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

by Randall Farmer

  “Then this must be their last test,” the dapper man in the suit signed. “Or at least the last test before they reach their target.”

  “I believe you are correct, Thomas,” the Madonna signed.

  Gail checked out the other four: a Keebler Elf, a female rock star, a man appearing as a cartoon wizard and wearing a star-studded night sky cloak, and a woman in a military uniform. An Arm, another Arm, a Crow and a Focus. The gonging bells represented a Crow, Thomas was a Crow, while the Madonna and the White Queen were Focuses.

  “Annie,” the Keebler Elf signed, “we need to act. Two of the ghosts just bowed to the Crow and the Sport.”

  “Here’s the plan. Arry, focus up Hummingbird and Thomas; you three represent nature and propriety. You’re the center of the group. Over here,” the Madonna signed, pointing to her right, “Arms, Singer and Polaris. You’re our anger, our need for action.” ‘Arms’ had to be the Madonna’s name for Keaton. “Your Majesty, The Lieutenant, and Rumor – you’re our faith, the holy righteousness that gives us leave to act. Call your backer.”

  A green aurora sprang up around those three, expressed mostly through green glowing eyes.

  “Now you, Arry,” the Madonna signed.

  ‘Arry’ turned out to be the Keebler Elf, and a white light surrounded Gail and her two companions. As the light grew, Gail drifted to the ground and her image changed, though she didn’t know to what.

  “You three – express your anger,” the Madonna signed at the last group. Darkness surrounded them. “Now focus everything through me.”

  I don’t know the enemy we face, Arry. The unspoken words came from Thomas. Gail couldn’t respond. I’m not sure we’re doing the right thing by acting.

  You would recognize him by his foul deeds, Arry sent. Her mental voice ‘spoke’ with a heavy German accent. He was Wandering Shade’s advisor as much as he was the Purifier’s advisor, the person who tempted Innocence into becoming Wandering Shade.

  Holy fucking shit! Gail thought, before she caught herself. She hoped her thoughts didn’t get translated into this mental voice trick.

  The unknown advisor. Him.

  Yes.

  Gail, out of the corner of her eye, spotted Nancy’s startled fall, both her and Nameless in Amy’s arms. Blood, from a huge hole in Amy’s chest, splashed into Nancy’s eyes.

  Gail wordlessly screamed and the world around her moved, the Madonna’s doing. The Madonna stood in the center of the group of nine, and the world around them became the snowy tundra, a bubble of reality perhaps a dozen feet across, the world dim but partly discernable outside. Lying flat on the tundra were three men, two with sniper rifles on tripods, with scopes on top. Behind them knelt an old man who wore a spring jacket, a bowler hat, and goggles. He peered through a spotter scope on a tripod. His weapon, a shotgun, lay by his side.

  “Eight seven mark two, at 1900 meters. Down in the snow. Another at eight five mark seven, same distance,” the old man said.

  The two men fired. Distant screams echoed through Gail’s fading link to Nancy.

  Push, Arry sent. Push with all your heart. Push the man’s control off his slaves.

  Gail pushed, following Arry and Thomas’s lead. The Madonna had spent weeks teaching Gail to be able to move things around in her Dreaming garden, and her instincts said to use her pathetic skill at garden rearrangement in this push.

  Arry and Thomas pushed as well, Arry with a tuned Arm predator use and Thomas with a dross skill Gail didn’t recognize.

  Something gave.

  The men screamed in panic and got to their feet. Freed from the control, they no longer knew where they were. They fled in fear and confusion, leaving their sniper rifles behind.

  “You’re too late, Erica,” the man said, staring into the Madonna’s dreaming bubble. “I have no idea how you talked the Madonna into this grotesque interference into my affairs, but no matter. I’ve done what I needed to do.”

  Gail disagreed. The questers all lived.

  A gunshot rang out, passing through the old man. “Who the fuck are you talking to, assassin?” Dan Freeman’s voice. The Madonna turned, and they all followed. There he was, prone, on the other side of a snowy hummock just over three hundred feet away. He was bleeding, but he didn’t care. He should have been out cold, but something mundane allowed him to act, something from his military experience. Something of the juice amplified his ability to act while wounded, and would keep him going until the fight was over.

