Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two

by Randall Farmer

  “No.”

  Svensen’s ghost didn’t respond.

  “What?”

  “I’m waiting.”

  Arm Haggerty thought for a few moments, then gave up on studying her feet. She met the eyes of everyone in the group. “I vow, with the juice as my witness, to not sit back and let my peers ignore my logical deductions and my insights. I vow to force them to learn about and accept my discoveries.”

  Peggy Svensen’s ghost vanished, replaced by the dancing aurora sign.

  Librarian Keaton circled Gail, stalking nothing. “This is a challenge,” she signed. “Svensen’s challenging me from the dead. Haggerty’s challenging me now, for real. I’m half tempted to go hunt her down on this idiot quest and beat the snot out of her for doing what she just did.”

  “What you witnessed may not be real,” Gail signed.

  “Did that not sound like a challenge to you?” Keaton signed.

  “Svensen’s ghost definitely challenged Arm Haggerty,” Gail said. “I think she won, too.”

  Librarian Keaton stopped her stalk. “I don’t like this quest. I don’t like this quest at all.”

  Gail nodded, radiating agreement. Her own vow not to get involved with this quest appeared to be one of her better decisions.

  Dan Freeman: November 21, 1971

  “A decade ago, Dan,” Sir Kevin said.

  Six weeks. Six weeks on foot. A week of snow, although there was a big difference between our endless flurries and a true storm. I thought I would have already been done in by frostbite, given how much more I felt the cold than the others, but no. The juice took care of me, at least a little. The wind whipped little flurry pellets onto my cheeks and I grumbled to myself. Again.

  “Was this place inhabited year round back then?” I couldn’t imagine people living here. Visiting in the summer, perhaps. Reduced to trekking in snowshoes, before Thanksgiving? Baah. The town below us certainly appeared to be uninhabited now, as if everyone left last month.

  “My old CFS maps, pre-Monster, call this place Port Nelson.” Which made the river the Nelson River. The partly frozen-over river was too wide to cross. More tramping through the snowy forest. “Much of northern Canada is Monster territory now. They don’t talk about that much, on the news. Or the Inuit refugee camps.”

  I vaguely recalled reading about the refugee camps in a two paragraph no picture Time article several years ago. Native Americans forced from their ancestral homelands by Monster after Monster after Monster. They fought back for a while, I recalled. And lost. So did the Canadian armed forces. “I thought the Monsters only held the tallest mountains and the far northern tundra.”

  “The great barren grounds start across the Nelson, or at least pockets of it,” Sir Kevin said. “That’s tundra. We need to go upriver, though, until we find a ford.” Upriver? To the southwest. “I’ll carry people across the ford one at a time. The river’s cold won’t bother me at all.”

  “We’re going to need to be careful,” I said. “We’re carrying a lot of stuff that won’t take well to a dunking.” Such as the radio system we carried for emergencies.

  “That goes without saying,” Sir Kevin said. He turned back to the rest of the group, gathered on a cut bank a quarter mile back. “Back home, the few local Monsters keep quiet and hidden, for the most part. Out here? It gets wild at times. Our best recruits for our Monster Commoners come from out here – well, not here here, but a similar place, the forests east of James Bay. Hunting, fishing, fur trapping, mining – you name it, it’s all gone now. Even one aggressive Monster every two hundred square miles is enough to drive people away. Sure, a big mining company can keep a perimeter, but try talking a small mining geologist survey team into going into Monster territory. It isn’t going to happen. This is…” Sir Kevin froze in place, mid-sentence, and sniffed.

  “What is it?” I asked, whispering.

  “Beast Man. About twenty miles to the northwest.”

  Another Sir Kevin prediction – wherever you find aggressive Monsters, you will also find Beast Men. The Nobles recruited them as well, though the term ‘recruit’ probably wasn’t quite the correct word.

  “It’s another test,” Cindy said. Our part-Arm part-Crow show-off took advantage of the day’s ‘sun’ and near-freezing warmth to strip down to her bra and panties. Cindy’s quirks did bring a smile to my face. She made me feel warm enough to fold down the hood of my parka and depend solely on my hat. And scarf.

