Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two Read online

  Yet, the enemy was, literally, a bunch of old ladies. And they certainly behaved that way at times.

  “Keep watching. Get ready to move our base as soon as the Amazon forces are fifty miles away.”

  “Where, sir?”

  “Camp four, outside of Manchester. Radio Colonel Orion to meet us there.” Camp four was forty-five miles to the northwest of our current position. Colonel Orion’s forces, an army a third of the size of my current army, should have successfully packed off the Minneapolis academy by now. Colonel Orion had been complaining about mercs on Harleys hounding him, though, along with the occasional appearance of the Hero. Minneapolis was no longer a secret. Colonel Orion and the academy could be in serious trouble.

  Quiet Creeper hurried off, and Cleo stalked forward from her corner. “I smell a rat.”

  I snorted. “If they let us concentrate our forces in camp four, and the Amazons have just given up for real, we’ll have Chicago back by the end of next week. If we want.”

  Cleo poked me in the crown of my wolf’s head with a sharp claw. “You,” she said, “are indulging in wishful thinking.” The cowering slaves skittered away from her as she passed. Cleo occasionally used her powerful claws to rip through the spines of slaves who offended her.

  I sat on my haunches and sighed. “I hate cities, I hate administration, and I hate recruiting. I would rather not return to Chicago. I would rather stay out in the wilderness somewhere instead of this hole. Even the air stinks here, and that’s our own damned fault!” Hunter armies generated an incredible amount of waste and destruction. A person could track a Hunter army just by the stench.

  Cleo crossed her arms under her gorgeous full breasts and stared at me.

  “I have better things I would like to be doing,” I said. “Research. You ever wonder what weather-sight actually is? Or how about why the Nobles can manage human forms that actually look human? Or why the Duende can push us out of the desert southwest so easily, and can’t touch us anywhere else? Or what secrets are behind the ‘Patient Zero’ conspiracy you uncovered.”

  “Chrysanthemum can wait for another day,” Cleo said. “First we have to survive this war. Which we’re not.”

  “Hell.” I glared a hole in the torn wallpaper, or tried and failed. I forced myself to relax. “We’re actually doing better at surviving than you think.”

  “What do you see, sir?” Tone Deaf said.

  “All they’ve been doing so far is saving us the effort of culling the weak from our ranks,” I said. “We’ll replace the fallen with ease.” The enemy never attempted to wipe us out, and instead went after us with pricks and nibbles.

  “I don’t trust this,” Tone Deaf said. “We don’t have the slightest idea where the Commander and the leading Arms are at the moment.”

  “If they’re not here, then that’s a good thing,” I said. The Arms had vanished from our rear early last evening, after we crossed the Mississippi and gave the National Guard the dodge. “They’re probably back in Chicago, to claim the territory for their Commander.

  I had raped her once, the Commander, that is. Sort of rape, anyway. I had been trying to kill her for poaching my prey, and the sex was her idea. If I had succeeded at killing her I would have saved us a lot of trouble.

  “You think the pull-out is a feint?” Cleo asked.

  “No. I think Rigel and Pack Mistress Delilah were right, when they said I was underestimating the divisions within the Amazon camp.” I couldn’t believe the Amazons had enough nerve to start this war if they were so divided. Something was off, here.

  “Rigel is a fool and a traitor, General,” Tone Deaf said. Tone Deaf hated his fellow Crow, Rigel, passionately, because Rigel remained unbound by the Law. Rigel, the best of the Horuses, was chummy with the Amazons in a different identity, chummy enough for them to count him as part of their number. Just a hanger-on, willing to do odd jobs and keep an eye out for trouble. I had met Rigel several times – a short little fellow with blonde hair – and knew the Crow despised the Amazons. He understood the real problem – Focuses should know better than to behave like men, the way the bull dyke Arms did. The poor misguided Amazon bitches needed to be shown the errors of their ways by a good strong man. Or Hunter, as the case may be.

  I had also hoped to snag myself an appropriately talented Focus bitch to serve as my Pack Mistress, but I had no more luck with that than I ever did.

  “Rigel’s been right, so far, as has Delilah,” I said. Rigel was exactly the sort of Crow that my late master, Wandering Shade, had warned me about: weak, vacillating and treacherous. I didn’t care. To me, Rigel was just another resource.

