“Ma’am,” Keaton said. Oh, how I still liked to hear Keaton say that word. As far as I could tell, she was being the perfect underling, not a smidge of disloyalty, not an ounce of independent agenda. And if you believed that, I had some land in Florida you might want to buy…when the tide was low. “Julius owned a private army of Marine veterans, ex-Navy SEALs, and turned gangsters. All normals. She used them mostly for the threat value, as mercenaries for hire, as well as to acquire money the old fashioned way.” Theft, that is. “When we took her, her group was overseas on a job, in Sierra Leone, and due back within a week. They never showed. Before the Patterson attack, I took precautions to make sure they couldn’t get to her. Unfortunately, by the time I’d recovered from the Patterson attack, they got her and Julius was gone.”
I put the problem on my mental list, but it didn’t sound like an emergency. Tonya went through the rest of the first Focus list, and save for Elspeth, they were all nicely accounted for.
“You’re president of the Council these days?”
Tonya nodded. “Gail’s the Midwest region rep, Pearl Innkeep is the South region rep, Flo Ackermann is the East region rep, Thelma’s an at-large rep and the rest haven’t changed. Outside of the Midwest, the positions are temporary appointments, but we’ll hopefully make them official after the conflict with the Hunters is over.”
“Then what’s the problem, Tonya? Why the jitters?”
“The UFA membership is down to only about fifty-five percent of the American Focuses. About a quarter of the list are either dead, vanished, or openly state that they’re part of the Hunter Empire. The other twenty percent can be considered to be independent at the moment.”
“Openly part of the Hunter Empire?”
Tonya nodded. “Subjects, not as Pack Mistresses but as normal Focuses who obey the local Hunter camp. All in the old West Region.” That is, west of the Mississippi.
Not good. This went right along with my analysis of the Chicago fight. I turned to Shadow.
“Crows?”
“We have less than two dozen Crows actively aiding the Cause at the moment,” Shadow said. “Of that two dozen, half are, um, Gurus, including all the senior Crows except Jester and Snow.”
“Jester?” I didn’t worry about Snow. He and I had been passing each other information for years, surreptitiously using inter-office memos in long-haul trucking firms. He detested and feared several of the Arms, including Keaton, Bass and Billington, and his fears had proven correct about the first two. He supported the Cause, though not publically.
“A western senior Crow of dubious reputation.”
“The Crows are terrified we can’t protect them,” I said. “Same for the Focuses in the Hunter Empire.”
Shadow nodded.
“The Nobles?”
“Decapitated. With Duke Hoskins and Count Dowling stuck behind enemy lines and the death of Earl Sellers, the Nobles no longer have anyone to speak for them, or the numbers for military action. In addition to the Chicago losses, the Hunters also destroyed the Diamond Barony, in the Ozarks, taking the lot of them captive.” I hadn’t heard. Not good news. “The Borealis, White Mountain, Fog and Iron Mountain Baronies took it on the chin here in the Chicago fight.”
Worthless. They had well over half of all the Nobles here in Chicago and still couldn’t grab a decisive victory over the Hunters. I turned to Keaton. “What about the Arms?”
“Ma’am, shouldn’t you be asking Gail that question?”
“I already have, but I value your opinion as well,” I said. Keaton nodded. Gail lost control of the Arms almost immediately, though I wasn’t sure she realized. Save for Keaton and Armenigar, the latter definitely more an ally than an underling, the Arms worked under Haggerty’s orders.
“You know about myself,” Keaton said. “Arms Haggerty and Sokolnik are in Hunter territory, only sporadically in contact with anyone, and currently lead the fight against the Hunters. Arms Sibrian, Billington, Bartlett, Whetstone and Kent are mobile, working as a group, and primarily based out of Memphis. They proved invaluable during the Chicago fights. The rest of the time, they’re patrolling and protecting a swath of land along the Mississippi from St. Louis down to New Orleans. This bright idea of Haggerty’s,” which Keaton didn’t agree with, “is to reduce the Hunter infestations east of the Mississippi and to protect the large concentrations of Focuses in the Memphis and New Orleans areas. So far, it’s working, but only because the Hunters haven’t made any large pushes there.
