“There is no reality,” Van said, from where he sat in his wheelchair. “Juice and élan and dross all make illusions in our minds, alter our perceptions and our beliefs. Even those of us normals caught in the orbit of the Major Transforms. That’s what Mizar taught me. In return, I showed him the world of many little things. The smell of perfume. The art on the cover of a book. Leaves of fall appearing under melted snow. The pattern of movement in a market. How civilization is not one big thing, but a network of myriad small things, all to be cherished.”
“I’m borrowing your eyes, Commander,” a voice said in my head. The Madonna. I didn’t fight her. Why bother? Under her illusions, she was old and frail, and she lay in a bed next to Van’s wheelchair, sleeping. Dying, according to Hank. Dying of old age, dying from a very ill advised several years in the wilderness in what should have been the prime of her Transform career, at the start of her second decade as a Focus. Dying from pushing herself unmercifully since the fall of Patterson to this moment. From one first, to another first, the first of the Focuses to die of old age. We sat at the climactic end of the pattern she first saw on the day I transformed, at the end of the age she birthed when she and Erica Eissler lived through efforts of the Man and the Crow who took the name the Purifier to rip away all vestiges of power from women Transforms world-wide. She lived to this point only by her sheer force of will. Here, we, our Cause, won or lost. No going back, either way. After this, the world would no longer need any Commanders.
“Carol, you’re riding my dying, not yours,” the Madonna said, in my mind. “This is where you start, not where you end. If it’s an end for you at all, it’s the end of the beginning. For me, it’s just the end. Just the end.” No, there was no way she could be doing this. She didn’t have the range, it was daylight, and I wasn’t in the Dreaming. Despite that, she spoke in my mind.
“I’ve been a Focus for twenty-one years.” As in ‘I’ve got the years on you and more tricks than you can imagine; there isn’t anything you can do about it, so stop whining’.
“I despise being controlled.” There. What I had wanted to say to her for fucking ever.
“I’ve never controlled you, Carol,” the Madonna said. “That certainly wasn’t what I did when I sent the three of you up north to fetch Beast. That trick, which on this continent only Focus Bentlow knows besides myself, is called argument compression. I could have convinced you with logic, if given a day without distractions to argue my case.”
Gobbets of flesh flew, along with bone, teeth, and dust. Mizar didn’t trivially win this fight. One on one, Enkidu had beaten the best of us, including Armenigar. Mizar was better, but not in his man-form.
“It’s not as much of a handicap as you imagine, Commander. Bigger is not necessarily better. We can’t change into just anything. That’s true physically, and that’s also true mentally and societally. We cannot metamorphose into anything that isn’t, at its true core, human. Even when we appear to. Mizar and Enkidu are both human.”
I didn’t understand the Madonna’s point, so I went back to something I did understand, which was analyzing the fight. Mizar told me ahead of time that if he ended up fighting in my war, he deserved to get the crap beat out of him. He hated war the worst of us all.
One on one fights, though? Well, he was a Chimera. Challenge combat was different. Challenge combat was life.
“Commander, don’t woolgather. Focus your eyes on the fight, please,” the Madonna said. I complied. She felt less sure about Mizar’s victory than I. The other, that despite my efforts we and the Hunters were going destroy each other if the fight resumed after Mizar’s challenge? We both agreed. I had done my best, but this time I wouldn’t win.
Gilgamesh
Wolf against man. Man against Monster. Monster against civilization.
Enkidu was his creation, and Mizar was losing. Gilgamesh metasensed the loss through the tag link, the ebbing away of élan. He could see the loss with his eyes. Fangs versus unarmored flesh. Mizar’s left arm was a shambles, bitten off at the elbow and cast aside. Mizar barely stood. Enkidu circled, not without his own damage, but relentlessly whole.
The power of the fight lay in the fact that it was fair. Gilgamesh could save Mizar – funnel élan to him, or use some other crude Crow trick – and the trick would save Mizar, but lose the fight. Lose the meaning of the challenge, send them back to the fatal insanity of this battle.
