He hoped Carol wouldn’t have too much of a fit about her Arms deciding to kidnap him to serve as their field medic, as well as to ride herd on Whetstone, Billington and Bartlett. Tags or not, neither Amy nor Webberly trusted the latter two Arms at all.
“The defenders chose to concentrate their efforts on group two, and actually forced them back,” Nameless said. “They have Crows.”
“Crows?” Zielinski said. “They?”
“Our opposition. I can’t tell how many, but at least three, and the Crows are taking group two apart.” Lori commanded group two, and it was supposed to be the ‘small, tough’ group. As usual, Zielinski couldn’t fathom Carol’s strategic setup. Three attack groups, coming in from different directions, and one reserve group, Zielinski’s own group four, following the point group (also named group one). Group two, among others, contained Armenigar, Sibrian, Sky, the Canadians (save for the two Canadian Crows) and both Lori and Focus Larson’s Transform entourages. He couldn’t imagine any Focus household, even Patterson’s, would be able to slow the Inferno Transforms down. Carol could, though.
The one thing Zielinski did know was that the defenders had erected a massive dross-based illusion of pitch blackness, a dark cloud covering the entire compound and edging out into the surrounding streets. At least this was pitch black from the point of view of the attackers. Carol had warned them about possible horrible dross effects, as Patterson and her fellow Focuses had somehow managed to master dross and use it to their advantage, instead of having Crows sweep it away or move, as most Focuses did.
Horrible didn’t come close to describing the danger of this controlled dross. Even though the group he was with, group four, followed Carol’s group, and had one of their Crows, Icestorm, and one of the lesser Nobles, Sir Thomas, working on breaking up the dross darkness, the effects were noticeable. The air was stifling, itchy and claustrophobic. Due to Icestorm and Sir Thomas’s work, they had moved the darkness away from their group by a full yard. At times, Icestorm and Sir Thomas’s control would slip, and blobs of darkness would break into the group. Disconcerting.
“Down! Down!” Viscount Nash, their commander, shouted. Everyone dropped. A deadly illusion of a black toothed cloud swam into their group from the left. Icestorm, the Borealis Crow Master, attacked the illusion with a scream, as did Sir Thomas. Sir Thomas, in his two legged carnisaur combat form, physically leapt into it. The cloud dissipated and Sir Thomas fell silently to the ground in a sodden lump.
Nameless gripped Zielinski’s shoulder, painfully. “That thing! It disrupted Sir Thomas’s juice structure!” Sir Thomas’s shape began to slowly collapse as Zielinski watched, the Noble vomiting and sweating blood.
“Connie!” Zielinski said, visions of an unhinged Beast Man playing through his mind. “Paralyze him!”
Focus Webb, flat on her belly five feet away from Hank, nodded and concentrated. Sir Thomas got to his knees, baring his teeth and ready to tear into the rest of them. Before he could charge, he went limp and fell back to the ground. Connie’s work.
“Here,” Nameless said, reaching into the pockets on the inside of his black cloak, and tossed a golf ball to Icestorm. Zielinski wondered if the golf ball came from Gilgamesh. Icestorm took it, placed it on Sir Thomas, and detonated it. “Concentrated élan,” Nameless said to Zielinski. The equivalent of juice for an Arm. Sir Thomas stopped bleeding.
“The attack disrupted his mind, and his humanity is gone for now,” Connie said. Someone on the other side knew how to fight Chimeras.
Icestorm nodded. “I can control him.” Zielinski stayed prone, watching for similar attacks. He found the toothed cloud unexpectedly unnerving. In the distance, a truck shifted gears noisily and raced its engine as it climbed the slope on the major city road that passed to one side of the compound, to their left, placing it near group three.
“The Commander’s penetrated the outer defenses of Patterson’s compound,” Nameless said. Viscount Nash nodded. The Viscount was stuck in his human form in this fight so he would be able to command. His combat form, an anaconda, couldn’t talk.
“We’re moving forward now,” the Viscount said, motioning for everyone to get up. Zielinski stood, wiped water from his glasses and then started a slow jog into the darkness, matching the pace of his compatriots. The group clustered more now, with no one ranging onto the lawns. Zielinski and Nameless walked in the street.
