An Age Without A Name

by Randall Farmer

  “So you’ve only been a Crow for six months?” Del asked. She caught Arête smiling broadly; he already knew the story, and thought his two companions were quite interesting young Transforms, if she read his expression correctly. “That’s a fairly successful acclimatization process Hephaestus has there.”

  “Yeah, though there’s still a few bugs in the system. For instance, I still panic around normals unless there are other Transforms around, though it’s starting to get better.”

  Del sighed. Crows. Here we had a Crow who could interact with Arms but couldn’t walk into a burger joint and place an order. The other Crows must consider Scout as much of a freak as the other Arms thought her.

  At least Arête didn’t seem to think she was a freak. Either that, or he covered it well. Del doubted her ability to read him fully, as he had been a Crow for a decade.

  “Arête, you said something about atonement back in the meeting. I’ve been meaning to ask what that was all about,” Del said.

  “I made a very big mistake, very big,” Arête said, his face stony, the rest of him not so well controlled. “Very big.”

  Ah, now that was interesting. All of a sudden she had a hint of why he was so nervous when he talked to her. She waited him out.

  “You’re familiar with Chevalier’s former feelings regarding the Cause?” he asked. Del nodded. Chevalier had been the Cause’s main Crow opposition until late last year, when he got his attitude adjusted by Shadow. “Well, we – meaning Chevalier and Arpeggio and several of our western peers – were stuck with the Black Widow in our back yard.” Western Crow slang for Bass. Del repressed a wince. “We thought it was inappropriate for the Cause to be proclaiming how the Arms had changed their spots and could be allies, when they tolerated the Black Widow among their ranks. Among other things, we decided we needed to do something about her. So I sent her a letter threatening to expose her if she didn’t mend her ways. She traced the letter back to Phoenix and staged the church massacre.”

  The idiot behind that piece of nonsense was a Crow Guru, not one of the first Focuses? Crap. Yet another of Bass’s annoying mind-fucks. “So you got stuck with the job?” Del said.

  Arête couldn’t control himself well enough to avoid reddening. “Actually, it was my oh-so-clever idea.”

  Del gripped the steering wheel hard, and let her hot anger percolate for a few minutes before banishing it to her quiet pools. Funny thing, the car was achingly quiet while she contemplated Arête’s death and demise. Fool! He said he was atoning. He really said he was atoning, that he knew his actions had been a mistake.

  “You may not realize this,” Del said, “but after the massacre, Bass was forced to take a tag from Arm Keaton. Arm politics. The tag left Bass in a precarious position, her goals temporarily stymied, and quite touchy. I was Arm Keaton’s youngest student at the time, and Bass chose me to be her target of aggression. On multiple occasions. She’s promised me that she’s going to capture me, force me to take her tag, and use me as an experimental torture subject until I die. Since I’m so junior to her, there’s not a fuck of a lot I can do to stop her.”

  Horror melted on to Arête’s face, his control shot. “Then I have more to atone for than I knew, Arm Sokolnik. I owe you personally for my mistake.”

  “Yes, you do,” Del said. Blind naïve idiots!

  Arête reached over to comfort her, and she shrugged off the extended hand with a twitch of her shoulder and a flash of predator effect. He pulled the hand back with a snap and watched her unhappily.

  “I don’t do men,” she said. Might as well get that out now. Given the way Midgard and Amy went at it sometimes, Arête might have expectations. Whatever the juice was doing to her sex drive, Del wasn’t ready for something like that.

  Arête blinked at her, and stared in slack-jawed amazement. He looked at her as if she had just announced she ate babies for lunch and was the second coming of the Messiah. Not what she expected from her little announcement.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, her voice frosty.

  “I don’t do women,” he said.

  Del glanced over at him in her own slack-jawed amazement, and then laughed. A big, deep belly laugh that a Duende would have been proud of. “You’re kidding!” And here she thought the juice tried to turn her straight!

  “Well, unless I’ve taken too much dross and my judgment’s off,” Arête said, a flush rising in his cheeks.

