“Well,” Athabasca said. He walked over to the quivering Crow captive and smiled. “How goes your integration of the Western Hunters into the Empire, General? I haven’t heard anything since our last meeting, when you told me you had defeated former General Leo.”
“They all wear the Eastern Hunter Law now, sir,” I said. “Leo’s managed to regain the rank of Colonel, and he’s my third in command at the moment. Under the Eastern Law he’s proven to be quite adept at recruitment.” My only problem with Leo was his Crow Shaman, Oberon. Oberon only pretended to wear the Law. The spastic Crow’s tie to the Hunters was his personal tie to Leo, and little more.
“And the others?”
“Ursus and Hurricane joined up as senior officers, and I find them supplied with ample talents and control. Klamath and Rainier remain junior officers, as both of them continue to fight the use of language.” The Western Hunters had tolerated beastliness far more than I considered appropriate. I had told those two that unless they learned to speak I would behead them, send them into withdrawal, and rebirth them as new Hunters. Incentive. “Loess and I speak, occasionally, but he refuses to join us.”
I metasensed Guru Athabasca do something with the juice to the captive Crow. “Master,” the captive Crow said. “So you’re the one who they call the Jester. The hidden Guru of Gurus.”
“That is I,” Athabasca said. “Dynamo, you serve me now, my eyes and ears in the organization of Hephaestus and Arpeggio.”
“I am not to die? Thank you, Master.”
Pathetic. A good lesson, though, in Crow management styles. Guru Athabasca had done something to Dynamo’s mind. “Guru Athabasca, a question, if you are so inclined,” I said.
“Certainly.” Athabasca didn’t break his eye contact with Dynamo.
“Is this alteration you did to Dynamo’s mind something you can do to the Crows who serve the Law?”
“I can, but I shouldn’t need to. The Law should take care of such issues.” He turned to me in somewhat shock. “I’m surprised, General, that you sensed the changes I made, and that this stuck in your mind.”
I chortled. “I’m a beast of many surprises, as you well know,” I said. “Guru, some of our Crows only pretend to serve the Law. They, um, see through it.” Even thinking about such things was difficult for me.
“I can fix that problem. For a price.”
I nodded. Prices were always an issue when dealing with Guru Athabasca. He was at least honorable; in my many dealings with the chief Judge, he had not only never broken a deal, he never cut corners. Instead, he nearly always gave a tiny bit more than he was required to.
An empire builder of what I considered to be a quite pleasant empire.
“Perfect,” I said.
“And now, speaking of prices, to the strange reward you wanted, General.” The Crow Guru turned to my Pack Alpha, Cleo. “You have your audience, and my full attention.”
“Thank you, sir,” Cleo said. “Is there a place we can sit? I have many documents to show you.”
The Guru waved his right hand with excessive magnanimity toward a trick dining room table that appeared to be supported by a single curved and thin chrome post at one corner. The table’s chairs reminded me of hungry mouths. I followed them, curious to see what the Guru would make of Cleo’s research. I stood behind Cleo as both she and the Guru sat.
Guru Athabasca hadn’t bothered to free Crow Dynamo from his restraints.
“Master Wandering Shade left us many documents,” Cleo said, to start. She slipped on her reading glasses, which made her look like a dowdy and frigid secretary, if one could ever imagine a lizard-dragon as a secretary. “When we took the timber lodge in the Bitterroots from Colonel Leo, we were surprised to find that the place had once been owned and occupied by Master Wandering Shade. We found, there, a larger set of notes and documents than we already possessed.”
“Yes, yes, and helping you understand them is the reward from your General’s completed quest. Continue?”
“Certainly, sir. First are these notes and diagrams that none of us can understand.” She pushed a set of documents over to the Guru.
“Yes, yes, the Denver operation. Oh, the fruitless hours of work and speculation that turned out to entail!” The Guru paused in thought. “I see no reason not to bring you up to speed on this. Tell you what – I’ll give you the awful fruits of that experiment to play with.”