  Despite Wandering Shade’s icon status among the Hunters – his picture was everywhere – his death had saved the Hunter civilization. Wandering Shade excelled as an innovator and ideologue, but he sorely lacked any real leadership skills, and his grasp of battle strategy and tactics had been non-existent. Anyone not under Wandering Shade’s command had been an enemy, an idiocy that led to the Battle in Detroit, which nearly wiped out the Hunter civilization to the last Hunter and Gal.

  Only dumb luck kept the Hunter civilization from falling with Wandering Shade. I had rebuilt the Hunters in my own image, and despite my many failings, I was at least sane. The idea that a Crow, a damned skulking non-predator, should lead a predator civilization was preposterous. We needed the Law that Wandering Shade created to keep us Hunters from turning back into Beast Men, and since it was there, I used the Law as a way to bind the Hunter Empire together. We did the binding now with our Crow Shamans, the Crow Shamans themselves bound to the Law.

  The changes hadn’t been perfect, but at least I put a stop to such asininity as taking tagged Transforms from Focuses to ‘manipulate’ the Focuses or killing everyone (or attempting to kill everyone) we failed to recruit. We were the good guys, and we were going to behave like it.

  These days, our Chimera recruits were voluntary, as were most of the Shamans and about half of the Pack Mistresses. Even, to my shock and amazement at my people’s success, a fair number of Gals willing to be gentled as intelligent Monsters volunteered to join the now diminished Hunter Empire.

  Our backing remained the secretive Judges, the west coast Crows who refused to be a part of the Hunter society. They maintained the Law, expanded it, and taught the Shamans the way of the Law. For a high price.

  If my notes were correct, our fatalities included, so far, three Hunters, twelve trainee Hunters, almost a hundred Gals and one Pack Mistress. Oh, and over a thousand juice zombies. The other side hadn’t lost a single Major Transform. Just a lot of their easily replaceable household Transforms. This whole exercise was too galling for words, despite my morale-building comments.

  Tone Deaf stood. “Fighting!”

  “Where?” I felt the adrenaline rush and embraced it. Another fight, a stupid fight, as there weren’t any enemy armies within miles. Alerted now, I metasensed the indistinct blob of metasense protections.

  “At the edge of our camp! Here! Right under our noses.”

  I rattled the house with a “Who?” The Crow metasense advantages always irked me.

  “Arms! Arms and normals!”

  “Let’s go!” I said, looking forward to humiliating the Arms again. They were so cute with their swagger and grrr, and so messed up in the head. If Pack Mistress Delilah was correct, the Arm Boss, Kali, had snapped and killed one of her crew last night in a fit of pique. Just the sort of thing I expected from that pack of fake men.

  Cleo followed me outside the commandeered farmhouse and past the poles sporting the skulls of the former owners. I sprinted to the sound of combat. Guns. Heavy weapons. The other two parts of my camp, under Montana Winter and Calgary, were under attack, and they were slow to rouse, worn out by yesterday’s extreme exertions. Cleo ran off to organize my Gals.

  I metasensed three Arms, no longer covered by any top-end metasense protections. The Arms’ normal metasense protections hid them from other Arms and Focuses, but not fro
m the better Crows and certainly not from us Hunters. They bought their Hunter-proofing protections from the Crows, but no Crow understood combat enough to hide an Arm in a fight. As far as I knew, the only Crow accompanying the Arms was Gilgamesh, who couldn’t do a trick like that, or even tie his shoelaces tight enough for his shoes to stay on his feet when he inevitably ran.

  So where did the metasense protections come from?

  I raised up, wolfen, and sniffed the air. I shook my head in disbelief.

  What sort of a fight was this? The Arms’ contingent consisted of only fifty or so normals, barely enough to count as a sortie. Were they committing suicide? I reached a promontory overlooking the part of my camp under attack. The attackers entered the camp from the narrow farm road, all in jeeps, with fuck-all heavy weapons mounted on the jeeps. They spun back and forth across the wide yard, making pass after pass at the the Gals and juice zombies. They shot anti-aircraft weapons tricked out to aim flat.

  Idiocy. The Arms had finally fucked up big time.