  Well, yes, Del understood that little clause. She glanced back at Scout. It sure as hell smelled as if the juice considered sexual orientation when it determined compatibility. “You have something in your sex life you haven’t shared with me?”

  Now it was Scout’s turn to redden. “I don’t know! I haven’t ever slept with anybody.”

  “You’re a virgin?” Del’s mind boggled. “Come on, surely you have fantasies.”

  “I’m only nineteen!” Scout turned even redder. “My mother said I was a late bloomer.”

  All right, Del didn’t understand the juice at all. She drove the car quietly past an ancient Ford pickup that belonged to Bruja Torres, and took the turn where US 12 joined up with 261 and headed west. The breeze was sweet with the smell of pines and mountain air.

  “So, Del,” Arête said, breaking the silence many minutes later, “What sort of interests do you have as an Arm? For when this unfortunate set of conflicts is over.” Now he was on a first name basis with her. Golly, Crows were just as inhuman in their interpersonal relations as Arms.

  “Before I transformed, I taught high school,” Del said, relaxing backwards into the seat and pulling a piece of beef jerky out of the snack sack. “I’ve already picked up Bruja Modesty and Promise as students, and I think I’ve got a feel for teaching Transforms. I was thinking of putting together a school for new Arms and Focuses. I think they should be trained together, to build up the trust between the Major Transform varieties.” An idea occurred to her she had never considered before. “I wonder if I could interest Hephaestus in passing along some Crow-training techniques to the three of us, and maybe Crow Occum’s Noble training techniques. Perhaps all four varieties of Major Transforms could be trained together.”

  Arête smiled. “Intriguing. I think I could get very interested in something along those lines.”

  ---

  The caravan stopped in Missoula, in the parking lot of the local plant nursery. Two cars and one of the trucks had already broken off to head for the local filling station – one broken radiator hose, one gas leak, and one flat. Del swore that given the state of their vehicles it was a miracle they hadn’t yet needed to abandon any of them. Except for Amy’s personal supply, every last damned one of them was a breakdown waiting to happen, and they all guzzled gas like a wino with a bottle of Mad Dog.

  Haggerty called Del over, to join the collection of the Major Transforms heading Amy’s way. Amy was handing out money again when Del got there, this time to Phil Ballard, Beth’s house president, and to Warden Jane. She had a wad of bills and was peeling off fifties. A lot of fifties. Del wondered how Amy always managed to carry an infinite supply of money, but she was beginning to suspect that Amy’s supply wasn’t as infinite as she first thought. Every time Amy did the money thing these days, she looked more pained.

  It was a beautiful evening, and the smell of fresh growth from the nursery was rich. Del could hear a cricket chirp, not too far away. Nobody bothered them in the empty lot of the closed nursery.

  “Something’s wrong,” Duke Hoskins said, when Phil and Jane headed off to buy supplies. “Two Monsters are hiding over there,” he pointed a claw to the east, away from town, “in some farmer’s barn. Scared out of their minds. They’re part of some Hunter’s pack, or should be. Other than that, this place is undefended, and we’re nearly right on top of Enkidu’s headquarters.”

  “Do you want to grab the Monsters?” Amy said. Duke Hoskins nodded. She turned to Del. “You up for this? We want them alive.”

  Sir DeWitt, Del, Arête and Promise
headed out fifteen minutes later. Under Sir DeWitt’s command, much to Del’s annoyance. He led them silently through the streets and into the rocky hills that surrounded the town, carefully keeping the wind in their faces and watching for signs of ambush. It was ranch land out here, and poor ranch land at that.

  Both Monsters were cow-mimics, among the least combat-capable of the Monster forms, and the fight was short and brutal. Sir DeWitt’s crew subdued the Monsters in a matter of seconds.

  “Smelly things, aren’t they?” Arête said as they stood over the bound captives. Back during the planning, Arête said he would be able to use his charisma to keep the Monsters quiet once physically subdued. So far so good.

