He wondered how long it would take him to learn to resist Mizar’s charisma.
Caveworm (3/19/73)
“Master,” Colonel Loess said, after he bowed to Caveworm.
Caveworm chuckled, though his ribs hurt when he did so, even after he had adjusted enough of the Law in the people who lived in and around the Hunters’ Montana HQ to get out of having to wash floors. He suspected his body wasn’t meant to last. “Why are you bowing to me?” he said, though he suspected he already knew the answer.
He didn’t have enough nerve to move from the punishment house pens, though he did range throughout the HQ during the day as he carefully made changes to the Law in all who lived here. Thus, his surprise when the eminently metasense-stealthed Colonel Loess and his small entourage came upon him in the great house kitchen. Before Caveworm’s emergency adjustment to Colonel Loess’s Law, the Hunter Tarn had been about to fight Colonel Loess to protect Caveworm, which would have been a bloody waste of Tarn’s life.
“You have mastered the Law, as Master Wandering Shade once did,” Colonel Loess said. “You are now my Master.”
There was more to Colonel Loess than Caveworm realized. “You noticed my changes this quickly?” Caveworm tilted his head toward Cathy, who quickly ushered the kitchen staff out of the kitchen.
“Yes, Master,” Loess said. “You changed so much, so fast, without needing to drop me into withdrawal. Only Master Wandering Shade ever knew that trick, and only toward the end.”
“Huh,” Caveworm said, a mental high-pitched giggle running through his mind. I’m Wandering Shade reborn! Such fun. None of the others Caveworm adjusted noticed immediately, or when they noticed later, realized the significance. Adjustments to the Law were easy; the only thing he would ever need the edge of withdrawal for was completely stripping off the Law. That wouldn’t be instant, and for the minute or so it took would be quite noticeable. “So you will serve me?”
“Of course, Master,” Colonel Loess said. “Perhaps the two of us, working together, can put an end to Enkidu’s reckless behaviors…and what I wouldn’t give for a few moments alone with Huntress Hecate…”
“You and most of the rest of the Major Transforms on the planet, at least if the Huntress is firmly tied down,” Caveworm said. He turned to Tarn. “Fetch my oatmeal and let’s go to the dining room. I’m tired of slithering on the kitchen tile.” Too many scratches and gouges from too many years of Chimeras and Monsters treating Wandering Shade’s old mountain home as their own.
At least the dining room chairs retained a little of their former comfort, though most of them had ripped seats and wobbled when you sat in them. Caveworm could partially curl up on one and mostly not fall over. If he chose the correct one.
The moving would also give Caveworm time to adjust the Law on the junior Hunter and five pack members who accompanied Colonel Loess. So far, the Law kept the junior Hunter, a generic seven foot tall vaguely man-shaped creature with what appeared to be three extra spider-limb style arms sprouting from each shoulder, from attacking Caveworm, but he suspected even the dimmest Hunter would soon realize he could legally attack Caveworm. Adjusting the Law on the junior Hunter was an absolute necessity.
“So, tell me, what brings you here to HQ?” Caveworm asked, after several bites of badly cooked oatmeal – liberally drenched in butter and honey – went down his throat. Food was a problem for him. Huntress Hecate, in her inspired sadism, had decided to place his anus in his mouth, with all the problems that entailed. The higher fiber foods came out better, in his opinion.
“I need a front party for my stealth group,” the Colonel said. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Master, I’m here to collect everyone in the punishment pens and use them as cannon fodder for the upcoming battle.”
“I don’t mind the description. It’s the truth,” Caveworm said, around a mouthful of oatmeal. “Tell me about this upcoming battle.”
Colonel Loess did, in excruciating detail. Every sentence he spoke was a sentence of death to Caveworm’s plans. To the Cause and Caveworm’s former allies as well, though Caveworm no longer considered them such a major consideration. California would fall, with the help of all of Caveworm’s new followers wasted as cannon fodder. The Hunters had too large an army, and General Enkidu pulled in every creature that could move and fight to make sure he succeeded and the enemy couldn’t escape. He wanted to back them up against the sea and force their surrender. His targets were Arms Haggerty and Webberly and their allies, and he hoped to pin down Haggerty by forcing her to defend Webberly and the pathetic Bay Area Focus households. If Colonel Loess didn’t lie, Enkidu had twice as many effectives as Haggerty’s guess, and triple as many if you counted the walking wounded from the Calgary and Chicago fights. And Colonel Loess couldn’t lie, not about this, not under the Law.