  Oh, and there was Kali, and no Commander in sight to protect her from me. I smiled and showed fangs. I owned her. Hell, I kept one of her legs, preserved, in with the Hunter Empire library we carried with us. She was manning one of the anti-aircraft guns on a jeep. Turbulent Waters chased her, backed by a full squad of his Gals. I charged down the hill, gathering twenty ancillary Gals and juice zombies into a diffuse skirmish line. I roared Terror at the enemy to get their attention, and scattered a jeep full of normals no longer wielding the machine guns they had just tossed.

  Ah, the glory!

  I and my line shredded the enemy normals with ease, leaving only the three now-wounded Arms on the battlefield. The rest of the Arms’ hireling normals were either dead or fled. Two the three Arms sat in the last of the jeeps, wounded, and the jeep wasn’t moving. Kali herself defended it, with knives. Quiet Creeper did his thing, growling Terror while hidden in the tall grass, otherwise in plain sight.

  I smiled, anticipating the fight. I howled Terror, echoed by the other Hunters. I gestured and sent Quiet Creeper and Turbulent Waters in a circle around the Arms, and ordered four student Hunters and two dozen surviving Gals and juice zombies to back us up.

  Charge! So said my next modulated Terror roar. We charged. Oh, this would be a glorious epic victory, a fitting cap to a…

  The world exploded around me.

  I flew backwards, perhaps seventy feet, and fell to the ground, half buried in dirt, Gal body parts and juice zombie shreds. I shook my head, hurting. The blast had mangled my left leg, severed my right front leg, opened my chest, removed a third of my ribs, and shredded my heart and lungs. So many dead lay around me, though, that I was in no danger. I gathered élan by the bucketful, and healed. Ate. Stood. I found Cleo and my Gals with Montana Winter. He and Cleo rushed forward with two other junior Hunters, another two dozen Gals and a few stray juice zombies. I held up a paw, to signal them to wait. Montana Winter stopped the charge.

  “Sir?”

  The Arms had fooled me into thinking they were helpless prey. “They came in under metasense protections, mined an area at the edge of the camp, and suckered us into the center of the mined area. They may have more tricks up their sleeves.”

  Their trap failed, as I still survived. Nothing moved in the bombed out area. Not even the Arms.

  On the other side of the blast, the normals in their jeeps, the ones who had fled, now returned, stopping sixty feet behind the blast epicenter. The two wounded Arms dragged each other back to the normals and jeeps, abandoning their likely now-inoperable jeep, partly buried in rubble. Could Montana Winter charge and take them? I counted noses, measured the distance, and sighed. No. Too much risk.

  This looked like something the Commander might set up, but she wasn’t here. Who ran the combat, then?

  Not worth the worry. The other two surviving Arms were too young to have any sense or talent. Easy pickings. I smiled and planned a flanking assault.

  “Not so fast, asshole.”

  I looked to the voice and saw the Arm, Kali, undamaged, about forty feet away to my left. I had heard rumors that Kali could talk, and hadn’t believed it. She hadn’t said a word in our earlier fights. Yet, there she stood, talking and holding my severed front leg in her hand, a big grin on her face. “Surrender, shitface, and my friends won’t slaughter your people in Minneapolis. Your phone lines are down, but I’m in contact with my friends there. Surrender and become Nobles – or slink off to rebuild your sorry excuse for a civilization with what little you have remaining. Because what you have here is all that’s going to be left of you, you cunt-licking motherfuckers.”

  “Why don’t you come over here and finish us off?” I said, in sudden fear for the Minneapolis Hunter academy, Colonel Orion and his people. The Commander and the Hero weren’t here. Were they in Minneapolis? Attacking the non-combatants and their guards? Probably, the typical evil I expected from our barbarian enemies. “Or can’t you?”

  Kali smiled.

  “Come over here and find out, you fur bearing limp prick.”

  I motioned for Montana Winter and the pack to stay put.

  Keaton cursed at them and insulted them for another minute.

  I waited, and eventually laughed. “You can’t run, can you?” I said. Although Kali didn’t look hurt, I saw no reason for her to just stand there as she taunted me. A healthy Arm would rush me, take a few swipes, and then retreat back to her bomb-protected area. I motioned for Montana Winter to circle right and get between Kali and her jeeps.