“Armenigar, along with Debardelaben and Duval, are here in the Chicago area. She’s so worked up about the Hunters that she’s been willing to take my orders, Gilgamesh’s orders and Gail’s orders without the least amount of pushback.”
“Armenigar’s here? Whole?”
“In a wheelchair or riding on a Noble or Monster. Her fighting capabilities are perhaps as good as Sibrian’s at the moment,” Keaton said. She didn’t grind her teeth, meaning she and Armenigar had a half tag arrangement or something equally minimal. I looked, and couldn’t see any Armenigar tags on her, so the tagging had to be the other way. Keaton’s control was excellent, given the circumstances.
My former boss impressed me. Keaton was now, if anything, harder than before. I would hate to be under her now, as I saw very little tolerance in her. However, her peer-to-peer tolerance for other Major Transforms was much higher, and I could tell her basement was empty. I also had decided that I really approved of her new “I’m too sexy for words but you can’t touch” demeanor – it gave her an edge she had lacked for years.
“Bass is on the other side, now, using the name Huntress Hecate and very active. Watch out for her. Last month, she grabbed a new Arm out of Indianapolis two hours before we were able to do the snatch.” Not good news. “Webberly holds the Bay Area in California, and according to Hank, has successfully gotten the four Major Transform household idea to work. She, Focus O’Donnell, Crow Master Zero and Count Dowling. She has the Arm students under her control, and Arm Maynard as her major local ally.”
Finally, a success. I had sensed something going on in their household in the Dreaming, but until Keaton described it, I hadn’t known what. They would be Enkidu’s next target, simply because of their success. It wasn’t as if we had any other successes for him to go after.
I nodded.
“You should note, ma’am, that the Canadian contingent includes the Madonna of Montreal, she’s mastered juice music, and she’s pulling her weight as a senior Focus for the first time.” I glanced at Tonya, who nodded, worry on her face. “She, too, is fixated on the Hunters.” Amazing. An official warning about a serious problem by Keaton, as an underling. I liked.
“Okay. I think it’s time for you to meet Mizar, the new member of my family,” I said.
---
“I’m sorry, Gilgamesh,” I said. Mizar had shredded my poor Crow’s delusions that the Chicago fights were a win. “But Mizar’s right. Chicago was a win for Enkidu.”
“Could you explain that, Commander?” Tonya asked. We had commandeered the trashed-out Branton dining room as our war room. There were that many of us, including two I hadn’t invited – Crow Rumor and Focus Tillie Martin. Rumor, by what he showed in my metasense, had converted to the Cause and thus believed he had to be here. Martin? All ears and closed mouth, the young but supremely talented Focus was doing a Gail and grabbing for a seat at the big table. I liked what I saw in her, and made a mental note to add her to my family as soon as we got a spare moment to breathe. I didn’t understand what I metasensed about her juice tricks, but they appeared to be both powerful and non-standard, and thus worthy of study. Later.
I had hoped for a quicker start to the meeting, but got held up by Mizar and Armenigar going ‘wowza’ at each other for a half hour. The meeting between them had the feel of a reunion of an old divorced couple who managed to stay friends because of the distance. I found I didn’t like the idea of the two of them together at all. Flaming, outrageous jealousy, so intense it was obviously irrat
ional. Mizar was mine.
I did my best to ignore my impulses and spent the time while those two were exchanging war stories in a nowhere discussion with the Madonna of Montreal. Dueling hubris, friendly and in agreement on the ends, but no agreement at all on the means. She counseled for a defensive struggle; despite the obvious, she remained convinced the Hunters destroyed themselves for us. She was, as advertised, so loaded down with juice patterns that not only couldn’t I metasense her, I couldn’t see her, smell her or hear her real self. Everything was an illusion. The only thing I could sense about her was a feeling of immense exhaustion.
I still couldn’t figure out what and how she did to me what she always did, even in the Dreaming. This wasn’t any form of juice or dross manipulation. Nor did she give me orders or throw her weight around senior Focus style. More like she was taking sides in those internal discussions that everyone always has. Quite flexibly as well.