“What’s going on?” Zielinski said. He kicked up small puddles on the side of the street as he walked. His shoes were soaked through and he wished he had followed Carol’s long ago advice to acquire military boots.
“Some military crap about conforming our position to match the positions of groups two and three along the perimeter,” Nameless said.
Zielinski nodded, and jogged.
Tonya Biggioni:
Two shots rang out, and Jen, the Monster five places ahead of Tonya, fell.
“Down!” Hoskins said.
Tonya dropped to the damp ground and their group fired into the darkness. Their group, group three, had made a steep uphill climb into Patterson’s compound, coming in parallel to the Alleghany and breaching the compound’s walls fifty yards to the left of Hilltop’s main entrance. Once in the compound, after ripping apart two fences, they found themselves swallowed in darkness. Tonya couldn’t affect the darkness. Unfortunately, neither Occum nor any of the eight Nobles had the skills to make the darkness go away, so they remained stuck, nearly blind in the artificial night.
Dross. Patterson’s compound reminded her of the ill feeling of the now-destroyed CDC detention center, the feeling of a Focus household gone bad, then beyond bad, into something fouler. Nothing at all like Adkins’ household’s tamed bad juice. The dross seeped into Tonya, doing things to her juice structure. If she concentrated, she could force it out, but doing so took juice. Juice she needed for other things, such as keeping her fifteen Transforms battle-pumped.
“Crawl,” Hoskins said. They crawled forward, across a cold, wet dirt yard. Ahead, if their maps were correct, was a set of houses that Patterson’s people used as kitchens.
Poom, poom. Two explosions, nearby. Tonya felt the sting of shrapnel, minor wounds, and her ears echoed with the thunder.
“Land mines ahead,” Hoskins said. His voice sounded tinny and distant. Something wet, sloppy and still twitching landed next to Tonya. A piece of a Monster leg. Tonya forced herself to ignore the gore and the fact the leg still twitched.
More shots at them, a pause, more shots, the sounds of a scuffle, and then someone shouted “Arms!” from up ahead.
Shots and more body parts flying. Tonya couldn’t sense a thing, save for the juice patterns by the thousands in the area ahead, making a hash of her metasense. Group three, her group, was the largest, over eighty Transforms and normals. More potent than Keaton’s initial attack, they were large enough to be a threat to Patterson’s compound all on their own. However, the Commander had ordered them to suck down enemy resources and not to confront Patterson unless she ignored them. Their two leading Arms, Webberly and Naylor, were lesser Arms, and Duval, Webberly’s aide, a mere student. Tonya, the group’s only Focus, wasn’t here for her average witchery skills but for her charisma, now termed sorcery by the leading Cause members. Beyond numbers, the Nobles, of which they had eight, comprised the real strength of their group. Hoskins led them, the battle leader of all the Nobles. The Commander wanted the Nobles to cause mayhem and attract defenders.
The Nobles hadn’t minded their orders in the slightest.
Through their mutual tags, set up by some strange Crow capability to link everyone in a single fighting group, Tonya felt a call for charisma. She clenched her fists and concentrated, squeezing the cold mud through her fingers. As she did, she slipped on the wet slope, and fell, cutting herself on a shard of broken granite, likely from a wall up ahead of them. Mud covered her up to her chest.
The Nobles, Arms and Monsters roared, in a linked group Terror. Tonya wouldn’t have wanted to b
e on the other side and face their Terror. Especially a Terror backed by her own powerful charisma. A lusty smile grew on Tonya’s face when she heard the answering panicked screams of the defenders. As a sorceress, an expert in charisma, she could make a difference in the fight. This was why Count Dowling wanted her for his household. She wondered idly for a moment who Dowling’s Crow Master was, and fondly remembered Dowling’s musky odor. Then she thrust her treacherous thoughts of lust away. She had work to do.
As the Terror faded, Tonya sensed Occum directing the Terror’s remnants. The effect wasn’t quite what Tonya expected. The artificial darkness rolled away from their group, the patterns in the dross disrupted by the Noble Terror roar. Regular night replaced the artificial darkness, and Tonya could see and metasense, again.
She wished she couldn’t.
