Tonya knitted, politely feigning paying attention. Nothing new here for her.
After he finished, he sat in a back corner of the room and attempted to relax. At least Polly hadn’t opened up the floor for questions. The questions would come later, and he didn’t look forward to it. Focus charisma, especially when Council Focuses in numbers worked together, was unstoppable, at least in his experience.
Polly waved Sky to the podium, and Sky ambled up. At the last instant he dropped his disguise.
“I’m not actually one of Focus Keistermann’s bodyguards,” Sky said, making no attempt to disguise his French Canadian accent. “This is a disguise.” The stocky-framed Crow, disguised as one of Keistermann’s Transform bodyguards, had today a shaved head, fake tattoos, a fake beer belly and an ill-fitting caterer’s uniform. “I’m actually a Crow, going by the name of Sky. I’m here for two purposes, mademoiselle Foyers. The first is to let you examine me and let you establish that I am indeed real, and indeed a Major Transform. Just in case you had any doubts. The second is to tell you that someone or something has been killing Crows, the same way someone or something has been kidnapping and killing household Transforms and the occasional Focus. The attacks started at the same time, and we Crows didn’t know who or what was doing the attacks. Understand, it is very difficult to sneak up on a Crow. The people behind these kidnappings and killings turned out to be the Hunter Chimeras and their backer, who we have named Rogue Crow.”
Sky told them the basics of Crows and dross, and how Crows lived at the fringes of society. He explained Crow skittishness, and how he was not at all comfortable being out in public like this, how he would rather be hiding somewhere. “Just like the Focus instincts are to move juice, the Crow instincts are to hide and watch – and help, if we can and it’s safe,” he said. “The threat to Crows is ongoing; as we speak, some friends of mine are attempting to find and rescue the recently kidnapped Crow who discovered that the Hunters and Rogue Crow were behind the killings.”
“They got Gilgamesh!” Tonya said, breaking decorum. Hank smiled. He hadn’t realized Tonya had joined the ever-growing Gilgamesh fan club.
After Sky finished, the Focuses examined him and asked numerous questions about his metasense, before Polly led the other three Focuses to their meeting room. The rest of them lingered in a corner of the huge dining hall, including Sky, Zielinski, and the occasional Inferno guard. The alehouse wasn’t open, unfortunately. Some good German ale and sauerbraten would have done wonders for his nerves.
The Focuses talked for hours, into the night, occasionally calling one of the two non-Focus presenters into their room for more questions. Sky even got to explain and show the Focuses some Crow dross art. Apparently, the Council Focuses had a hard time understanding the mindset of Major Transforms who ignored the real world in favor of endless philosophical arguments, creative activities, and manipulating dross just to make beautiful things.
A couple of times, the four Council Focuses called in Focus Rizzari; information on Cloud’s birth (and presence at this meeting, as Lori didn’t let Cloud out of her sight) had made the rounds, and the Council Focuses, archetypically feminine, wanted to ogle the baby. In the meantime, Sky talked to Zielinski about the goings on in Inferno.
The meeting finally broke up about a quarter past ten. Polly led Focus Bentlow off, likely to twist her arm some more. Focus Webb came up and thanked them, and told them they could count on her support. Focus Biggioni came by and wanted to talk. Sky couldn’t handle it, and skittered away.
“What’s with Sky?” Tonya said, cornering Hank behind the podium. The few overhead lights in the room gave a harsh light, insufficient to hold back the darkness outside.
“Crows find certain Focuses difficult to deal with. It almost seems proportional to their political power.”
“So he can handle us as a group, but not individually,” she said. “That’s a strange quirk.”
“He does like to have an audience, and the more the merrier,” he said. Tonya sighed. “Anything you can tell me about how things are shaking out?”
“Well, Focus Bentlow thinks we’ve just committed suicide; by taking this public we’ve all signed our own death warrants. She hasn’t decided what to do about it, though. It’s pretty clear she’s had contacts with Crows before, but refuses to say anything. The reason she got invited was because Polly and I already knew she had no doubts about the existence of male Major Transforms. The only question is whether she’ll support us in the Council meeting in March. I hope Polly can lean on her enough to get her support. We’re going to have to push a bunch of this through the Focus Council without unanimity.” Tonya’s face turned grim. She expected a nasty political fight. “Any word on Gilgamesh?”