What could he do, if anything? Was it his prerogative? He had interfered in the fight between Shadow and Chevalier, and what – Shadow won, Chevalier lost, but in consequence, Shadow no longer trusted Gilgamesh. Oh, the Mentor covered it up, but Gilgamesh knew. If Gilgamesh did that here, the cost would be the same or worse. The Hunters wouldn’t abide by Enkidu’s loss in an unfair fight.
Everyone on their side chanted his line about the Law being a lie.
Dammit.
He knew a mistake when it came up and bit him in the ass, even when it was his own.
Gilgamesh held up his hands, and projected ‘quiet’. No result. He pulled on the tags of his family for strength, he pulled on the ample dross in the area, he pushed himself as he never thought a Crow could push himself. Still no result. Still they chanted. The chant did good, once, provoking Enkidu into accepting the challenge. Now, it fed the fury of Enkidu and the Hunters. It shamed them, it roused their obstinacy, it gave them power, and it squeezed their over-powered adrenal glands, rousing them to berserker madness and power. Damn it, Enkidu won this fight because he rode the power of his enemy’s chant!
So Gilgamesh continued. Pushed the charisma. Pushed the silence. This needed to stop!
Inside of the dross, inside of himself and the world of dross constructs, Gilgamesh found an unexpected engine.
He had never sensed the engine before, but he found it now, hiding at the edge of his limits. A marvelous engine, an engine he never found before because he never pushed so hard. Such a wonderful engine, the Crow metaphorical equivalent of the Arm capability to burn juice, but so very different. It didn’t burn, but multiplied. The nasty deepest secret of the senior Crows, the chemical engine that made little into big. Catalyzation, the greatest magic of chemistry. He shifted his energy from silencing the crowd over to starting the catalytic reaction. Pushed himself just a little harder. Pushed harder again. His head throbbed and he felt sick to his stomach. He kept pushing, and slowly, so very slowly, the catalyst did its work, and his little charismatic command became big.
This was no unique discovery. No, this was the trick behind the Crow Mentors and the ancient Crows such as Sky and Rumor, one he had seen many times before, but never understood. The trick hadn’t been something he could see, but he saw it now. Oh, it wouldn’t make him a Mentor, but it would make him a true senior Crow, a potential Mentor, a terror among other Major Transforms.
He couldn’t not use it, what Sky referred to as ‘the method truly sublime’, now. He tapped the engine’s power and used it to multiply the power of his command.
The crowd quieted.
In the quiet, the illusion that they were all one, witnessing a contest for the leadership of them all, now could grow.
Enkidu slowed, no longer buoyed by the shame and obstinacy of his fellow Hunters. Now the challenge became just between him and Mizar, a challenge of blood and dirt and sinew.
As Enkidu slowed, Mizar took the initiative in the fight for the first time. Impossibly light on his feet he circled Enkidu, an Enkidu who crouched and spat and snapped and growled. A moment later, Mizar picked up the remains of his left arm with his right hand, and with this extra advantage, he began to pound Enkidu. The advantage wasn’t enough, so through his will, Mizar caused his lost arm to grow, fed by the ample élan of the area, fed by the blood of Enkidu and himself, and after Mizar stuck it into Enkidu several times, fed by the body of Enkidu. His own severed lower left arm became a massive club, and with it Mizar bludgeoned Enkidu. With it, he broke Enkidu.
At long last, Enkidu fell. The crowd inhaled, but
Gilgamesh exhaled. To his surprise, he had been holding his breath.
“Your General has fallen!” Mizar said, towering above Enkidu. “I am your leader now. The wars of Enkidu are over. To me, now. Acknowledge my leadership!”
Gilgamesh gasped in shock as the Hunters obeyed. They all bowed and prostrated themselves to Mizar, both the living and the dead, save those who slunk away through the ample gaps in the lines. Crow Flowerpot and Focus Minton returned to Shadow and Keaton, and the Crow in Keaton’s grasp vanished into invisibility, along with Colonel Loess’s squad.
Mizar now led the Hunters.