They faced a five foot tall wall, old and worn, made of the same pale speckled granite she had cut herself on. A row of houses sat beyond the granite wall, and between two of the houses, the defenders had erected a sandbagged strongpoint. Behind the sandbags two Transforms ran a heavy machine gun, the problem blocking group three’s progress.
Many of group three’s front line of Monsters were already down, taken apart in part by the machine gun and in part by the three Arms racing back and forth across their front line, doing what Arms did best. Two of the Arms sucked at combat, but one didn’t: Rayburn, one of Keaton’s team.
Rayburn had already been turned, complete with sea green eyes.
Tonya reached out and dropped one juice pattern after another on the Arms, various forms of juice leeches. Before she had a chance to do anything else, four of the Nobles and about half of their Monsters stood and charged the machine gun nest.
The group roared again. Hoskins, in his appalling crab form, leapt over the Monsters at Rayburn and pincered her with his crab claws. In his combat form, he was nearly as fast as an Arm.
The inky blackness closed back in, blocking Tonya’s sight and metasense.
Poom, poom, poom. More land mines. Another Terror roar, and another clearing of the darkness. Sand fell on Tonya, sprayed perhaps by land mines. From their own ranks, Transforms and normals with weapons opened fire at the buildings. Screams rang from inside the buildings as the shots connected with defenders who had taken cover inside. Several of the Nobles fell. Through the inky blackness, she heard Webberly and Duval’s battle cries join Hoskins in the fight against Rayburn. A moment later Rayburn screamed and fell silent. Tonya didn’t hear either of the other two enemy Arms in the fight, either dead or fled.
A huge explosion, which had to be visible miles away, shattered the inky darkness and opened up the fight to Tonya’s metasense and eyesight again. The explosion came from a bomb at the machine gun nest, and the explosion took down two of the Nobles. Two hundred feet farther inside Patterson’s compound, to the right and on the other side of a row of houses, Tonya saw the Commander’s group, group one, forced in their direction by a yellow mass of something screaming horror into Tonya’s metasense. Gunfire from farther inside the compound sprayed Tonya’s group.
“Back!” Hoskins. As he turned, Rayburn appeared out of the darkness and charged him again, perhaps for the kill, as he leaked internal organs through his now broken carapace. Gory wounds covered the entirety of the Arm’s body, but none of them appeared life threatening. Hoskins, though, showed why he deserved his rank. He turned faster than Tonya believed possible, and as he turned Tonya penetrated the trick the Duke used – the battle damage was only an illusion. The fully functional and unwounded Hoskins closed his pincers on Rayburn as she charged too close, and sliced her torso in half. Then he snapped his pincers again and her head rolled free, to stop in a puddle of gore just feet away. “Back! Take cover behind the wall.” Tonya followed Hoskins’ gaze and saw the reason for the retreat: an irregular line of Patterson’s defenders inched its way toward them from their left, along the fence, in an attempt to flank them. Tonya skittered back and noticed she had taken a bullet in her leg. She stopped the bleeding and started to heal the wound in the most juice-efficient manner she knew. Behind her, she felt Rayburn’s dead sea-green eyes staring into her back.
“You’re retreating because you lost,” a voice said in Tonya’s ear. She swiveled her head to see beside her the illusory form of Patterson herself, tall and angel white. Patterson’s voice was soft and seductive. “You’re salvageable, Tonya, unlike the rest. But not if you die here.”
Tonya’s world turned dark, and her will vanished into Patterson’s sea-green eyes.
The Commander, I’ll have you know, is a most stubborn Transform.
December 24, 1972 (Continued)
Suzanne Morris – Focus #15 – May 1957. Focus Morris is the youngest of the first Focuses to have been actively involved in the organization of the breakout from Quarantine. Before she transformed, she was a professional nurse, and was the only one of the first Focuses who got along with the doctors and researchers. She was deeply involved in the formation of the Focus Network, and like Focus Claunch, strongly believes that cooperation between the Transform community and the rest of humanity is absolutely necessary.
“Lives of the Focuses”
Gilgamesh:
“I object!” Chevalier said. He had taken nearly five minutes to work himself up to proclaiming his objection, while Gilgamesh continued to prepare the duel site.
