Besides, if Hoskins lost, he and Sinclair would either be killed or captured. Enkidu had captured him once and he had no desire to repeat the experience. Hoskins needed to win this, for all their sakes, and he would need whatever help Gilgamesh might be able to provide.
When the Hunters finally appeared, they proved to be both mammalian. One was long and sleek and low to the ground, with dark brown fur and a sinuous way of moving Gilgamesh found hard for his eyes to track. A weasel. The second Hunter towered ten feet tall, an ugly ogre out of some child’s fairy tale. He carried a huge club, and wore a look on his face of singular stupidity.
The weasel had to be the leader. His size, mass and shape were close to human, allowing him easy changes from human to his combat form and back. The ogre? Too massive to ever change back to human, and Gilgamesh guessed he paid for his size and strength with his mind.
The two Hunters came out of the brush onto the road on opposite sides of Hoskins, each about fifty feet away from him. The closer, the ogre, stomped by just to the right of Gilgamesh.
When the two Hunters came out of the brush, Hoskins did something unexpected. With no warning, Hoskins ran his fingernails along the flat of his sword. The weapon made a piercing, nerve-rattling shriek that spread a sudden aura of mind-numbing terror across the entire area. For a moment, Gilgamesh envisioned Hoskins in his combat form, and the noise came from the sound of oversized crab claws scraped against each other. He froze and his Uzi slipped from his suddenly numb fingers.
The Terror, the Chimera’s equivalent of an Arm’s predator effect. Gilgamesh hadn’t experienced the Terror since the Clearing of Chicago. He couldn’t ever remember hearing Hoskins’ Terror when the Duke wasn’t in his combat form.
The Terror sawed along the nerves and said ‘flee, flee’. Hoskins was an old Noble, and his Terror was the worst Gilgamesh had experienced.
The two Hunters hesitated when they encountered the Duke’s Terror, and for a moment Gilgamesh hoped they would flee. Instead, they responded with their own Terrors, and Gilgamesh nearly ran screaming from his hiding place. Only sheer will and his many years with Tiamat kept him still.
The two Hunters had weaker Terrors than Hoskins’, but the two of them worked together. Between them both, they matched Hoskins. A draw.
“What is a Crow’s pet doing in Hunter territory?” the weasel said, from the other side of Hoskins. His voice was low and sibilant. The ogre, closer to Gilgamesh, threatened with his club, but he waited silently for the weasel.
“I’m giving you a warning,” Hoskins said. His voice was a deep rumble of a growl. “If you attack me, you die.” He raised the sword without taking his eyes off the weasel. Gilgamesh gingerly picked up the Uzi, mimicking Hoskins, trying to feel as if he belonged with Hoskins. Surprisingly, that helped.
“Give up,” the weasel said. “Surrender, and we’ll take you to the General, and let him make you a Hunter.”
“Surrender, and I’ll take you to a Master Crow and let him make you Noble.”
The weasel answered with a charge. The ogre charged a second later. Hoskins didn’t wait for the Hunters to arrive. He charged the weasel, sword ready to strike.
Now.
Gilgamesh gently squeezed off one shot at the weasel, concentrating on his memories of prior weapon practice to drown out his natural Crow fear of loud noises and the after-effects of the Terror. His shot took the weasel in the upper right shoulder and blood spurted. Not much damage, given the way a Chimera healed, but hopefully the wound would help Hoskins. The one shot was all Gilgamesh managed before Hoskins’ own bulk blocked his view. The weasel moved fast.
The ogre didn’t alter his charge. Gilgamesh waited another two seconds before he shot again, letting the ogre pass his hiding place.
Crack. The shot took the ogre in the middle of the back, but he didn’t stop his charge.
Crack. The middle of the back again, only inches from the first shot.
Crack. Another. This time, the ogre planted his feet and turned. No exit wounds on the front of his chest, dammit. Had his shots done any damage at all?
Gilgamesh waited while the ogre looked around. While the ogre stood in confusion, he wasn’t supporting the weasel with his Terror and wasn’t attacking Hoskins. Gilgamesh would be perfectly happy if the ogre stood there until Hoskins finished chopping the weasel into stew meat.
