An Age Without A Name (The Cause Book 5)

by Randall Farmer

  No eyes. He experienced only darkness, and the darkness held no escape from the pain.

  “Hell, what more can you do, Huntress Hecate? He’s a functional resource. We need to send him along the pipeline and get to work on our new orders.” Sinclair clung to Leo’s exasperated voice. It was so rich in the darkness, so beautiful. The only thing in his world that wasn’t pain.

  “‘What can I do?’ Punishment, Colonel! The goddamned Crow wiped his mind of everything useful. He must be punished for his treachery!” The Arm’s voice was like glass, cold, hard, with sharp edges. Even the sound of it hurt.

  “He wouldn’t be the first Shaman who sought solace by wiping his memory. It’s not that critical. Go back to your day job.” Leo didn’t like the Arm. His words were polite, but his tone wasn’t. Nobody liked the Arm, from what Sinclair could tell, and the Arm despised all the Hunters, especially Enkidu. She didn’t even attempt to hide her hate, telling Sinclair as she tortured him of her plans for General Enkidu, some horror beyond horror involving something she called ‘The True Law’. She had plans, big and bloody plans. “You’re the one responsible for stopping Arm Haggerty’s depredations. You should be in the field and not here.” Good old Responsibility, which Sinclair doubted the Arm understood at all.

  “Fuck. Give me another three Senior Hunters and their packs and I’ll wipe Haggerty’s cocksuckers out to the last motorcycle.”

  “As you know, there are no Senior Hunters to spare at the moment,” Colonel Leo said. “The Crow, please?”

  Please? Shit. Bass had found a way to rise far enough in the Hunter ranks to make a senior Hunter need to ask instead of order. Bass didn’t reply, but a moment later, Sinclair heard the door slam as Bass left the room. He tried to sigh in relief, and failed at that as well. More pain would come. It always did.

  Kind and strong arms picked him up, and he felt himself carried off. Finally, it sunk in that the torture was really over. He cried, sobbing miserably, except that he still could make no sound, and he had no eyes so there were no tears. He just lay in the safe arms of a Chimera and shook.

  The Hunter held him closer, and finally, Sinclair found he could escape into unconsciousness.

  ---

  “You’re mine, little Crow,” the nightmare voice whispered. Sinclair fled, and shook, and found himself suddenly awake with a gasp.

  Nightmares. Bass was gone, and this was only a nightmare. He tried to convince himself that he was awake, difficult in the relentless darkness.

  He lay on the floor of a medium-sized room, a room inhabited by other people. He could tell by the way the room echoed and the sound of heartbeats. The place stank of piss and shit and old blood. Fear, unwashed human, and Monster. Farther away, he heard the sound of distant voices, people working, and even farther, the rattle of chains. He couldn’t metasense a thing, again, and he didn’t yet have enough nerve to try to figure out if the loss was permanent.

  He was famished but not thirsty. His body still pained him, but not badly. His juice structure hurt worse, scarred from some terrible damage. The Law, he realized. Bass had burned the Law into him while she tortured him.

  His mind, well, his mind was the worst. He found his mind filled with empty spaces and twisted places, and new voices moving into the open traces, sucking at his sanity. He tried not to think.

  “He’s waking up,” someone whispered, a male voice, stressed but friendly.

  He vaguely recalled that this wasn’t the first time he had awakened. Some people had tried to train him, or something. He fought and they fought back, all with dross. They did something to him when he fought back, punishment of some variety or other. Knocked him out cold. Several times, if his aching mind remembered correctly. Something about his waking, this time, felt different. Some form of dross pressure on him had eased. He wondered how long he had been gone. Days, maybe?

  “You can’t sleep with me,” a female voice said to him.

  “What?” Sinclair said.

  “You can’t sleep with me,” she said. Her voice was beautiful. Melodious and smooth, like silk. The voice made him feel happier just listening to it. “The General’s orders. I only need to let the Hunters sleep with me. So you can’t sleep with me.”

  “It’s all right, Cathy,” the male voice said, wonderfully gentle. “Look at him. He couldn’t anyway.”