“Don’t worry, cherié,” she said, when I pressed her on the subject. “You’ll understand when the time is right.” She patted my hand, or at least my normal senses told me she patted my hand. “You’re only starting to understand the Dreaming. You won’t stop learning for a long time. You’re my heir, did you know? You and Gail and Lori.”
Her comment made my nerves itch. She played so many games, and moved so many people around like chess pieces on her chessboard.
I tried to get her to explain. I would have had better luck talking to the wind.
“At your service,” I said to Tonya, regarding her request for an explanation. Right. I put down my paper plate of sauerbraten remains and gave Tonya the attention she deserved as Council President. “Chicago was a victory for you, but Enkidu isn’t fighting the same war that you are, so it was a victory for him, as well.” An appallingly decisive one, too, in my book. “You’re thinking in terms of territories and armies, while he’s thinking ideology and causes. To him, this is an ideological struggle against our form of civilization. To win, all he needs to do is survive as he attrits us away. The fact that he didn’t succeed in all his battle aims in Chicago doesn’t make this a loss for him. Eventually, when we’re reduced to just the Arms and the witch Focuses, he’ll pin us down, turn the normals against us, and destroy us.” The latter was what we most needed to avoid. A thousand normals wouldn’t bother us. Ten thousand we would most likely lose to, especially if they could hit us with artillery and air power. Fifty thousand – say, a single Army division – and the term ‘road kill’ came to mind.
“His strategy can’t fail unless we change the rules of the game,” Mizar said. He kept close to me and I could sense him attempting to read my mind. I wondered what odd thoughts rattled through his head. For someone who lived in a cave for the last ten years, we had hit him with many nasty adjustments in the past several days.
I had been eying him a lot since we left Calgary. He was my best surprise for this coming fight, and I needed to figure out how to use him. This would be a challenge. Anne-Marie seemed to think I needed a powerful Chimera to counter my Chimera enemies, and I believed her, but I didn’t have a fucking hint of how. I knew too little about Chimeras. It didn’t help that Mizar wasn’t army officer material, not in the slightest.
I remembered how badly the Focuses and Crows had screwed up, years ago, because they knew too little about the Arms. I wouldn’t make the same mistake with the Chimeras. I had a hell of a lot I needed to learn, starting with Mizar himself. Part of that, I feared, would be not giving in to my Arm instincts to leash him. I wanted his mind concentrated on our enemies, not grousing about my orders.
“But we beat his ass here,” Tonya said. These days, I expected Tonya to show up to meetings wearing some executive lady-lawyer outfit. Not today. Today we got safari Tonya, khaki shirt, pockets and epaulettes, for the mother of God. I would love to mind scrape her again just to find out what in the hell had been going on in her head since Polly handed her juice buffer access and true witch in the run up to Pittsburgh.
Not that such an event would be politic, at the moment. Aw shucks.
I turned to Shadow. “I know Crows. How depleted are you all? That is, you and Thomas and Arpeggio and Rumor?”
“Too much,” he said. “Arpeggio’s not likely to be useful in a battle for six weeks to two months, Thomas the Dreamer for a month.” He paused in thought and exchanged a glance at Rumor. “Rumor and myself should be ready in two to three weeks.”
“Two to three weeks is likely all we have,” I said. “If that.” I circled the room with my eyes and made sure everyone understood the point. The most senior of the Crows used up dross in vast quantities in these fights, and dross wasn’t an easy quantity to come by in the amounts they used.
Snap went a pencil, and I turned to the source of the dead pencil, Gail. “Crap,” she said, taking the tip half of the broken pencil and wryly poking her left hand with it, just barely not hard enough to puncture flesh. “You’re right. We held on with the skin of our teeth, despite all the reinforcements. And even though we won, I haven’t seen the slightest sign of a morale boost.”
“What about all those Hunter corpses they left behind?” Armenigar said.
“How many heads of full Hunters were among them?” Mizar asked. He had been pounding this into me since we left the Yukon, regarding Chimeras and old Monsters: ‘they’re not dead unless you destroy the head’. Some of the recovery methods you could use on Chimeras and old Monsters were simply too disgusting to describe. Oh, and if they were old enough, if you left enough body parts near their heads, they could put themselves back together. Eventually.