Even the dining room smelled of carrion. Caveworm’s intention before Enkidu decided to lay his claims on Caveworm’s people was to convert anyone who came to HQ to the new Law. Remove the ‘True Law’ – the utterly mindless horror Huntress Hecate inflicted on her Transform and Monster underlings – from any who possessed it. Gather his new loyal Law-abiding subjects and wait for General Enkidu to show. Convert General Enkidu to the light and then head north, away from Civilization. The Law yearned for the high arctic, where beasts could be beasts and Monsters could be Monsters. Prepare to run like hell in the unlikely event that Huntress Hecate disobeyed the General’s banishment of her from his Montana headquarters.
Though if Colonel Loess’s stories and the information Caveworm pulled from Wandering Shade’s formerly defunct spy network were correct, Huntress Hecate often found a way to disobey the General’s orders. Despite the Law. Very worrisome, especially to someone who remained, as far as temperament went, still a Crow.
“You appear perturbed, Master Caveworm,” Colonel Loess said, as Caveworm digested the Colonel’s appalling information. “What can I do to help?”
“Help me think,” Caveworm said. “That is, if you still can think.”
Colonel Loess bowed his head. Caveworm decided he could get used to this. It certainly beat torture and janitorial duty. “What bothers you, Master?” Colonel Loess asked.
“I don’t want this war. It’s a waste of lives.”
Hunter Tarn set a plate of steaming beef in front of Colonel Loess. Body temperature, but it steamed because nobody bothered to heat the HQ building, even in winter. The air in the house remained just above freezing. “We must obey the General, Master.”
Caveworm sighed, which to him sounded far more like a whine than a sigh. The Law placed the Hunters’ General in charge of matters of war and peace, something Caveworm couldn’t change until he got the General in his clutches. Which appeared to be most unlikely, now. “I agree. And if you challenged the General?”
“He would defeat me. As he has before.”
Unfortunately expected. Caveworm, even as Master of the Law, couldn’t change by fiat who led the Hunters. Well, not without cheating. Colonel Loess couldn’t challenge General Enkidu, win, and become the new General. He wasn’t powerful enough. Caveworm doubted he could make Colonel Loess powerful enough quickly enough to stop this stupid war, unfortunately.
“Could you simply report your inability to gather your cannon fodder?”
“If I did, the General would be forced to question me, to examine me. I would be forced to reveal your existence as the Master of the Law. I might no longer be trusted.”
Caveworm translated this to mean that if Colonel Loess showed up without his cannon fodder and disobeying the General, he would show himself to be outside the Law. The General could then kill Colonel Loess, or, more likely, burn the old Enkidu-style Law back on him the hard way, through withdrawal imprinting. Which would get Caveworm nowhere.
“And if you just stayed here with me?”
“When I didn’t show, the General would investigate. The Pack Mistresses would tell him the truth, and we would be attacked.” And they would lose. There wa
s a reason the General ordered Colonel Loess here to collect the remainders here for use as cannon fodder. They were, alas, nothing more than cannon fodder.
Caveworm would have put his head in his hands and moaned, if he had anything resembling a normal head, a normal neck or normal arms and hands. Doomed! Again! After putting together a relatively safe and foolproof plan. After successfully taking over Enkidu’s own HQ. Would nothing ever work right?
“There may be another way, Master Caveworm,” Colonel Loess said. “You may need to do what Master Wandering Shade intended to do if he won his Detroit battle.”
Colonel Loess’s words shivered a dormant piece of the Law. If Caveworm possessed eyes, they would have opened wide. “Oh!” This piece of the Law appeared to be nonsense, a flaw, a piece of badly designed nonsense at that. Not the first such bit of the Law. Untrue. This was something else entirely.
It was ‘leader of all Chimeras’. A position sitting right there in the Law, waiting for use.