I paced, amused, as they talked. At times I struggled to follow the technical details, and when I grew too frustrated I expended juice to understand. The Guru, as always, leeched the boisterous out of me. He lived a life of work, not fun, and didn’t understand or appreciate the aspects of the Law that encouraged boisterous play and just plain fun. A memory of Montana Winter, Quiet Creeper and I tossing Leo’s favorite front leg over his head in a game of keep-away, before Leo regained his senior officer status, came to my mind.
Buried two thirds of the way through her questions, Cleo finally got to the one question I had demanded she include. I buried my preparations for a berserk response if the question, as Cleo feared, set off Guru Athabasca and sent him into some insane and deadly tirade. We had cause to worry, as when we mentioned Cleo’s discovery to Focus Picklejuice’s diplomat we got shot at and told to never think of such things around said Focus or her representatives again. “Picklejuice is Ajax from the Chrysanthemum records,” Cleo had concluded, after the shooting ended. “No doubt about it.”
Cleo brought out the dangerous documents. “Sir.” She pushed forward the Chrysanthemum records and the sketch we had created of the Provocateur, Cleo’s ‘Patient Zero’. “Are you familiar with this corporation, and this man?”
The Crow Guru didn’t explode in anger. Instead, he blinked in wonder at the Chrysanthemum records. The sketch, though, he recognized. “My, my. I knew my old Guru had his hooks into something big associated with the first Focuses, but I didn’t know he was into something this big.” He flipped documents, one after the other. “Amazing. A secret corporation, likely one founded by him, and sold to the first Focuses simply, as with all things this man does, to cause trouble.” He continued to flip. “Ajax is the local bitch. I possess no proof about who this Cassandra is, but I can guess.”
“Who, sir?” Cleo asked.
“The White Witch.”
Focus Shirley Patterson, the terror of Pittsburgh. I shivered. Hunters who hunted Pittsburgh never came back. All Wandering Shade had ever told me about Pittsburgh was to never go there, ever, under any circumstances. I had obeyed, of course. I didn’t get to be where I was today by sticking my neck out needlessly.
“What do they get out of this? What’s going on with all this crazy science?”
“Income and power, my dear Cleo,” Guru Athabasca said. “Sales of the deepest secrets of the Transform community to whoever pays the most. It’s all here, if you read between the lines. The Commander’s lairs and how she defends them. Kali’s weakness for torture, and how someone can trigger her psychotic breaks. The Hero’s nightly patrol methodology. The blackmail levers on the Council Focuses. Hell, even the location of my old Seattle stronghold and Guru Chevalier’s art studio in San Francisco. They sold them all, and more. Much more. How to induce a transformation with diluted Monster blood. How electrical interference messes up the metasense. Stuff I previously only knew about by rumor.”
I paced and thought, as the Guru and Cleo began to work out the details of how the Chrysanthemum Corporation worked. This wasn’t good. To me, what neither Cleo nor the Guru saw, was how this changed the balance of power between the Transforms and normals. We all thought that because the authorities tended to label us all as Monsters, and pontificate about using anti-Monster tactics to control the ahem ‘Transform menace’ ahem that they didn’t know anything for real. The Major Transform leaders believed the only threat the authorities offered us was raw numbers.
Wrong. The anti-Monster crap was a smoke screen. The fact all this information got sold meant that the authorities eventu
ally bought it and learned from it. They had their doomsday plans for us, the same way they had their nuclear war plans.
This was the Provocateur’s plan, and thus his fault. Whoever and whatever he was. He was not on our side.
“Sir,” I said, returning to the table. I pointed a finger at the sketch. “Him. Who is he, and what does he represent? Is he the first Transform, as Cleo believes?”
“Ah, I was wondering when your impatience would overcome your excessive caution,” Guru Athabasca said.
I waited.
He waited.
Cleo gave me ‘the look’.
I waited some more. I understood Crows.