  “No one’s going to sleep with you, Cathy,” a second male voice said, with a harsh Canadian accent. This voice was powerful, a Chimera voice, but his deep voice cracked, as if someone had shoved razors down his throat, or otherwise damaged his voice box. His voice was painful to hear.

  “Where am I? Who are you?” Sinclair said. Reflexively, he tried to look around him, but of course he had no eyes. Only darkness remained.

  “You’re in the punishment house, Crow Master Sinclair,” the first male voice said. “With the Hunters. It’s me, Newton.”

  Newton, Gilgamesh’s former student, a Hunter captive for months.

  “What’s the punishment house?” His own voice seemed normal enough.

  “It’s a part of the Founder’s Lodge complex. The Hunters run it, in the Bitterroot Mountains. Here’s where they stick all the recalcitrant Major Transforms, the ones who fight the Law,” the Chimera said. “My name’s Tarn.” Not a familiar name. In the distance, a tape started broadcasting over the loudspeakers, the umpteenth rendition of ‘I fought the law and the law won’. Now he remembered. They had played the song repeatedly while they attempted to train him.

  “Cathy Elspeth,” the female voice said. A Focus, one of the firsts. Sinclair almost panicked when he heard her voice, and then remembered. The Commander converted her many months ago into one of the good guys. Except she was here, now, captured with the Newt.

  “Elmer Nabors,” said a third male voice. Stupidly curious, he instinctively turned on his metasense. He winced in pain. Nabors was neither a Crow nor Chimera, but something else. A Sport, most likely. He found dross around Nabors, a little, and Sinclair let himself take some, and left his metasense on.

  “How did you get captured, Crow Master?” Newton said. “What horrors did Enkidu and his thugs perpetrate this time?”

  Sinclair asked for food, and as he ate, he told them the story of the prisoner exchange and his sale to Arm Bass’s pack of Hunters. “I’m pretty sure I wiped my own memories of whatever important work I’d been doing before I was captured. I do know I worked with Arm Haggerty. I don’t really know exactly why I got included in the exchange, save that somehow, the agreement allowed Amy and her crew to stay in Oregon.

  “I’d thought I would be held by the Judges, the Crow faction living in western Oregon and Washington. To insure Haggerty’s and my Barony’s good behavior. Instead, they immediately handed me over to the Hunters. Then Arm Bass – that is, Hecate – started to work me over, and when she found I’d wiped my memories, she did the rest of this to me.”

  “Can a Crow recover from such treatment?” Elspeth said. Such a beautiful voice, but her juice structure didn’t match, a ruin of accumulated damage. Old wounds, years old, overlaid by more recent wounds, half-completed healing, and still more wounds. On top of this mountain of a mess lay the Law, burned into fresh wounds and old scars.

  Punishment house was the house of the ruined Transforms. He belonged here.

  “Yes,” Sinclair said. “Slowly.” He had heard Sky’s tale of how he had lost his right ear to a bear, during a time when Sky had been so addled by low juice that he tried to seduce it. The ear took five months to grow back. The part of the story regarding the bear sounded improbable, but the older Crow had sounded quite sincere regarding the five months. Any of the other Major Transform varieties would regenerate faster, but, well, Crows.

  He still didn’t know everything Bass did to him. He knew she took his eyes and his male organs. He didn’t remember much else, but he couldn’t feel his right leg. His right arm felt funny, numb to the shoulder, and he kept imagining he now had two right arms. Bass had also beaten h
im about the head so much that his mind was foggy. Something moved in his mind, something not him. Gaps. Missing pieces. His memories of Bass haunted the empty places like a ghost.

  None of those with him made any comments. “She used pain – she has a pain touch.” She had burned him, too, over a great deal of his body.

  Still no comments.

  “What is it?” Sinclair said. “Is there something wrong?”

  “You don’t know what she did to you, then?” Newton said, his voice close to breaking. Sinclair shook his head. “I don’t know how she managed to do this to a Crow, but Hecate turned you into a Monster, Crow Master Sinclair.”

  Oh. Right. That would explain the strange feeling that he could move around with just one leg. He was now part snake. A blind, ruined snake. He knew how she did it, too. The sadistic Arm had experimented on him with injected élan and her twisted version of the Arm healing touch. From what she said as she contorted his shape, she did so to examine the limitations of Crow shape changing. He flashed back to a memory of Hecate trying and failing to grow him gills.