“To what are you objecting?” Shadow said. They stood with the other Crows under an ancient maple tree that spread its bare branches about fifty feet from the duel site.
“To what I just said.”
“Perhaps you should say it again, as an objection, to make yourself clear,” Shadow said. “There were many aspects of your commentary that could relate to objections.”
“Fine, than I shall say it.”
“Please do, friend Chevalier.”
“I object, dear Shadow, to the starting of the duel before the duel starts. Look! Your charge works as we speak!”
“Yes, he is working,” Shadow said. “How is this starting the duel before the duel starts? He’s doing nothing to Phobos. Phobos isn’t even here, but elsewhere, meditating. He, too, is working.”
Chevalier sighed. “Your charge is placing dross constructs on the ground where the duel is to begin. Setting traps, traps, ahead of time!”
“I recall nothing ever decided in the past that would prohibit such activities.”
“Again, you and your charge are assuming the results of the duel before the duel starts. The right to work in the way your charge is working is a right not yet earned. The duel is a wizard’s duel, Shadow. Your charge is not acting as a wizard.”
Shadow furrowed his brows. “I see Gilgamesh utilizing dross constructs, the heart of Crow wizardry. What else could he be doing?”
“He’s doing this ahead of time, dear Shadow. What he does is not allowed.”
“Is it not? When we’ve dueled, friend Chevalier, both of us carried stabilized dross to draw on. In fact, one of the measures of a Crow’s capabilities as a wizard has always been his maxcap, how much dross he can stabilize.”
“Yes, yes, yes, that’s true, but when we did that, we stabilized it ourselves. We didn’t attach our dross to objects, nor did we place it on the ground, as functional dross constructs.”
“Why did we not?”
“We did not, because It Is Not Done.”
“But, friend Chevalier, that isn’t quite true. For us, it isn’t done because we didn’t then possess the skills necessary to stabilize dross constructs on objects, or on the ground, or set them to run in any fashion of permanence and usefulness save on ourselves,” Shadow said.
“Nevertheless.”
Perhaps he had looked at the problem incorrectly, Gilgamesh decided, as he mostly ignored Chevalier’s distant arguments. The light rain turned the dueling ground into a sea of mud, which he deplored. However, wouldn’t that make an appropriate illusion? An actual sea of mud? Gilgamesh began his work.
“Are y
ou saying the objectification of dross is wrong, then, friend Chevalier?”
“What else save wrong? A wizards’ duel involves wizard Crows using their own personal abilities against each other. Weaponry isn’t allowed, of any sort. That includes turning the dueling grounds into a weapon, dear Shadow.”
Shadow turned to Thomas, who was thinking and looking elsewhere. “Thomas?”
“Sorry. I was waiting, and thinking of Focuses,” Thomas said.
“Waiting?” Chevalier said.
“Yes. For you and Shadow to ask me my decision. I made my decision long before you got around to stating your objection as an objection.”
“I cede your hastiness, friend Thomas. You have much to think on.”
“Accepted.”
“And your decision, friend Thomas?”
“About the emplacement of dross constructs on the dueling ground, I find in your favor, Chevalier, but not for the reasons you stated.”
“If not, can you tell us why?”
“Yes.” Thomas studied his fellow mentor with reserved equanimity.
There was silence for a long moment.
“Then, by all means, Thomas, why?” Chevalier said, after a minute had passed.
Gilgamesh shook his head and stopped his work when he realized Thomas the Dreamer’s judgment had gone against him. This was going to be a big problem. His site preparations were his edge. He fought back panic and tried to reconcile himself to losing Guruhood. No. Wrong wrong wrong. Tiamat had ordered him to be aggressive. He would win, even without his preparations. There.
Not very convincing, if he couldn’t convince himself.
“The emplacing of dross constructs on objects and locations is central to the art of wizardry, in my humble opinion,” Thomas said. “However, concerning dueling, if this practice were accepted, then certain Crows, such as Guru Merlin, under my care, would be immune to challenges. Who in their right mind would dare to challenge Merlin, if he could choose as the location of the duel the shade of his most impressive creation, Yggdrasil?”
The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) Page 32