“He’s a Goldilocks,” Guru Athabasca said, finally, after far too long. “The rarest of all Transforms. His only abilities are defensive, and minor at that.” The Guru paused. “And he’s old. He was born in the mid to late 19th century; you can hear it in his voice, despite his tricks. He was one of the early settlers who came west, the Canadian west, to seek his fortune. A gold miner or something similar, my best guess.”
Guru Athabasca leaned back in his gaping maw of a chair and studied the ceiling. “I’ve met him three times. He’s opinionated and caustic, of the ‘you young people have life too soft and the world is going to hell’ variety of caustic, only you need to realize that ‘you young people’ includes anyone born after the 1880s. He’s a college graduate, but from a time when colleges only taught Latin, Greek and mathematics, so he considers everyone in our modern world to be undereducated. He hates the Germans and Eastern Europeans, the Chinese and the Japanese. He fought in World War I as a soldier. He served in the Canadian diplomatic corp or espionage corp or something similar in World War II. He claims to be the first Transform, but he told a different story about his origins in each of our three meetings. He deals with Crows face to face and says he never deals with any other Transforms.” Pause. “Satisfied?”
“You don’t believe a single thing the Provocateur’s ever said to you, do you, sir?” Cleo said.
“No, I don’t.”
“But you do believe he’s into causing trouble.”
“I know so. In our second meeting, he hired me to sell information on suppressed Focus research and older Monster capabilities to a young Focus named Martine DeYoung. And introduce myself to her and reveal myself to be a Crow. I did so, and what I did triggered a major civil war among the United States east coast Focuses.” Another, longer, pause. “Which surprised me, given the stupidity of the information I passed on. The division of juice use into three varieties – direct, ritual and social – is something I still consider false.”
I repressed a snort at his disbelief in trivially observable reality. The Guru wasn’t half as smart as he thought he was, or a quarter as observant as he needed to be.
“If I may ask, sir, did he hire you in the other two meetings, and for what?” Cleo was being smart here by not asking what Guru Athabasca had been paid for his services.
The Guru nodded. “The first was to connect a ghost writer with an abused household male Transform in Focus Buckle’s household.” Cleo blinked at the Guru quizzically. “Focus Sanderson of Dallas, a lesser first Focus. The project was a book that ended up with the title ‘I am Transformed’, an overblown lurid tale of the horror of living under a sadistic incompetent Focus who possessed every flaw known to womankind. Think ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ but about household Transforms in the role of the slaves and the Focuses in the role of the slave-owners. We actually got the book published, but it sank without a trace. The Focus Council and the ISF here in Canada nearly died of apoplexy when it appeared on the bookshelves, but I don’t think the public was ready for the book’s message back in ’64.” Guru Athabasca shook his head and shuffled papers. “In our last meeting, he wasn’t exactly hiring me, he was giving me information to pass along to whoever I thought needed it. He chose me because I read Russian. Do either of you?”
Cleo shook her head, as did I.
“In that case, you’ll just need to believe me. The Russians found a cure for Transform Sickness in 1965, but they stopped using it in ’69 after, well, I guess I’ll just tell you the details. The way their cure worked is that you had to catch the infection within the first 18 hours after it started. It involved massive doses of a specific antibiotic that goes by the scientific name of fusafungine, and if you start later in the infection cycle, the dosage needed most often kills the Transform involved. The cure has no effect after the Transform fully transforms, or on induced transformations. The reason the Russkies stopped using it was that they experienced several localized Listeria C outbreaks – dozens of simultaneous transformations, in the Moscow area – and all involved fusafungine-resistant Listeria C. They shat their britches when they realized what was going on and stopped the fusafungine use cold. What the Provocateur gave me were copies of the actual Soviet medical documentation on the case.”
My conclusion? The Provocateur was heavily into pointless.
The Guru shrugged. “I think he’s retired now, though. Which may be the best thing for us all.”
Recruiting (October 22, 1971)
“Welcome, friend Loess,” I said, welcoming the last of the unassociated senior Hunters to my humble abode.