  The memory proved to be too much for Sinclair, and he curled up and let the world expire.

  Carol Hancock (3/12/73 – 3/14/73)

  I had lied to my people, even my family. I hoped this was just a temporary lie, but I had my doubts.

  The lie? I didn’t think we could win the war with the Hunters. Chicago was where we should have held the big fight. Hell, catching the Hunter army while they marched through the Chicago urban wilderness was practically a wet dream of mine. With what Gail and crew had gathered, plus my extras – I could have arm-twisted another dozen combat-capable Focus households into participating, and I would have had Haggerty and her crew there, as well as my nine dormant merc crews – we would have wiped Enkidu’s ass off the face of the planet.

  Of course, had I been available, Enkidu would have never marched through Chicago. He took advantage of the situation. My only hope was for me to keep my return a secret, and trick him into another risky-for-him urban assault.

  The only problem with my plan was that, with our forces depleted by the Chicago fight, he could now win an urban assault if he staged one in the next month or two unless I came up with something tricky. Well, not true. I needed a whole lot of ‘something tricky’, like conjuring hundreds of combatants from nowhere, if I wanted a chance at stopping him.

  I had said I needed some time alone to think, and off I went, leaving the family scratching their heads about my motivations. My first stop had been Milwaukee to check on my Church of the New Humanity project. In the three months since my last visit, they had made great strides toward what I wanted them to become. They all emulated the Transform lifestyle now, living in homes presided over by appointed Focuses. Following the ways of the Cause, an appointed Crow lived with them, and they had reached out and made contact with several actual Focuses, including my main Milwaukee Focus contact, Yolanda Warren, and the most ‘open minded’ of my Chicago Focuses, Gloria Frasier. To my surprise, they also found a way to make contact with the senior Milwaukee Crow, Ten Dog. Three members of the congregation had undergone voluntary transformations, and, luckily, they all survived. While I visited, in disguise, I passed along the contact information for three more local Major Transforms, Focuses Brandy McEwan and Mercedes Bailey, and Crow Snowshoe, though I would need to find a way to warn them about Snowshoe’s con man tendencies. My project’s momentum built, making me proud.

  Right now, I hunted St. Louis. Probably futile, but Mizar and my nightly activities these last few nights left me down on juice, and I wasn’t willing to cadge juice from my Focuses just to recharge from some wild sex. I might not be growing a heart of gold in my beast-ridden psyche, but I was at least regrowing some semblance of a conscience.

  I also thought I had convinced Mizar there was more to me than met the eye. Too bad my bedroom activities didn’t do anything to convince Mizar that I was anywhere near his equal as a person. In fact, showing him my sexual prowess likely knocked that issue back several steps. I probably should have left the ‘good in bed’ card in the deck for now, but, hell…Major Transform sex was fun, and I liked sex.

  My hunt had reached the Terraces, a group of older residential neighborhoods to the northwest of downtown St. Louis. Some other Arm, my guess Betsy Whetstone, had hunted St. Louis last week, hitting all the good hot spots downtown and along the waterfront. So I didn’t bother to hunt there. Instead, I followed juice traces out here in some older residential neighborhoods. One, a couple weeks old, had already been scooped up and now lived in a clinic. Another, though, fresher…

  There.

  No tag. Cruising down, um, Hunter Avenue, in a robin’s egg blue late-60s Pontiac. Two turns later and he pulled into a small but well-kept home in Velda City. I tried to get a read on him as I exited my ride and hopped up on to the roof next door. He was a black man living in a predominantly black neighborhood, in a house he shared with four others, all men by the smell. He was home early, feeling sick, my guess, from low juice. Nobody else home yet. Take him, here? Nah. Too rookie Arm, too appalling. Extraction? Yes, but how? Bamboozling him, of course, but as a white woman in a black neighborhood? That wouldn’t work.

  I did have one of my kits with me, taken from a storage room in the Branton. I roof-danced back to my vehicle, put on a police uniform, and ‘became male’. I went up to the house, knocked, talked my way in, bamboozled my prey with my charisma, cuffed him and led him back to my ride.