  “Moos are omnivores, but they prefer carrion,” Sir DeWitt said. ‘Moo’ was Noble slang for the cow-mimics. He was in his half-man form, Mr. Lion (call him The Cowardly Lion and you died). “They tend to pick up the smell.”

  “Sorry, ma’am,” Del said to Amy, back in the nursery parking lot. No local authorities seemed to have noticed a collection of a hundred some-odd people in the parking lot of a closed business. It was amazing what local authorities would fail to notice when Major Transforms put their minds to it. “They don’t talk.”

  Crow Merlin stepped forward. From nowhere. He had definitely not been anywhere a moment ago. “They’re human intelligent, though, and as part of Hunter packs, should still understand us,” he said. “I think I can help them communicate.”

  His help didn’t take long. Merlin knelt by the Monsters, stroked their heads, and said comforting words to them. Just a few minutes later, ghostly images began to appear in the air above them, reflections of the Monsters’ thoughts. Fighting. Burning. Chaos and collapse. Del leaned forward, trying to puzzle out the story. Around her, she found half of Amy’s Major Transforms and a few of the Transforms and normals doing the same.

  The puzzling took a while, but they finally managed to piece together some information. As best as they could figure, there had been some sort of revolt in the last few days. The Hunters had captured a Crow, turned him into a Crow-Monster, but the Law didn’t take properly for some reason. Instead, he took over Enkidu’s headquarters, burned the place to the ground and fled with a small army in tow. The two Monsters fled in the chaos, terrified of the Crow-Monster.

  “That’s Sinclair, isn’t it?” Beth said, from behind Del’s shoulder.

  “It appears so.”

  “Well, we have to do something about this!” Beth said. “He needs our help.”

  “He seems to be doing fine on his own,” Amy said. “I recognized Focus Elspeth in at least two of those scenes. He’s got her as part of his army.”

  “He’s not doing fine! They turned him into a Monster!”

  Perhaps Beth’s feelings toward Sinclair weren’t as buried as Del thought.

  “I don’t know if it’s wise to go after him and this gaggle he’s collected,” Duke Hoskins said. “Our group is rather ungainly; we might never be able to catch up, and there’s no telling whether Crow Master Sinclair is sane anymore and still on our side. The best idea might be to figure out where Sinclair’s going and meet him there.”

  “Your suggestion?” Amy said.

  “We need to make sure that Enkidu’s headquarters has indeed been destroyed. Remember, this place was a trap for us at one point in time. If that proves correct, then we might want to consider going to help Arm Webberly in San Francisco.”

  “Let me guess,” Amy said. “You have a feeling that’s where the fight’s going to be, or you’ve seen this in the clouds that this is where Sinclair’ll end up.”

  “Yes to both.” Duke Hoskins was as embarrassed as a walking crab could be.

  “Fuck,” Amy said. She didn’t have a good relationship with Arm Webberly. “Not immediately. I’d like to talk to some of the Crows we left behind in Portland.”

  “Ma’am,” Del said. Amy turned to her with a frown. “Although we couldn’t all follow Sinclair, a smaller group of us could.”

  “I’ll go,” Beth said. “I need…”

  “…and unless we do something, you think we might wake up some morning and find that Beth has run off after Sinclair?” Amy said. Beth gave the senior Arm a nasty look.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Del said.

  “Were you thinking of yourself, perhaps?”

  Del nodded. “Bruja Modesty, and…”

  Amy shook her head. “Not Bruja Modesty, or Promise, or Stidman.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Arête said, from back in the crowd. “I owe Sinclair a large debt. I want to help him.”

  “Perhaps…” Del started. She had a bad feeling that two wouldn’t be enough.

  “No,” Amy said. “We can’t afford to deplete our ranks any further. If you think the two of you can be of any help to Sinclair, go. Until you reach Sinclair, this isn’t a combat mission, it’s a stealth mission. I’ve taught you enough of my tricks that you should be able to make it.” She turned to Arête. “I’m counting on you not to do the Crow thing and vanish.”