“That’s ‘luuus’, not ‘low-ess’,” Loess said. His large pack of Gals filed into the hunting lodge behind him. Twenty-seven Gals, none of whom were full Monsters. Amazing. It spoke of yet another Gal stabilization technique we would need to master. With five known methods of stabilization, we were set up for nearly all possible contingencies.
“I just pronounce’m as I see’m on the written page, old friend,” I said. Needling Loess never got old. He frowned at me, and then shrugged.
I heard rumors of the elaborate dominance fights the Arms held, ever more elaborate as time went on. Overcompensating as always. I had just won mine over Loess. It took one exchange of comments. Stupid Arms, always so wasteful.
Leo? Proving my rank against the former General had taken five fights and nine conversations, and I had lost four of the five fights and still took dominance. The win came after Leo gave in when six of my Gals walloped eight of his in a no-weapons sparring match. I had won by proving my way superior.
“Just so you know, this here hunting lodge isn’t something we ate our way into owning. This was originally Wandering Shade’s place, his Guru Salon,” I said, leading Loess from the cramped entry hall into the place’s great room. “He purchased it after his Crow faction lost a fight back in the early ‘60s, in the Crow’s ‘days of trouble’. Here, searching for a new path, he did his first experimentation on Beast Men.” Corbelled rafters arched fifteen feet over my head, and at the far end of the room, racks of windows marched up the wall, allowing us to overlook Blood Valley as it wound its way through the deeper parts of the Bitterroot Mountains. Out of sight to the northeast, save as a smudge of light on the horizon on dark clear nights, lay Bozeman, Montana. Where we bought our supplies.
Blood Valley was our name for the valley below. Our best hunts happened there, part of the disposal process for unwanted captured enemies.
Loess admired the luxury of the hunting lodge and shook his head. Partly to honor the memory of Wandering Shade we had preserved the beauty of the interior and hadn’t trashed the place. “The Mountain Men. Leo and, um, Ursus if I remember correctly, survived those old experiments,” Loess said. “I remember the Master’s stories about them, and his later tales about how he was able to return enough humanity to allow them to talk. He never said he owned any place this beautiful, though.”
Both Colonels Leo and Ursus were older than me as Chimeras. I was older than Loess, but by less than a year.
“So,” I said, “do you understand the seemingly nonsense rule about only man-shapes in the main lodge?” I had told him this in my formal invitation.
“I do, though I did find reforming my Monster Gals into human shape for the sake of proper etiquette to be on the far end of acceptable for a ‘Hunter Empire’.”<
br />
Loess always talked like that. Changing the shape of his Gals, though? That should have taken longer than the time since he accepted the invitation. Another technique we would all need to learn. We were doing a lot of learning recently; I had just mastered, last week, the secrets behind turning a psycho male Transform into a Guy. The armies of the Hunter Empire were now going to have Guys as well as Gals.
The enemy wasn’t going to be happy about our innovation.
“When Leo bowed to me, I adopted the ‘only man-shapes inside of buildings’ Law addition common to the Western Hunters.”
“Doesn’t that make it hard for the Monster Gals in winter?”
“They live in their own quarters, now,” I said. Whether they kept the place clean wasn’t my bailiwick, but that of the Pack Alphas. “We’re slowly getting away from the practice of requiring the Gals to quarter with their Hunters.”
“That is a radical idea,” Loess said. “I also heard a rumor that you’re allowing Gals to transfer from one Hunter to another. Is that true?”
I nodded. Loess’ Pack Alpha, Tangiers, padded over to me and bowed. I waved my fingers and gave her permission to speak. “I feel the changes to the Law, General, just standing in this beautiful home of yours. Laws about neatness, cleanliness and study. These changes gladden me. If we are to be able to rip out the throats of our enemies, we do need to improve ourselves. In all areas.” Tangiers was nearly as beautiful as my Cleo. She retained her human shape, but had tough leathery skin, black in color, a black darker than I had ever seen on a normal human. Her leathery skin was rough and dimpled, and thick enough to stop a normal’s knife. She didn’t wear shoes; her skin was thick enough on her lower legs and feet to serve as all-weather boots.
Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two Page 5