  Off we went. He was just a guy, nobody would miss the merely average, and he would turn psycho and kill people if someone didn’t take care of him.

  I patted my fallen prey’s head, dropped him in the grave, and then stowed the casket back on top. In broad daylight. I was tempted to stay for the funeral, but I was being cheeky already, and that would have been pushing things too much. Still, how could I resist, with St. Peters Cemetery three blocks away from my prey’s former home? I knew St. Louis well from my Chicago days, one of the places close enough to hunt when the prey got scarce in Chicago. This end of St. Louis, out St. Charles Rock Road, housed seven large cemeteries, and I had long ago mastered the art of double burials.

  Normally, hunting down my juice would leave me too horny to think, but today I would channel all that sexual energy to my mind instead of my senses. I drove back downtown, ditched my car, grabbed another, and booked an expensive room at the Hyatt with an excellent view of the Gateway Arch.

  I needed some better plans. After exercising I sat, thought, meditated, brainstormed, meditated some more, and did stretches and hotel room exercises. No miraculous war plans came into my head. I cursed the unfairness of the universe, which sneered back at me and gave me a firmly upraised middle finger. Eventually, I slept.

  In my dreams, I ran down a wide freshly tarred street, lined with faux plantation houses set back well over a hundred feet from the street. Magnolias lined the street, and fruit trees and stately live oaks clustered near the faux plantation houses. Four people chased me on foot.

  They were unlike anyone who had ever chased me before. To the standard part of my metasense, they were barely Transforms, running juice counts of less than one point. To the abnormal part of my metasense, the one that metasensed juice traces, they ran juice counts larger than mine.

  They carried short swords.

  They gained on me.

  I swiveled my eyes around to the street ahead, reacting to some unseen danger. A brontosaurus, or something like one, lumbered out of the yard of one of the faux plantation houses. It left behind a trashed house, just starting to burn. A Monster, too large to fight. I turned around as the four Transforms caught up with me. And stabbed me. As I fell, one of them, a woman, said “You used to enjoy sex with both Lori and Sky. So, why don’t you, anymore?”

  With that I woke.

  Fuck. I stood, took a pee break, and then went back to bed. I meditated my way back into the Dreaming, and there I growled to the world and the Madonna of Montreal that I didn
’t want her messing with me like that. Though ‘growled’ might be too strong a word, as I wasn’t a speaker in the Dreaming. I was pissed, though.

  “I didn’t send that dream.” I shook my head and sat down on a diaphragm case – yes, this was my normal visualization of the Dreaming, the huge bed, the oversized sex toys and accoutrements, and far too many goddamned bedbugs scurrying at my feet. The voice came from the Madonna of Montreal, or a likeness of her, as a classic Madonna statue, holding the baby Jesus in her arms. She was a speaker in the Dreaming.

  “Who did?” I signed.

  “The Man or one of his minions,” a different voice said. “Carol, I think your Dreaming scream awoke half the Dreamers in the country.” I turned to find an angel to my left, flying and hovering above a used condom. Also speaking. Gail.

  “Him? Why me?” I signed. This I didn’t need. “How can he be doing that?”

  “It’s better to ask why than how,” the Madonna said.

  There were times when I just hated the Dreaming. I silently growled in disgust and forced myself awake.

  A moment of bed thrashing later, I found myself back in the Dreaming, Gail in an angelic dominatrix outfit, and me on my hands and knees, collared. A black leather leash dangled from her right hand. I followed it with my eyes to my collar. She had found a way to yank me back into the dreaming, using our mutual tags and some sort of crazy juice trick.

  “Do you mind if I try something?” she asked. I took a moment to figure out the symbolic meaning of the leash – her tag on me. Sigh.

  “Whatever,” I signed. This was not turning into one of my better nights. I stood and glared until the leash went away. I remained collared, though, regardless.

  The Madonna remained near, shaking her iconic statue head and clucking ‘tsk tsk’ at Gail. Gail worked the juice in the Dreaming – neat trick, that – and brought in another Dreamer, an Artemis figure, complete with bow and hunting dogs. Keaton. She bowed to me, but couldn’t keep the ‘she’s yours now, so you get to deal with her insanity’ smirk off her face.