“I can’t stay here if I take this option,” Caveworm said. Leader of all Chimeras. That might include the Nobles as well as the Hunters. The thought appealed.
“No, Master Caveworm, you can’t. You will need to prove yourself in battle, or at least your troops will need to prove themselves in battle. If I may be so bold to make a suggestion, Master, I know of the perfect target. Huntress Hecate.” Who Colonel Loess appeared to hate and distrust as much as Caveworm did, as evidenced by the aggressive way he cut into his slice of raw cow as he spoke of her.
Perfect. “Her repeated failures and her ‘True Law’ perversions show her to be an apostate,” Caveworm said, casually repeating what numerous Hunters and pack alphas of the anti-Hecate faction had told him. “She must be destroyed.” He took another bite of honey flavored buttery-soupy oatmeal. “To make this work, you’ll need to tell the General of my ascension in person.”
“I will serve you, Master, however you desire,” Colonel Loess said. “But wouldn’t you be safer with me by your side?”
“Safer from Huntress Hecate? Yes,” Caveworm said. “From the General? No. You need to fight my people, here, and lose. Let us revolt and run. I’m sure we can come up with some cannon fodder for you to take back.” He had a few of the appalling pack members who served as prison guards he would be perfectly willing to send away. “Tell him a truth, not the truth. A truth that will keep you from his close examination. A truth that will allow you to report to me on the General’s doings, and that of Huntress Hecate.”
Colonel Loess nodded. “I can do that, Master. But this won’t stop the war you want to stop. Your former acquaintances will still die, or become part of the Hunter Empire.”
Caveworm did chortle at this. “Think of what they’ll owe me, as Emperor, when I free them afterwards. Peace in our time, forever!”
That was worth a mad guffaw or two. He merely needed to somehow destroy Huntress Hecate. Or at least chase her out of the Hunter Empire. And survive doing so.
Becoming Emperor Caveworm was going to take a lot of honey and oatmeal. And his participation in a battle that would likely kill quite a few of his former friends.
Part Two
Do You Know The Way To San Jose?
“Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.” – Stefan Zweig
“We’re Focus Rickenbach’s wedding party.”
Carol Hancock (3/19/73)
“This is a fucking disaster,” Sky said, picking up a knock-off Ming vase, twirling it in his hands and setting it back down. “And I don’t just mean this place, either.”
I didn’t have any problem with this place. The house in Santa Cruz where we stayed was only a rental, but the media mogul who owned it had been quite flattered to rent it out to an ‘unknown Arm’ in return for a two hour taped interview some number of months in the future. He agreed after less than a minute of Arm predator. He would get his interview, but he wouldn’t be telling anyone my location until after the interview. Exclusivity and all that.
I had come a long way from my days of beating up mistresses and locking them in the wine cellar. Sky did have a point about the rental’s interior decorating scheme, though. It showed no personal touches at all, making me suspect they hired an interior decorating firm and ordered them to fill the place with expensive kitsch. For one thing, I suspected I was the first one to ever use the immaculately shiny copper pots hanging over the kitchen island.
I grunted to Sky and motioned for him to continue. He did, after conjuring up a dross illusion of a baseball bat and taking a fake swing at the faux Ming vase. “Tell me again why we aren’t back in Chicago, putting Gail and Gilgamesh’s far more usable army back together. Or tell me why Enkidu didn’t just rumble through this place, first, before hitting Chicago. Nobody here could have stopped him.”
“If he had, he would have faced at least twice as many opponents in Chicago,” Lori said. “The Calgary attack was terrifying, but since it was in Canada, not the US, it didn’t get anywhere near the press coverage required to cause a real panic. Wiping this place out first would have panicked all the Focuses into cooperating.”
“Uh huh,” I said. “I made some phone calls, and I can tell you, there’s a lot of panic out there among the Focuses because of Chicago. Give me another month and I’ll have the overwhelming army you want, Sky. Unfortunately, we don’t have the necessary month.” I settled myself on the black leather living room sofa. It crinkled under my weight. The problem with Focuses and armies was that it took time to organize a group of Focuses into a cooperative unit. Most households held only a few people worth recruiting for a fight, and prying them loose was always a political nightmare. “We’ve all looked at this area, now.” And revealed ourselves to only a few. “What strengths and weaknesses do you see?”