  It took all day, but Sir Kevin found us a ford across the partly frozen Nelson and ferried us across. The next day we hunted and bagged a moose and a bear. Only Sir Kevin and Amy would eat the bear meat. Now, we walked through the arctic forest toward the distant Beast Man. “Why else would the auroras be leading us this way?”

  “A test for all of us, or another individual test?” Midgard asked.

  I shrugged, having no feel for this. Neither did any of the others. The never-ending tests took their toll on us.

  We walked. The broken forest around us vanished, replaced by nothing. Endless snow-covered nothing, humpy rocks alternating with flat plates of snow-covered ice ponds that would make this area impassible in the summer. Frozen swampland, now endless icy plains. Tundra. We angled to the left, to where a few pockets of stunted trees huddled tight to the ground. Wispy cirrus clouds rushed in from the southwest, and as the damn sun began its multi-hour sunset dance (and Cindy put her now aired-out clothes back on) darker clouds gathered on the southwest horizon. I pulled up the hood of my parka and tried not to shiver.

  “There,” Sir Kevin said, and pointed north. I turned and saw nothing.

  “The Beast Man,” Amy said. “He wears a tiger form.” I still didn’t see a thing.

  “Is he coming toward us?” Nancy said. Nancy now sported a coat of white fur, with black fur circles around her eyes, making her appear vaguely like a white-furred orangutan. She no longer wore boots or clothes.

  Major Transforms were way freaky. Amy’s skin resembled hard rubber these days.

  “Yes.”

  “Definitely a test.” She turned to the two Crows, who huddled behind Cindy. “Taming Beast Men is a Crow trick. That means you two are up.”

  “I understand nothing about taming Beast Men,” Midgard said. “I don’t possess any of the animal taming skills.”

  “Me either,” Nameless said. “Not an ounce of Crow Master in me. Count Mensik tried to teach me, so I could take care of Sir Kevin if he needed any help, but I couldn’t even learn the basics.”

  Nancy’s eyes went wide. “But I thought you were acting as his Crow Master! If you aren’t, then who is?”

  I caught myself edging away from Sir Kevin. We had been out here a long time, as the Major Transforms measured things. I had experienced uncontrolled Arm lust three times already, and after the third Amy told me I somehow dampened her intensity. Growing as a Courtier.

  Sir Kevin laughed. “Nobody,” he said. “It’s why I ‘volunteered’ for this quest, or one of the reasons. Count Mensik would have needed to come with his entire household, as well as with Icestorm, his Crow Master. I’m a relative rarity among the Nobles, what they call a self-stabilizer.” Sir Kevin took off his gloves and showed them his hands, now equipped with black fur and sharp iron non-retracting claws. “Even in my combat form I can think and talk like a man.” A gorilla. Sir Kevin laughed. “The cost I pay for this? For raw physical power, I’m pretty much at the bottom of the heap.”

  Amy sidled up to Sir Kevin, appreciative and coy. Early on, the two had spent a bunch of time growling at each other. The third day out Sir Kevin said something innocuous about the difficulties of replacing Amy’s boots while on the quest, and she took his comment the wrong way. The initial fight didn’t last long, but after forcing Sir Kevin to give in, she let him recover and beat the crap out of him again. Four more of these serial battles ended up with Sir Kevin pledging his undying devotion to his new goddess of the dark, the Hero.

  These days, if Amy said ‘jump’ Sir Kev
in jumped before he asked ‘how high’. We all reacted the same way to the senior Arm. Except Nancy. Nancy just shrugged, whined, bargained, and mostly did whatever Amy wanted. I suspected she could fight back if she wanted – I hadn’t forgotten how easily Nancy disabled Gail’s top woman Transform – but the older Focus-Sport didn’t seem to have much fight in her at the moment.

  “I heard a rumor that you volunteered to be a Noble,” Amy said. “That you walked into the Burg of Fog one day last year and said Enkidu promised to kill you unless you joined the Hunters or Nobles, and you wanted to choose the Nobles.”

  Sir Kevin nodded. “Master Whisper didn’t fully appreciate a talking gorilla volunteer. He lacked the strength to initiate me as a Noble, so he sent me to Master Occum, in the White Mountains Stronghold, to fix me up.”

  “How long had you been on your own, your grace?” Amy asked.