Which wouldn’t be happening any time soon. The weasel was fast and talented enough to give Hoskins a challenge. Gilgamesh thought Hoskins would win if he got a little time, but he would be in big trouble if the ogre joined the fight. There was a reason the Hunters and Nobles both referred to their most beastly shape as their combat form.
The ogre turned back towards the fight, and Gilgamesh shot him in the back again. Blood gushed, reopening the already closed wounds from the first three hits. Gilgamesh hoped this meant he did some damage.
The ogre turned, roared, and charged Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh damned near upchucked his major skunking right there, which would have been death. His little concealment dross construct wouldn’t survive a dross upchuck. Instead, he forced the reflexive sick-up back down again and huddled behind his tree in petrified immobility. Major skunkings were for real emergencies, which this one wasn’t. Yet.
Twenty feet away from him, the ogre stopped and looked around, trying to spot Gilgamesh. His gaze slid right over the fallen tree sheltering Gilgamesh.
“Jack!” the weasel said, in a near panicked scream. “Get over here!” The ogre, Jack, turned and jogged back towards the fight.
Gilgamesh sagged in relief and checked the Uzi. Still loaded. Still in good shape. When the ogre got half way back to the fight Gilgamesh popped up over the tree and fired another shot into the ogre’s back. Then another.
The ogre followed the weasel’s orders and ignored the shots.
Gilgamesh fired off another shot into the ogre’s back. The next one hit him in the shoulder, and the next missed completely, but the next two both hit the small already wounded spot in the center of his back. The closer the ogre got to the fight, the faster Gilgamesh fired. In desperation, he didn’t even bother with cover any more and switched to full-auto. The ogre didn’t turn. Gilgamesh slapped in a new magazine and continued firing. The ogre ignored his wounds and kept charging Hoskins.
Shit! What did it take to drop this creature? Gilgamesh shot the second magazine dry and slipped in another, a tiny bit of fear creeping in about his limited ammo supply. No more full-auto. Hoskins continued to duel the weasel, and to Gilgamesh’s inexpert eye appeared to be winning, but adding the ogre to the fight wouldn’t be good. Gilgamesh got two more shots into the ogre.
The ogre whirled a mere ten feet from Hoskins. For a second, Gilgamesh found himself looking straight into the ogre’s eyes. The ogre charged with a roar.
So much for hiding. Gilgamesh switched the Uzi back to full auto and emptied his last magazine into the ogre. The ogre slowed his charge for a couple steps and roared Terror. Gilgamesh dropped the now useless Uzi and a rotten egg, and took off at a dead run.
“Huh?” Jack said, confused by the illusion of six Gilgameshes running at random from his former hiding place. “Oh.” Then the chase was on, the ogre, faster but less nimble, twenty yards behind Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh ran in a panic for about ten seconds before he started thinking again, and began to make a wide circle. Behind him, the ogre gained ground, but only slowly. Farther back, the weasel bled dross from a dozen large wounds, and Hoskins bled less dross from more wounds. Gilgamesh continued his circle, ducking between trees, seeking out muddy ground and large deadfalls to leap over. The ogre, clumsier, needed to clamber around Gilgamesh’s chosen obstacles and barely gained ground on Gilgamesh at all. Gilgamesh slowly turned back towards Hoskins, hoping Hoskins would finish killing the weasel, because he would soon have an ogre on his hands.
Ahead, Gilgamesh found a partly cleared side road and a clearing beyond, one he couldn’t avoid. As Gilgamesh crossed the
clearing the ogre put on a burst of speed and gained ground. Sixty feet became twenty feet, close enough for the ogre to draw a ‘dazzle metasense’. Jack screamed, but didn’t appreciably slow. He had fought off the trick before.
Gilgamesh attempted a sprint and failed, echoing his other futile footraces against Chimeras. Fifteen feet. The ogre gained ground quickly even as they plunged back into the piney and weedy underbrush.
The ogre would reach him before he reached Hoskins. Ten feet. Five. Gilgamesh’s breath came like an engine, and each breath hurt like a Monster’s claws pulled it out. He detonated one of his newer rotten egg treasures, ‘tainted élan’, right down Jack’s throat. The ogre growled and Gilgamesh smelled the reeking stench of him. Five feet. Still.