  “Yes, Arm Haggerty,” Arête said. “If I say I’m in, I’m in. All the way.”

  Del ran the idea around her quiet pools for a moment, looking at it from all sides. It was a big gamble, very high risk – but the potential rewards made it worthwhile. “We’ll do it,” she said.

  ---

  “Shit,” Arête said from behind Del. Del had managed to sweet talk Amy out of one of the spare Harleys, and they had, so far, motored along without any problems. A starlit canopy of night spread over them, and few other vehicles disturbed the peace. “Four, five semis filled with Hunters and Monsters.”

  It was wonderful traveling with him, just the two of them through the darkness. Mile after mile with him pressed comfortably against her back. His presence made her feel like all was right with the world. They would find Sinclair and rescue him. The Commander would defeat the Hunters. Peace would come and the two of them could settle down with Beth and Modesty and the rest of Del’s people.

  Del even felt a mild stirring of interest in him, and could comfortably dismiss it. Beth and Modesty made sure she was full up on juice before she left, and any interest in a man was just a normal high-juice reaction.

  Del wondered briefly what it would be like to have Thomas the Dreamer with her, too, and then pushed the thought away. She had won the lottery once with Arête. There was no point in complaining because she hadn’t won twice.

  “Where?”

  “Coming up ahead, going north on I-15,” Arête said.

  Del shrugged. They went south on I-15, still tracking Sinclair. He passed through this area on the back roads and they attempted to gain time on him by sticking to the interstates. Sinclair’s group’s trail was easy to spot, and Del counted on finding it again with ease if they cut west after passing Pocatello.

  “There’s the first,” Arête said. Del sensed the Crow Guru tense, likely trying to steady their metasense defenses. Del spotted the semi on the other side of the interstate, barely visible in the pre-dawn darkness, a full-sized eighteen-wheeler with ‘Wonder Bread, Builds Strong Bodies Twelve Ways’ on the side. She repressed a growl. Nothing on her metasense – the Hunters shielded the semi well enough to prevent her from metasensing a thing. Which didn’t take much on their part, she knew, especially as she zipped along at over a hundred miles an hour.

  Arête pointed out the five semis as they went by, all like the first. “Where are they headed, and why?” Arête said, into her ear. “I hope they didn’t take out Sinclair.”

  A legitimate worry. “My guess is they’re going after Amy and the rest of her army. Not that there’s anything we can do.” Amy said she would wait as long as was wise near Missoula, to keep open a way out of enemy territory if the rescue attempt succeeded, but Sinclair and crew had too much of a head start. There was no way the two of them were going to be able to get back before Amy and her army needed to vacate. Not with the Hunters suddenly moving.

  They really were on their own.


  ---

  Del and Arête got off the motorcycle and looked around at the wreckage at the scenic overlook. Two smoldering cars and a jeep turned on its side, riddled with bullet holes. Blood on the ground, and one Monster’s leg picked at by a buzzard. Just past dawn, the early morning shadows gave the destruction an added air of desolation.

  “How big was this fight?” Arête said. He looked shaky after doing five hours on a motorcycle going a hundred miles an hour. Del was impressed that he remained conscious. “Was it with the same crew of Hunters we saw yesterday?”

  They were just off Utah 199 in the Stansbury Mountains, a few miles west of Clover, and thirty miles southwest of Salt Lake City. This far enough up in the mountains ample snow covered the ground, though the air temperature was above freezing. Del spent a few moments stretching and doing short sprints to warm herself up and work out the kinks. Arête sat on the ground and did breathing exercises.

  “Not sure,” Del said when she finished. She walked the fight, looking at the traces in the slush piles and mud. The scenic overlook included a small parking area, as well as a small expanse of flat ground to the east and west. The road was to the south, and a steep drop-off to the north. “Both groups came in from the east. They chased Sinclair’s band to here, and Sinclair decided to stop and make a stand.”