Mizar lay down across the shag carpet, in front of the gas fireplace and its ornate carved wrought iron ‘logs’. “Not counting Haggerty’s mobile force, there are only two Nobles in the entire state of California, and none in any adjoining states. And of those two, one is a recently converted Hunter. Sky is correct. The Chicago remnants, pathetic as they are, are better than what’s out here.”
I felt better about Mizar. He wasn’t giving me any flack at all, and had quit with the shocked looks every time I showed any form of competence. In fact, now that I thought about it, his newfound trust in my leadership started about the time that we engaged in beastly Arm sex back in the Branton. It figured. Of all my actions, the one that changed his attitude the most was when I turned out to be good at sex.
A good lover and useful in a fight. Pretty good qualifications for a man, when you get right down to it. Maybe we would get this to work. Maybe. Now all I needed to do was figure out how to make proper use of him.
“The best fighting Focus households are in Los Angeles,” Lori said. “Mostly the Latino ones, the ones who got on best with Stacy and traded for training.” Keaton, fluent in Spanish, won them over early in her tenure as boss Arm of Los Angeles. “Council Focus Rodriguez, for one, is a good enough Focus that I couldn’t hide from her. The non-Latino LA Focuses are, well, a different story. There’s a lot of them, only a few have decently trained household fighters, and they’re well factionalized. Quite a few Focuses don’t speak with each other, ever.”
I nodded and turned to Sky. Sky shook his head. “You want dross art, you’re in the right place. My sort of Crow? Wrong place. I did manage to figure out that Guru Chevalier and Focus Pitre are now an official item. If you care. Which I don’t.” Sky still disliked Chevalier, even after the ancient Crow became a supporter of the Cause.
“That’s interesting,” I said. I watched ocean waves crash into the shore, a quarter mile away and a hundred feet down from our rental. “Too bad Pitre’s still a basket case. Anything else?”
“Something’s happened up north, in Oregon,” Sky said. He took a carved wooden eagle off a couch-back table, leapt to the table top, a
nd posed in the same position as the eagle. Sky was bored. “It’s got all the Crows agitated and for the most part hiding out and keeping their heads down, far more than normal for the Crows out here.”
“Work on figuring out what happened,” I said, to Sky. A bit of detective work would cure his boredom. “Rose Webberly’s currently the only Arm in the area. Hell, she’s the only Arm currently holding a territory on this side of the Mississippi. Los Angeles is Duval’s official territory, but she’s out east with the Arm pack. It’s Webberly’s Focuses, such as they are, that we’re going to be counting on for fighting and logistics.” I rattled off the official troop numbers, based on the local allied Focus households, drawing a groan even from Lori. This was bleak, far worse than any of us imagined.
“So, people, let’s brainstorm,” I said. “We need to pull some rabbits out of some hats, here, and we need to be able to do it fast if we’re going to be doing anything useful.” Otherwise, it was time to evacuate the Focuses.
We talked. Time passed. I paced. “The Stone Point Barony’s too rural for a staged fight,” Sky said, about twenty minutes in. “I know it’s close to the Bay Area suburbs, but it would be trivial for Enkidu to play the same sort of maneuver games he played during the Clearing of Chicago fracas and cut us to ribbons if we concentrated up there.”
“Uh huh,” I said. “I’d love to stage the fight in San Francisco proper, but it’s too expensive a place for any Focus to live. I haven’t been able to think up any reason why the Focuses might suddenly move there.”
“We could pay them. Bribe them,” Sky said.
“With what money? Nearly all my remaining cash supply is allocated to flying the remnants of the Chicago army here.” Our best trick so far, if you can count something as obvious as that as a ‘trick’. “Remember, we’re trying not to telegraph ‘the Commander is here’ to Enkidu.” I needed to play my sudden return for all it was worth. We didn’t have much else left in reserve. “Things need to look natural, or mostly so.”
An Age Without A Name (The Cause Book 5) Page 20