Epilog
(3/27/73 – 3/29/73)
Carol Hancock
I followed Mizar into the so-called recovery tent, where he sat down beside Anne-Marie Sieurs, the now dying Madonna of Montreal. He hesitated as I came close, and watched me warily. I had spent the last half hour searching for Bass, only to find that she and her inner circle had fled the combat the instant Mizar challenged Enkidu. Livid, I took out my anger on some rubble until I worked it off, all the time dodging the local and state police officers now haunting the former battle scene.
Sometimes words are no good at all. I touched his cheek, gently. Gave him support through the tag.
I understood why he strengthened my beast for the fight. Respect. Somewhere along the line, he gave up on trying to make me his little wifey. Somewhere along the line he decided I did know how to be the Commander. He stopped trying to control me, or guard against my mistakes. When the time came, he just gave me strength and let me command.
“You followed me,” he said, referring to his attack on Enkidu.
I nodded. He wanted my respect, too. My tag gave me power over him, and he felt vulnerable. He didn’t understand my tag on him any more than I understood his tag on me.
When I followed him to the challenge fight, based on nothing more than his promise, I gave him the same respect that he gave me when he freed my beast.
“I hear you did well back with all those Focuses,” I said. I hated those after-battle scenes. I was the Commander, not the Persuader. Yes, I realized, I was perfectly happy to have him deal with those clumps of self-interested bitches and bastards who always seemed to find reasons that their own self-interest outweighed the good of rest of the world. Politics.
While we hid in the hospital tents, it was the Focuses turn to work. Out there, the remains of the battlefield crawled with police and FBI. I was very glad to be rid of that nasty job, the job of trying to explain in any meaningful way what had happened in the fight.
Mizar read my thoughts and nodded, equally relieved not to be dealing with the authorities.
I surprised myself with a flash of empathy for him. It’s hard to come into a strange land with people you don’t fully trust. The city was a strange land for him, I knew. He lost his human memories as Beast, and knew nothing since his transformation except the northern wilderness. We took him into a land about which he literally knew nothing.
He came anyway.
…and found the way to defeat the Hunters. Only he had figured out that their force deployments mirrored the Hunters’ internal disputes. He didn’t know the details, but we proved his juice-aided read afterwards. Colonel Loess, who commanded their stealth group, turned out to have been turned by ‘Caveworm’ already and was working against Enkidu. In addition, politics forced Enkidu to separate Colonel Leo and Hecate because of their plots against him, with Hecate ending up in charge of the Hunters chasing Haggerty’s army and Leo in charge of the Hunters’ reserve army. And then there was Caveworm and his rebels, the worst challenge of them all. Politics forced Enkidu to attack us while caught in a power struggle, weakening him enough for Mizar’s challenge to be politically possible.
And Mizar, the ultimate predator, had pounced and won.
Mizar rested his arm along my shoulder and stroked my hair, right in back of my ear. It felt good. I came close and held him, and he held me back. As we leaned on each other, he slowly drew down my beast. He didn’t take the beast all the way down, but to a half-sleeping state that I once found normal. It would still be there for me when I wanted it. I found a tension easing that I had forgotten I carried. The thought of torturing captive Hunters no longer appealed.
This wasn’t so bad. I felt a warm affection growing in me, and decided it was probably juice-powered and artificial. Then I decided I didn’t give a damn. So what if it came from the juice? Didn’t fucking everything? He was my family, and I cared for him.
“We’ll make this work,” he said in my ear.
“Yeah, I think we will.”
---
Anne-Marie Sieurs – Annie, the Madonna of Montreal – the world’s first Focus – quietly passed from this life at just after two forty in the afternoon on the 27th of March, 1973. At her side were her household Transforms, Armenigar, Sky, Mizar, Hank, Lori, Gail, Van and myself. Her last words had been “He won!” uttered the moment of Enkidu’s fall, many hours previous. Her last words to me, in my mind, a moment after her proclamation of Mizar’s victory, had been “Don’t spend the rest of the day in a tent, Carol. Get out and give yourself a chance to recover.” She fell into a coma soon after that. After she fell into a coma, I made the mistake of using my metasense to diagnose her ills. Bad mistake. She suffered from some sort of runaway juice-powered blood cancer that spread throughout her body in creeping fingers of poison. It was no wonder she appeared so old.