The ogre crushed a rotting pine under his heavy feet and stumbled, just a bit. A small bit of weakness, finally, from three magazines of bullets in his torso, and the tainted élan. Ten feet. Fifteen. The ogre slowed a little more. Gilgamesh fed the ogre another ‘tainted élan’ rotten egg. Gilgamesh metasensed Hoskins’ sword connect with a weasel leg, severing it. The weasel’s screamed human-style, echoing among the trees, before he sprinted away from Hoskins on three legs.
The ogre slowed again, falling back to twenty feet behind.
Yes! Gilgamesh wanted to cheer, but he didn’t dare take any energy from running. He remained a hundred yards from the road, still a long way from Hoskins. Perhaps now for the major skunking? He and Sky, the only Crows in the Clearing of Chicago, had learned a hard lesson in the fight: the Hunters not only knew about the Crow major skunking trick, but practiced against their own captive Crows until they became able to shrug off a major skunking in a melee.
If they were healthy.
When the ogre slowed to a walk, Gilgamesh turned and let loose his major skunking. Although now thirty feet away, Gilgamesh’s Guru training allowed him to direct a major skunking almost fifty feet without any loss of potency. This one was a beaut: the ogre fell flat and then rolled, howling and scratching himself. The ogre, no senior Hunter, would be rolling and clawing at the polluted dross for a half hour or more before he recovered. Gilgamesh, winded, kept jogging until he reached Hoskins, who ran toward him, drenched in blood and grinning fiercely.
Hoskins didn’t stop when he reached Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh stopped and turned, jogging after Hoskins as he approached the ogre.
The ogre didn’t stand a chance. He got to his feet, unsteady, took two panicked fast steps and collided with a six inch thick pine, uprooting it and entangling himself in its branches. Two seconds later, before the ogre and pine fell to the ground, Hoskins beheaded the ogre.
Gilgamesh sat down, woozy. He hugged himself, and rocked back and forth.
“We’re done here,” Hoskins said gently as he picked Gilgamesh up in his arms. “It’s safe now. We won. You did very well indeed, Guru Gilgamesh.”
Safe, finally, in Duke Hoskins’ arms, Gilgamesh let unconsciousness claim him and passed out, a smile on his face.
---
“The calls were insane!” Sinclair said. “They gave the Soviets three different tries! We had that game won and some referee was clearly paid off. What did they do? Decide ahead of time that it’s time for some other country to win the basketball gold?”
“Or they were making a political statement,” Hoskins said. Gilgamesh sat back in his chair at the Beaux Bon Restaurant in New Orleans, and let the chatter wash over him. Three days had passed since the fight in the woods, and the fight still haunted his mind. Even Hoskins approved of his performance in the fight, with the Uzi, his rotten eggs, and the major skunking. Gilgamesh wasn’t sure whether he was appalled or delighted. Too much of this praise and Carol would put him on the front lines of their next fight.
He really hoped that a promotion to Guru didn’t mean he would be expected to do this sort of thing on a regular basis. Given his background, though, he had a bad feeling…
“What I want to know is how long it’s going to be before we see Transforms in the Olympics?” Hoskins said. “They spent days going on about Olga Korbut, and I know half a dozen Transforms who can do better than that in their sleep. You remember the last time we saw Haggerty doing her thing? Hell, I think even Lori Rizzari’s that good.”
“Well, yeah, but if we let Major Transforms compete, there won’t be anything for the normals,” Sinclair said.
“Well, all right, what about Transforms?”
Sinclair nodded. “They used to let Transforms compete, until that scandal eight years ago, with that East German woman, whatever her name was.”
Hoskins was a real fighter. Cool as a cucumber. He had actually enjoyed the fight. Fights added a little spice to life. After the fight, he not only didn’t have the shakes, he insisted on going after the Monster. He said he had earned the Monster, and he wasn’t about to let any Hunters take her.
“Yeah, well, maybe if there’d been some Transforms on the Israeli team, they wouldn’t have gotten killed,” Hoskins said.
Sinclair shook his head. A waiter came by and delivered three large bowls of gumbo, so dark it was almost black, with little piles of white rice in the middle. Gilgamesh’s stomach rumbled at the smell. The waiter, a Transform, slipped off again in the unobtrusive way of all waiters.