  The old man reached for one of the sniper rifles, but backed off after another shot elicited a “Shit!” from him.

  “Go ahead,” Dan said. “Your juice trick doesn’t work on your minions’ weapons, so when you’re near them, I can hit you.”

  “They’re using you,” the old man said, backing away from the weaponry, his left hand on his now bloody right arm. “You shouldn’t be their pawn. You’re like me, better than they are.”

  When the old man was fifteen feet back from the two sniper rifles, Dan sprang to his feet and carefully jogged forward on his snowshoes. The old man continued to back away. Dan shot twice more, but the old man just laughed at the shots that didn’t hit. When Dan reached five paces from the sniper rifles the old man began to glide off, as if he was on invisible cross-country skis. Which he was.

  Dan shot at the tracks. “It doesn’t matter what you do, anyway,” the old man said. “I already won.” Dan shot just before the tracks. “Bastard,” the old man said, bending over in obvious pain. “Chase me. Chase me and hunt me down.”

  Dan stopped when he reached the sniper rifles and the old man’s shotgun. He picked them up, turned around, and walked back toward the quester’s camp, silent and watchful. The old man slid off into the distance and vanished from the Madonna’s Dreaming area.

  “Victory,” the Madonna signed.

  ---

  “I’ve never seen you shake before, ma’am,” Gail said. She and Keaton sat on the roof of Gail’s apartment, drinking hot cocoa. Gail not only shook, she had a hard time breathing. She had already stopped herself, twice, from accidentally taking Keaton’s juice. The snow almost reminded Gail of the quest, save that these were large dainty flakes, and the air was barely below freezing instead of well below zero.

  “You’re clueless, aren’t you?” Keaton said, her face bathed in steam. She took a sip of hot cocoa. “Let’s just say that your desire to remain unnoticed by the Major Transform VIPs just failed in a spectacular way.”

  Gail feared the same, but so far refused to admit the obvious. “Why was I there, then?” She wasn’t any VIP. Her juice skills were minimal, her charisma good but not exceptional, and her household was a mess compared to the more successful Focus households. Years of work lay ahead of her before she mastered enough tricks for anyone to count her as one of the Focus VIPs.

  “Why was the Singer there?” Keaton shot back. Gail suspected the Arm knew all the Dreamers – and wasn’t going to be telling her squat. Gail, for once, wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Some of them were or could be enemies, and she suspected that if she knew who they were she wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. “She’s younger as a Major Transform than you are. The Madonna wanted specific personalities and talents, Gail. You just got caught up in the dragnet.”

  “You don’t trust the Madonna, do you?” Gail sipped cocoa and relished the warmth. The strange Dreaming fight had taken a lot out of her, but she didn’t regret a moment. She had learned so much!

  “Do you?”

  “I’m not sure. I just suspect that if I end up going against her, I’m dead.”

  “Huh.” Keaton took another swig of cocoa. “She’s saved both Hancock and myself on multiple occasions. Gilgamesh, too. And Arry. Hell, she’s probably saved Arry dozens of times.”

  “I get the feeling I ought to know Arry, but I don’t.”

  “You should, given the number of times you’ve listened to Haggerty’s stories.”

  Oh, shitting shit shit shit! “Arry! Arm Erica Eissl
er!” Eissler and I were chatty! Gail thought. She knows who I am! Wini’s going to swat me like a bug if she ever finds out. “Ma’am, may I have permission to ask…”

  Keaton snorted. She knew exactly what Gail wanted permission to ask. “She showed up in Detroit just after Haggerty’s challenge. She stared me down, but we didn’t fight. Nothing like the bitch in Calgary.” Erica had established dominance by sheer force of personality, without any need to get physical. Gail understood. It was the way Keaton dominated her. Something about compatible personalities. If the Major Transform personalities were compatible, then the dominant one just dominated, and the subordinate one never challenged. If they were closer in power, they spent a bunch of time elbowing each other in the ribs and dueling with wisecracks. “She wanted Haggerty alive. I think she likes Haggerty.” Gail gulped. Did Keaton just say what Gail thought she said? Arms didn’t like other Arms. “You? She wanted me to try to keep you alive.” Gail shivered. Arm Eissler wasn’t sure Keaton would be able to succeed. “Only until you jump off that cliff, though. Then I need to let you go.”