Hank and Lori were beside themselves in grief, and I let them be. Sky was worse, beyond words. Heartbroken. The day’s events proved too much for him, and he went to find some place to be alone with his grief. Mizar? Well, Mizar managed to choke out “Oh, Focus, I wish I could have been a better Beast to you,” before he began to cry. He finally shambled away from Anne-Marie’s side two hours later, and I guessed he would be worthless for the rest of the day. If Biggioni continued to harass him, I would… nah, better not go there.
Armenigar had a strange reaction, saying angrily to the air, “Now who’s going to tell me what my next impossible task is?” She knelt with Annie for about a half hour, praying, holding Annie’s now ancient hands, and daring anyone to violate her personal space. We didn’t.
Myself, I gave the Madonna one last look, offered her soul a heartfelt prayer, then went back to work. Never in my life had I felt such responsibility on my shoulders. To her, I was her heir, though I didn’t know in what sense. I couldn’t see myself being the spider-lady master of the Dreaming, nor could I see myself handing out oracular advice.
I began to understand what I meant to the Madonna, though. I was her latest focus, pardon the term, in her machinations, in her nameless struggle to save civilization from the Major Transforms who had gone irredeemably bad (a category to which she consigned both Arm Bass and The Man, a truly scary thought). Perhaps ‘fulcrum’ was a better term. The battle we fought today was the last act of her personal struggle. We won, and, hell, it had been my personal idea to reverse the trap on Enkidu instead of fleeing to the sun-drenched lands, to fight another day.
We didn’t need me as the Commander any more.
In the Madonna’s nameless struggle, that is. She didn’t predict the future, but guide the present, and the struggle was a logical necessity to her, not a foreordained fate. I didn’t think she was right in her belief that the Hunter Empire would have destroyed itself for us, but I did have a gut understanding of the reason she didn’t push hard for her peaceful solution – it would have left us prostrate before the Transform Apocalypse. She didn’t want to cripple the Cause.
I healed, I cadged juice, I healed some more. I visited Cathy Elspeth, where she slept near Rose, recovering from having the Law removed, and from malnutrition, and from general abuse. She had been pregnant through a good part of her captivity. I kissed her, so beautiful and so scarred. She did well in such miserable circumstances.
After I watched several hundred National Guard troops arrive at the battle site and step on everyone’s toes, including t
he already present authorities, I decided to find a quiet place, well out of sight, to think and meditate. What battles remained for a has-been but successful Commander to fight? From the Hunter stragglers, I already knew that Enkidu’s most senior surviving officer, Colonel Loess, had somehow found enough wisdom to tell the free Hunters to disperse and not challenge Emperor Mizar. We wouldn’t be facing any more enemy Hunter armies.
Despite the lack of Hunter enemies, my question held far too many easy answers. Bass, for one, remained as big a problem as ever, as did her Crow partner and uberscumbag, Echo. I wanted to sneer at the Man as a distraction, my usual refrain, but I knew better now. The fact none of us understood his true goals was more than a little frightening. Given what Sir Dan Freeman showed us today of his younger Courtier abilities – with his fake juice buffer and borrowed Focus healing, he turned out to be as difficult to kill as a Focus – the Man’s potential capabilities were enough to give me nightmares. Worse, because of the property damage we did in San Jose, the normals and their government weren’t happy with the Transforms, and I needed to prepare for the possibility they would go after us militarily. Hell, some California police officers almost arrested Tonya and Gail just for being ‘Transform leaders’ right after the battle. Every Focus cajoled into the fight proved their worth, afterwards, by being able to deal with the authorities in a peaceable manner.
Let’s not forget the lesson we learned from the Duende society of Mexico and the confusingly named ‘bruja’ Latino Focus group from southern California – dealing with Transforms from other nations wasn’t going to be a trivial problem. Or was that idiot Pattersonite Focus Wilson an aberration, or just one of many? Many would be bad, and this was something the late Focus Keistermann warned me about before Pittsburgh. Worse, what was first Focus Mary Beth Julius up to?
An Age Without A Name (The Cause Book 5) Page 39