  “Just under a year,” Sir Kevin said. “I’m not sure how much longer I could have kept going, though. My vocabulary wasn’t exactly stellar by the time Occum Nobelized me. If I stick to my man-form, though, there shouldn’t be much of an IQ loss for months.”

  Amy crossed her arms across her chest. “So your chances of dominating the Beast Man, Chimera style, is nil.”

  “Probably.”

  I had wondered how Sir Kevin fit into this mess. Every one of us was a non-standard version of our kind, save for Sir Kevin and Midgard. Nancy and Cindy were Sports, Nameless was a ‘mystic Crow’ and possessed none of the standard Crow abilities, I was whatever the crap I was, and Amy showed almost no side effects from drawing juice from a Monster, apparently a unique Arm ability. That left the unperturbable and preternaturally quiet Midgard, who professed to be a standard Crow ‘wizard’, albeit still in training.

  The eyeballs of everyone in the group, on me, ended my woolgathering. “You’ve gotta be kidding,” I said.

  “You have what it takes, at least in theory,” Sir Kevin said. “From experience, I know you can quiet my anger and help me think in a calm and rational manner.”

  “But a Beast-Man? A friendly ‘back off’ nudge from a Beast-Man would likely kill me.” I was the only person in the group without any juice defenses. Both Crows could skunk an opponent and immobilize him. Nancy could strip the juice off anyone, though officially she could only strip tagged women Transforms. She made us promise never to tell the authorities she had trained up these dangerous capabilities. Cindy and Amy were, as far as combat was concerned, simply Arms, and with all the Arm’s juice-based combat benefits, though Cindy’s juice count was more Focus-like in numbers and thus she had less juice to burn when doing the Arm ‘juice burn’ trick. Cindy’s real issue was that she had a tendency to run instead of fight, though like a Crow she could skunk an enemy as well. Amy, though, thought Cindy’s combat capabilities were sub-par for an Arm of her age. By a lot.

  “Then I guess you’d better succeed at taming him,” Amy said. She gave me a typical ‘you chicken out and I’ll never consider you a man again’ look from the standard female arsenal of tricks. She was definitely yanking my chain today.

  “Thanks, guys,” I said. Right about now I wished I had pressed harder to acquire some milspec weaponry before we started this damned quest. My hunting rifle wasn’t going to do squat to a damned Beast-Man. I gave the useless weapon to Amy and trotted off.

  A massive, bright orange and black tiger in the icy grayness of the frozen swamp looked decidedly out of place. “Hey there,” I said, as I approached, doing what I thought to be my best charismatic projection. We’ll ignore the fact that whatever my ‘charisma’ was couldn’t be metasensed and thus wasn’t a juice effect or a ‘charismatic projection’ at all. “My name is Dan Freeman, and I’d like to talk to you about an opportunity to join our quest.”

  The tiger grunted and studied me as he slowly paced, back and forth, in front of me. The grunt was supposed to send me fleeing, giving the Beast Man the excuse to chase me down and kill me. The Terror, Sir Kevin called it. The first time he caught me with a half-assed Terror, I flinched instead of panicking. He had been three words into an apology for accidentally terrorizing me before he realized I didn’t panic. After that, he made it his responsibility to train me to resist his Terror…and in the process we found a secret.

  I recalled Sir Kevin’s Terror and let it flow through me like a river. The Beast-Man stopped its slow pacing and, I swear, chuckled. This was no ‘dumb beast’. He now knew I had backing.

  “Would you like to earn the opportunity to return to your human form?” I asked. My study of the Beast-Man told me, instinctively, that he no longer understood my language. Or never spoke English. I couldn’t tell. He understood the gist of my comment, though.

  I turned to the distant Sir Kevin. The Beast-Man followed my gaze, puzzled for a moment, then nodded. “You’re an incredibly handsome beast,” I said. “Sir Kevin is in human form, now, but he can change from his human form to his beast form, what he calls his combat form. If he changes now, he would, like you, lose his words, but back home his Crow companion would guide the change in a way that won’t lose him his words.”

  The Beast-Man understood my comment. He approached me, sniffed, bumped me, and circled me. I didn’t spook, but I can’t say I wasn’t afraid. I had been in worse situations in ‘Nam, though, and I understood the adrenaline response. How to use it to make me more aware of my surroundings. The Beast-Man nudged my gloved right hand, the one itching for a trigger to pull. We exchanged a glance; he thought I was doing something with the juice with my right hand. No, wrong. That I could do something with it.