“Not yet. Carol should be in Dallas by now, but we haven’t heard anything since we started this morning.”
“I want the details,” Tonya said. “How do you sneak up on a Crow, anyway?”
“It takes senior Crow tricks, and now that they’ve been used a few times, those tricks appear to be crawling out of the woodwork on a regular basis,” Hank said. He wondered if, when all of this ended, there would be any Crows left still willing to show their faces to other Transforms. “Not too long ago Carol got warned she had a Crow spy inside her operation.” Hank told her the story.
Tonya frowned. “This nonsense has to be stopped. Now,” she said. “We’re too few in number, and if the world learns about the true capabilities of the Transforms, they’ll kill us all to save themselves.”
Hank nodded in agreement, filled with despair. “I know this all too well.”
Chapter 5
“It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles.
Then the victory is yours.
It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.”
– The Buddha
Gilgamesh: January 27th, 1969
Gilgamesh woke again as Echo’s car stopped. He feigned unconsciousness and waited as Echo left the car. Minutes passed. When Echo returned he had another person with him; they dragged Gilgamesh out of the car then hoisted him, head and feet, into a building.
“Your attitude is most enlightening, Guru Arpeggio,” Echo said, after he unceremoniously dropped Gilgamesh’s feet down to a rough carpeted floor. The other person who carried him placed Gilgamesh’s head and shoulders down more carefully. “You had no trouble with my reports.”
“Espionage is one thing, kidnapping is another,” the other man said. His voice was firm and confident, almost musical. An exquisite voice. This had to be Arpeggio himself; Hephaestus had mentioned the quality of Arpeggio’s voice to Gilgamesh several times. The older Guru’s earlier anger, evident over the telephone, had vanished. “I needed your information to keep track of Tiamat’s doings and protect Hephaestus. I had no need for this.”
“Feel free to make it right, if you want,” Echo said, smarmy. “If you’re smart, you’ll kill him and dump his body somewhere non-incriminating. Say, Kansas City. Tiamat’s not going to take this sitting down, and you won’t be able to reason with her. They’re lovers, of all the appalling things.”
“As you’ve said many times,” Arpeggio said, exasperated. “Please leave.”
“I shall, and thank you kindly for your down payment, Guru Arpeggio.” Echo stepped away. A door closed.
“You saw?” Arpeggio said. Not to Gilgamesh, who remained bound and gagged.
“Of course,” another voice rang out. Chevalier, Gilgamesh recognized. “Kindest Arpeggio, I am beyond disgusted, and take no responsibility for Echo’s action.”
“Some responsibility has found you nevertheless, as you sent Echo to Houston.” Thomas the Dreamer! What was this, a senior Crow moot? Gilgamesh thrashed, trying unsuccessfully to free himself. “Would you do me a favor, kind Arpeggio, and free our young charge? He is blameless.”
“If I must,” Arpeggio said. He walked over and knelt beside Gilgamesh. “You’ll behave?”
; The question was to him. Gilgamesh nodded, not sure what he would be able to do that might count as misbehavior, given his current lack of juice. Arpeggio cut the ropes binding him and removed his gag and blindfold. Gilgamesh blinked his eyes open and winced in pain. Low juice. No dross. He sat up, slowly, and boggled at the tableau in front of him.
Arpeggio’s house was a funhouse riot of images and illusions. Ostensibly, Gilgamesh sat in the front room of a normal ranch house, Texas style, complete with a limestone rock fireplace, a long-horned bovine skull above the mantle, and cowboy boots with spurs beside it, mounted on the wall. The windows, though, showed a moonscape.
Arpeggio had four large pictures mounted on the wall to the right of the fireplace. One showed a moving Chevalier, the next a moving Thomas the Dreamer. Chevalier appeared to be in his San Francisco studio back room, where Gilgamesh had visited him once, while Thomas sat in his rocker in his illusion-filled cabin. As always, Gilgamesh couldn’t make out Thomas’s face. The other two pictures showed still lives, one a quaint painting of a schoolboy in a blue beret, done in the style of the Roaring Twenties; the other a still life showing a desolate winter scene.