I supposed I should be grateful for his information. He now believed in my Commander status and made it part of his responsibility to feed me everything he thought I needed to know. I wished the information didn’t come with the faint tone of panic as he gave it to me. He accepted my position, but with the air of someone who found himself going into battle under the command of the king’s ne-er-do-well fourteen-year-old son.
His comment was right, though. In the entire extended Chicago fight our side managed to corral only one Hunter, with head. The Hunters took far more Nobles, though they wasted the big prize, Earl Sellers, in a show of terror. The Hunters hadn’t been lax about grabbing the Nobles’ fighting Monsters, either.
Deadly quiet settled around the four pushed-together duct-tape steadied institutional dining tables.
“Son of a fucking bitch!” Armenigar said, and slapped the table. Beverage glasses and mugs jumped, and the table sagged about four inches. “Pardon my profanity, folks, but I see the problem now. We had too many Arms and Focuses on our side, and we’re always thinking in terms of territory.”
“Correct, Arm,” Mizar said. “The Hunters use your love for territory to goad you into fighting the wrong fights. If you do a simple invasion to take their strongpoints away from them, they’ll just move elsewhere and strike you some time later, where you’re weak. What matters to them are their lives, their cause, and their personal interconnections.”
“I won, dammit,” Gilgamesh said. Not very loudly, but with a rapier-thrust voice I hadn’t heard from him before.
“You won your battle, Gilgamesh,” I said, bucking him up through the tag. I didn’t want to be giving him grief over this. Stuck doing my job for a gaggle of out-of-control Focuses, Arms, and their reluctant Noble allies wasn’t trivial, and I hadn’t done any better in the Clearing of Chicago war. “Territory might not matter for the Hunters, but it does for us. You saved Chicago and its Transforms from Calgary’s fate. Enkidu’s goals, though, included the capture of the Director and her Arm allies, the destruction of the Littleside schools, proving that we couldn’t protect the Crows, and ending the threat of the Nobles. He succeeded at three of four of his goals.”
A bit of an understatement, actually. The Hunters had stripped Littleside, scattered my researchers, and shut down the Crow school and the Focus witch school for good. Because the Chicago defenders couldn’t protect the Littleside schools
from the Hunters, the Crows had scattered and abandoned the Cause. This was why we were, as Shadow stated, down to the support of the senior Crows.
“So what do you want us to do, Commander?” Shadow said.
“That’s simple. Pretend we’re still in the Yukon. Go about your normal business, hunker down, look defensive, look fearful, look hurt. Only one thing – be prepared to move yourselves and your households on a moment’s notice. I’m not going to tell you where.” Because I didn’t know where. I refused to say that, though.
“What about us?” Viscount Kevin said. He referred to the Canadians. They wanted to fight, but I couldn’t hold them in secret, because they had showed themselves in the Chicago fight. Nor could I give them firm orders.
“I’d suggest you find an obvious place that needs defending, and go there. Immediately. If, that is, you want to be in on the next big fight,” I said, baiting Armenigar. The obvious place for them to go was California, but California wasn’t the only place where we were overwhelmed.
Focus Martin, who had edged over to the Madonna of Montreal to do a little aura basking, raised her hand and then spoke for the first time. “Madame Commander, thank you for being willing to listen to me. The place we, they, should go is Memphis. The Cause Focuses there are starting to waver because of the destruction of the Barony of Fog.” And because they didn’t trust the young Arm pack protecting them and everyone else in the Mississippi corridor. For which they were correct.
Armenigar sent the young Focus a glare that roughly translated as ‘young Focuses should keep their traps shut until they’re old enough to change their own diapers’. Focus Gwen Larson, her jittery metapresence serving as a case study in why Focuses shouldn’t be frisky with multiple Arms (in her case, Armenigar, Debardelaben and Keaton), patted Armenigar’s shoulder and subtly reigned her in with the equivalent of a charismatic shoulder massage. “If my dreams are correct, the Mississippi corridor Focuses are in grave danger,” Larson said. “Too many Pack Mistresses know about the defenseless Dreamers among them.” A constant refrain, alas, about talented Dreaming Focuses. “We should at least consider going there.” She turned to me, and I shrugged. When I summoned the Arm pack, the Canadians would be perfectly positioned to come with them.
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