“What I wonder is how they got them past Eissler,” Gilgamesh said.
“Eissler? Why would Eissler care about something like that?” Sinclair asked.
“They did the assassination on her turf. I’ve never met an Arm who wouldn’t be pissed as hell at someone pulling crap like that on her turf. I’ll tell you, she may not have managed to stop the attack, but I wouldn’t want to be any of those terrorists when she catches up with them.”
The three of them thought about that as they ate their gumbo. The soup was tasty, but not exceptional, made better by the sauce of hunger. Gilgamesh’s hunger surprised him.
After a few minutes of concentrated eating, Hoskins frowned.
“There’s some kind of juice effect going on,” he said.
“What?” Gilgamesh said. “I don’t metasense anything.”
Hoskins shook his head. “I can’t metasense anything either, but something affected me. I shook off the effect, and now I’m not nearly as hungry.”
Gilgamesh frowned and concentrated on his metasense. He sensed the six Transform waiters, the hostess, and the three Transforms plus the Focus in the kitchen. A thin layer of dross covered the restaurant, not enough to be an issue. He did metasense something in the air that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. A juice something. He looked deeper.
Ambient juice patterns, not attached to the Focus, her Transforms or any objects. Amazing. He had known these sorts of things existed, but he had never been able to metasense them before. Must be a side effect of his Guru training.
He didn’t understand these ambient juice patterns. They sensed different and acted different. Gilgamesh attempted to manipulate one as it wafted by, the way he manipulated dross, about as useful as attempting to hold vapor. He attempted to push the pattern away from him and the pattern didn’t go. He tried to resist the pattern by force of will, and it went, and then Gilgamesh didn’t feel so hungry either. A few seconds later when his attention wandered the pattern slipped into him again.
Hell, Gilgamesh swore, disgusted. He noticed the effect extended onto the street outside the restaurant, and gently insinuated its way into everyone who entered the area. The pattern affected people until they either left the area or ate until their stomachs bulged, whereupon they wore looks of blissful contentment.
Everyone except Hoskins. The effect stayed completely away from him.
Hmph. The restaurant was far busier than the quality of the food would justify. Gilgamesh suspected the extra income made a big difference to the household. He wasn’t sure if he disapproved or not, but a trick like this meant Focus Daumarie did have the delicate manipulative skills they needed to fix Sinclair.
His stomach rumbled, and he resigned himself to a post-d
inner dessert.
“So you think this Focus can fix Master Sinclair?” Hoskins asked.
“I sure as hell hope so,” Sinclair said.
“Keaton thinks so,” Gilgamesh said. “So does my already full stomach.”
“This is taking too long,” Hoskins said. Gilgamesh sighed, frustrated, and ran his hand through his hair. Here they sat, a target for senior Crows and other enemies, and they couldn’t do a damned thing about it. They stayed in a different location every night, but not one of them expected such minor tricks to matter.
“We have to wait. There’s channels. She won’t see us unless we’re cleared through the Focus organization, and Focus Rizzari is working on the issue.”
“This is ridiculous, Guru Gilgamesh.” Gilgamesh thought Hoskins’ promotion premature, as they hadn’t gotten Sinclair fixed, yet. Predictable, though. All the predators overvalued the tests of combat. “The Focus is less than fifty feet away, she metasenses us, we metasense her, and we can’t talk to her. Why are we waiting? We should just go talk to her.”
Gilgamesh winced. “I’m sorry, but no. If we barge in on her, all we’ll get is trouble.” He told the story of his encounter with Focus Gladchuck, back when he was a young Crow. She had gotten him arrested and tossed in jail.
Hoskins tapped his fingers on his leg, and glared, unappreciative of the humor of the story. Gilgamesh worried he really would do something stupid, despite all advice to the contrary.
“Think Rules, your grace,” Sinclair said. “The Focuses have their own set of Rules. We’re supplicants. We have to follow their Rules.”
“Oh, hell. I’ve been to too many Council sessions to believe that. They don’t have Rules. All they have is some idea of the way things should be done, and they all know the proper way to do so, and they don’t bother to tell anyone else, and half of them have a different idea than the other half.”
The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) Page 36