  He understood. He wanted to teach me. I petted him, and he purred. He started to walk away, and I followed.

  Six paces on, I realized I had been rolled. After Sir Kevin’s realization that I could resist his Terror, the others had gotten into the act and played with me. Amy was still the one most able to roll me with her charisma; she thought I couldn’t stop her because I thought I was hers. I couldn’t disagree. If six weeks with a group of chatty Major Transforms had taught me anything, it was never to dispute an Arm’s declaration of possession.

  Of course, in Amy’s mind, everyone in our group was hers, except perhaps Nameless. “I am nothing so I cannot be anyone’s,” he had said, balking Cindy when she was in a mood, and Amy hadn’t challenged Nameless’s assertions. I did balk Cindy’s ownership claim, verbally, which was why she thought our nights together were so spectacular. My mind might belong to Amy, but Cindy firmly claimed my body. Nancy’s comment on the subject was “I was just as bad as the man.” I had heard too much about the man, the troublemaking Courtier I apparently resembled.

  Despite all my experience resisting my group members’ attempts to play with my mind, the damned Beast-Man rolled me, anyway. As soon as I was out of range of the quest group, I was dinner.

  “I think it would be better if we went back to talk to Sir Kevin,” I said.

  As I said the words, I caught a change in the Beast-Man’s demeanor, and I knew I was dead. He turned, and when he finished turning he would gut me with his right front paw faster than I could even register, and…

  The Beast-Man no longer walked beside me. Instead, he flew sideways and bled profusely, a mostly invisible Arm Amy Haggerty goading him with a fire-hardened spear. He turned and roared a full Terror roar at the both of us. I flinched, so I didn’t see how Amy did it, but she found a way to stick her M-16 in the Beast-Man’s mouth as he roared and, full auto, blow the back of his head off from the inside.

  I hadn’t even seen her M-16 before she fired it. Oh, and neither did Amy flinch from the Beast-Man’s terror.

  “Amy! Thank God!”

  “God had nothing to do with this,” she said. She whistled over the rest of the group.

  “I failed.”

  “Bullshit. You did as well as a Crow Master until he rolled you, and that’s the reason why Crow Masters always take back-up in these situations.”

  “I still failed.”

  Amy look
ed me over. “Fine. Just don’t end up like Arm Hancock and let the failure to be perfect make you too risk adverse to be useful.” I nodded. Given that she just saved my sorry life, I had no call to balk her now.

  Then she gave me her wide-eyed stare that meant that after she and Sir Kevin screwed in their violent and superhuman way, she reserved me for next. “Time for some juice!” she called to the rest.

  In her mind, by turning on one of hers after I won him over, the Beast-Man deserved to die a permanent death.

  Who was I to argue?

  Tomorrow we would follow the aurora, no matter what.

  ---

  The aurora guiding us vanished when we reached the black rock. The slab sat alone on a featureless knob of a hill that stuck itself perhaps ten feet above the surrounding tundra. The night was clear and moonlit and frigid, and far to the east I caught glints of the iced-over Hudson Bay.

  “That was fast,” Cindy said. We had been walking hand in hand this evening as an experiment to see if I could learn whatever trick she was using to make this venture through sub-zero arctic like a springtime stroll in the park. She, too, grew fur, but so far her fur remained downy and too thin to count as insulation. I did pick up some benefits from this, but I didn’t yet believe what I gained was anything more than the juice equivalent of the placebo effect.

  “It is.” The encounter with the Beast-Man was only three days ago. I eyed the black rock with suspicion. “I’m actually getting bad vibes from this rock.”

  “I suspect we all are, Courtier Freeman,” Midgard said. He stopped ten feet away from the rock and refused to come closer.

  Those with a metasense – that is, everyone but me – studied the rock in silence. This had to be an artifact of the Progenitors, our first. “It’s a dross object,” Midgard said. “A Saturn Five rocket compared to Crow Gilgamesh’s hand axes. Our own monolith.” Another ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ reference. Midgard was a die-hard science fiction fan. I refused to believe that his frequent attendance at science fiction conventions was enough to make him an ‘impossible Crow’.