webberly said. She tensed, faintly. “We’re in a bit of trouble right now, but if the favor is possible, I’ll listen.”

  “Madame Arm,” the tall Crow said. “I’m Crow Guru Arpeggio, and the one in need of restitution. I made a mistake recently, of which kind Guru Snow has convinced me, and I seek to balance the scales by protecting you from the assailants who are following you.”

  Oh. Del clamped down on her impulse to blurt out the obvious truth – that Guru Arpeggio had been one of the Crows involved in casting out Crow Master Sinclair, which he now considered a mistake. She wasn’t sure how much Arm Webberly knew about the event, as Del had learned this from Merry after she tagged the older Arm, but she was sure any interjection wouldn’t be polite.

  “And the favor?” Arm Webberly didn’t appear to be curious at the moment, likely feeling the weight of her responsibilities as well as fearing for her life.

  “Do you happen to know the identities of those who are following you? The Crow community wishes to know this, for many reasons. For one, two of the three involved are known of as escapees from the recent fight in Pittsburgh between Arm Keaton and Focus Patterson, and I personally expect the third escaped as well, but better hidden.”