Gilgamesh made the obvious connections: Innocence and Snow. These other two most senior Crows must have been busy, or perhaps not invited.
Arpeggio looked much like Hephaestus’s statue of him, the young rugged and stern frontiersman. What Hephaestus’s statue didn’t convey was the force of Arpeggio’s presence, which dwarfed that of any Major Transform Gilgamesh had ever met. Gilgamesh had trouble thinking here.
“Espionage is perfectly acceptable,” Chevalier said. He turned to Gilgamesh. “I like our young Gilgamesh; he has spirit and inventiveness. I don’t trust his choice of companions and friends, though.”
Thomas the Dreamer sighed. “You were keeping tabs on him so you would be able to swoop down, rescue him someday and steal him away from Shadow, weren’t you?”
“Also perfectly acceptable, if done without coercion,” Chevalier said. “Gilgamesh, you are wasted being a Crow of action.” Chevalier made the word ‘action’ sound like something foul. “You would make a wonderful architect or interior designer, especially with your ability to place dross effects into physical objects. With my contacts, I could help you beyond your wildest dreams. I could make you a star.”
Gilgamesh shrugged. Right now, he didn’t want to be a star, he wanted a phone. He needed to stop Carol before she came in here with guns blazing. That is, assuming she was able to find him. However, if she couldn’t, he suspected Lori would be able to, at least up to the point where he entered Arpeggio’s lair.
“Yes, and I wish he would go back to being a writer and philosopher,” Thomas the Dreamer said. “But that’s neither here nor there. The problem I’m called upon to judge is simple: Echo’s actions.”
“I’ll save you the trouble,” Chevalier said. “I formally denounce Echo’s actions and remove my support from him. He is no longer a student of mine, I am no longer his Guru. If you wish to ask for my permission for more stringent actions, I will support your request as well. I’ll even pay kind Arpeggio back for the ransom payment Echo extorted from him. I…”
Arpeggio narrowed his already narrow-slitted eyes, and his house came alive, re-arranging itself into what appeared to be a castle interior. The moonscape vanished, replaced by a wooded outdoors scene of a Texas ranch in winter. “I don’t know what just happened out there, but I don’t like it. I have a bad feeling this is connected to some recent mundane harassment I’ve suffered with my telephone service, though.”
“Worse, much worse. I believe Echo has fallen to a greater evil,” Thomas said. “This is unprecedented; one of us, or another Crow working as we do, is advancing upon your home in great anger, kind Arpeggio.”
Arpeggio tensed, uncertain and confused. He looked carefully at Gilgamesh for a moment, before dismissing whatever thought he had.
“Two Beast Men are with him, although he’s trying to hide them, as are nine dross-enslaved and enhanced normal men,” Chevalier said.
“I can’t sense any of this,” Arpeggio said. His stern face grew sterner and he began to whistle a tune. As he whistled dross organized around him, the sort of high-end dross work Gilgamesh never understood when Shadow did it.
“If this enemy has found a way to mask from you, then you must flee,” Chevalier said.
“It would be prudent to avoid a conflict of deeds,” Thomas the Dreamer said. “Such activities at this point in time might shatter our necessary consensus.”
Thomas’s words brought tears to Gilgamesh’s eyes. Whatever the words ‘conflict of deeds’ and ‘necessary consensus’ meant, they were both filled with juice and echoed deep into Gilgamesh’s soul.
“Never,” Arpeggio said. The whistled tune kept on playing on its own. “Whoever this fool is who thinks he can hide from me is about to learn the hard way that facing one of us in our home is utter idiocy.”
“I am sure Shadow thought the same,” Thomas said, gently.
“He is not one of us.”
Gilgamesh shivered to hear that. He thought Shadow a Guru of Gurus. Apparently not.
“Only politics prevents that from being true,” Chevalier said. “And despite our many differences, whatever happened to him was not right. I do not wish to see anything similar happen to you as well, kind Arpeggio.”