  Kali tapped the ground, and the inevitable bombs between us went off. Big ones, larger than the first set. When the smoke cleared and the dirt clods finished falling, Kali was gone, as were the jeeps. The authorities’ sirens dopplered in the distance, on their way.

  “Betrayed,” I said, as I counted up the dead and living. I understood, now.

  I counted far fewer dead than I originally feared, thankfully. Hunters and their packs were made of stern stuff. Delilah had called it, exactly. “They were betrayed by their own people. They could have continued the war if the Focus bitches remained with them. As it was, the Arms needed to attack us just to pin us down and wound us some more. Now their treacherous Amazon allies can slink off in good order.” All while the Commander and her crew took one final swipe at us, slaughtering our non-combatants in Minneapolis. “Gather the heads and let’s go,” I said.

  I had been telling everyone for years that Kali was dumber than a rotten stump. I had been wrong. This was her attack, her trap, and in her own way she was nearly as cunning as the Commander.

  Tone Deaf, newly returned from his hiding place during the battle, nodded at my comment. The Hunter Empire would decamp and head west. For the moment, we would walk, but if we got bored and hungry, we would just commandeer a batch of semis. It had worked before, it would work again, despite the hard work involved in driving a semi. “Not only that, sir, but it sounded as if they have no idea that we hold Kansas City, Denver and Salt Lake City for recruiting, as well.”

  “Yes,” I said. “If they think we’re the last Hunters, they’re sadly mistaken.”

  A half hour after the Arms left, we got the bad news from Jelly Roll, our Horus contact in Minneapolis. The Commander, her appalling Focus ally Lady Death, her bodyguards, Lady Death’s lover the Crow Sky, and the Hero, Haggerty, had indeed slaughtered our Minneapolis area stronghold and training academy. Colonel Orion escaped, carted off, unconscious, by his Gals. The enemy captured at least five student Hunters, student Hunters they would sell to the Nobles for future favors. Jelly Roll laughed through the description of Lady Death, herself on a Harley, riding through the camp, waving her hands, and killing scores of Gals at a swat. Living through dozens of bullet wounds, as well.

  We had no choice but to retreat to the west, to the Rocky Mountains, and give up on the Midwest. I understood exactly why the Commander chose Minneapolis. She wanted captives for information as well as for sale.

  The Commander
knew, now, what she faced. She knew the Hunters weren’t finished, that the Hunters had two generals, myself and my counterpart, the well-hidden Leo. She would now know about the junior Hunters holding Kansas City, Denver and Salt Lake City and how they were under orders to keep their heads down and just recruit. She would know now about the Western Hunters and the territory they controlled in the northern Rocky Mountains and Cascades.

  Things needed to change. I needed to rise to the top, or go clawing and screaming into the endless black night. To match the Commander, I needed to command all the Hunters.

  It was time for me to challenge Leo.

  Groveling (September 17, 1971)

  “Guru Athabasca,” I said, and bowed. I bowed to him despite the fact that he wasn’t my master. He was an ally, and dealing with allies brought forth the diplomatic words and the obeisance. So said the Law. “I completed the assigned quest.”

  “I see,” Athabasca said, examining the wounded but still alive captive Crow in Cleo and Toothy Grin’s care. “So, General, what do you think of my new digs?”

  I blinked in surprise. Small talk. Guru Athabasca had once required formal obeisance when we met, and masked his Crow fear with over-the-top bluster. The fear had receded into caution, though, despite the physical differences between us. Today I wore my man-shape, and I towered over him by a foot and a half. The Guru was tall and thin, even for a Crow. Black hair, black eyes, what I thought of as Black Irish. “Modern,” I said. The Guru’s Vancouver apartment was large and overlooked the Pacific Ocean and the Frazier River from high on a hill, almost in the shade of one of Vancouver’s mountains. The windows of the front room stretched from floor to ceiling, thick unframed glass divided by thick plastic strips. The pale wood floor shone in high polish, and the room’s overly angular furniture matched the angles of the irregular walls and cabinetry. “It’s like you’re living in an art gallery.” I didn’t like the coastal areas from west of Portland up through Vancouver. It was as if the ground itself was angry and ready to bite. I wouldn’t stay here long.