“It will not,” Arpeggio said. “I am not as forgiving as our missing friend, nor as tolerant of this manner of aggressive stupidity.”
Pound pound pound on the door. Arpeggio began to whistle again. Pound pound pound.
The door opened of its own accord to show three lawmen.
Carol Hancock: January 27th, 1969
“No, I can’t tell,” Lori said. “He’s vanished.”
Dead or protected, then. “I’m going to talk to Arpeggio, or attempt to. Keep this to yourself for now.” My feet itched to pace and I shifted from one foot to the other, constrained by the cord of the pay phone behind the Mobil station.
“Yes,” Lori said. I heard the worry in her voice. “Move quickly.”
“I will.” I hung up and headed back to my car, waving orders to the two dozen thugs from my Dallas thug collection to follow.
According to Hephaestus, Arpeggio lived on a ranch on the outskirts of a town by the name of Midlothian, which wasn’t yet a Dallas suburb but was thinking about it hard. The thug caravan followed. I wished I had more muscle with me. Lori. Inferno. Keaton. Sky. Dammit, even Tonya and her private household army. All I had was Guru Hephaestus. He had the muscle but not the inclination for a job like this.
“Do you do this often, ma’am?”
“Do what often?” I passed a semi doing 70 in the right lane. I was doing about 85 and wishing I could go faster, but the rest of the drivers in my caravan weren’t up for Arm speeds.
“Disguise yourself as a man. It’s perfect.”
It was supposed to be perfect. “It’s a job necessity,” I said. In a man’s voice. I had changed before I collected my thugs. My traveling kit contained all the necessary clothes and makeup.
“I can’t believe Arpeggio is Rogue Crow, ma’am,” he said.
Ah. That worry. “I understand your point, but if he is, this would be a huge discovery, one that would change the contest,” I said. The other senior Crows would turn on him.
“If he is, Gilgamesh is doomed,” Hephaestus said.
He meant ‘I am doomed’. “I might be as well,” I said.
I considered the risk. I had faced Rogue Crow once before, as a barely graduated real Arm, and lived. I couldn’t out power a Crow of his talents, but might be able to out-think him. He had stopped me for a moment in the Chicago espionage mission, but Sky freed me from whatever Rogue Crow did to me to hold me in place. Would Hephaestus be able to do the same? My life likely rode on that bet. Rogue Crow had also arranged my takedown, earlier in Chicago, with an army of police and FBI agents, but they had me surrounded before I started fighting. There would be
none of that this time.
“How well can you metasense normals?” I said.
“Not at all.”
“Normals with dross or juice tricks on them?”
“If they have juice patterns or dross constructs enhancing them or protecting them, I’ll be able to pick them out. Not to disparage Gilgamesh, but, ma’am, none of the Crows who were killed or kidnapped were Gurus. We’re trained to protect ourselves.”
“I’d feel a lot more confident if something similar hadn’t happened to Shadow,” I said. Shadow’s fall bothered me more than a little. In my mind, Shadow had been the rock all of us could anchor to: powerful, immobile, and invulnerable. That someone had been able to get to him changed all my calculations.
Hephaestus nodded. Panic surrounded him like a caul, but he hadn’t given in. So far.
“There. Stop.”
I pulled to a stop along the side of the two lane road country highway, as did my thug entourage. Hephaestus got out of my car and focused his metasense ahead through the wild Texas scrub. “There are Transforms under dross construct protections at Arpeggio’s front door. Nine normals with dross constructs on them are cautiously heading this way.”
Prudence dictated I share Hephaestus’s metasense and examine this myself, to understand the tactical situation. The Arm instincts in me wanted to charge, on foot, from five miles away. I chose a third way, barking out a predatory order: “In! In!” Hepahestus obeyed without thinking. I stuck my left hand out the car window and waved my thug caravan forward.
I led the way in my car.
“Ma’am?”
“Speed, Hephaestus. Speed.” Speed would double the effective power of my small fighting force. “We need to close with the normals, and fast.” He didn’t look happy. “I’ll let you out before the fighting starts.”
“No,” he said.
All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) Page 17