  “What does that mean? What cliff?” Gail’s curiosity failed again. She didn’t want to know the answer.

  Keaton spoke anyway.

  “The day everyone learns your name, kid.”

  Dan Freeman: December 9, 1971 – January 10, 1972

  At least this time Sir Kevin stayed here with me.

  “That’s a good bear,” I said, running my hand through the white fur on the Monster’s head as she nuzzled me. I stayed close to her, borrowing her warmth, and protection from the wind. Sir Kevin chuckled as he eyed her.

  “I said you would succeed,” he said. The tall Noble towered over me, as always, but since I was hunched over, one knee resting on the snow, I felt almost like a child compared to him. “This is how it’s supposed to work. If you want a Monster for your household, you don’t go chase her down. You let her come to you.”

  I continued to make friends with the bear-Monster, allowing my worries about the quest to ease from my mind. We knew we were close to the end when the auroras vanished. Cindy said we were ‘here’, but we didn’t understand what ‘being here’ meant. Nancy also said the visitors in her head were gone. We still didn’t understand what we were looking for.

  “Alphabet?” I said, picking up something from the Monster. ‘Alphabet’ was as close as I could come to her real name, which she had either forgotten, I just wasn’t good enough to pick up on, or was a non-English name. She licked my face, or at least the fake fur around the hood of my parka, showing me her dangerous teeth in the process. “Alphabet.” The name was good enough for her. I think she liked me, too.

  Alphabet’s only visible differences from a standard bear, as far as I could tell, were a high domed skull and a foot-long tail.

  “You want to come with us?” She nodded. “We’re up here looking for something that called us up here. Only we lost the trail, I think because we’re so close our tracking methods no longer work.”

  Alphabet backed away from me, stood on her hind legs bear-style, and growled and pawed the air.

  “What? Dan, what did you say?”

  This wasn’t a threat. Didn’t Sir Kevin understand?

  Oh. It was my duty and responsibility to translate in this circumstance. I stood and met Sir Kevin’s blue eyes. “She guards the thing we seek,” I said. Her and several hundred of her closest Monster friends, that is. I turned to Alphabet. “Now that you’ve joined our group, we too guard the whatever-it-is. Can you take us to it?”

  Alphabet got back down on four legs. She walked over to me, grabbed my outer coat sleeve in her mouth, and pulled. “Here we go!”

  “So, do any of you have a better feel now for how I’m able to do what I’m doing?” I asked, as we followed Alphabet to the east, back toward the icy shoreline of Hudson Bay. We weren’t being snowed on, a rarity up here. Patchy clouds hid the almost eternal night sky. I tried to stay close to Alphabet, and remember the last time I made love to Amy Haggerty, to keep warm. The snow crackled with an icy crunch, crunch under our feet, and the wind sang its howling song.

  We had turned inland from the inhospitable shoreline days ago, as we all thought the weather stormier and the wind fiercer there. Giant ice mounds marked the edge of the Bay, where storms piled up sheets of ice like oversized frozen playing cards. A large inuksuk – a cairn erected by the First Peoples for navigation purposes – stood near the shoreline and helped us navigate the rocky frozen tundra near the Hudson Bay shoreline. The target of our quest was here, somewhere within ten miles of us, but nobody had metasensed a thing.

  I had asked them to scan me with their metasenses as I did my thing with Alphabet. Doing so had broken the boredom and frustration of not being able to find the object of our quest, and distracted me from the cold.

  “I believe Amy’s hypothesis is correct and you’re borrowing our capabilities for what you’re doing,” Midgard said. Crap. My terrifying idea was correct. “Only what you’re borrowing is so tiny I can barely metasense it. You’re powering, if that’s the right word, the trick yourself, as well as naturally masking your own juice use.”

  Huh. Courtiers cheated, and did so in secret. So, was I a ‘Major Courtier’, as Amy suspected? Did ‘Major Courtiers’ possess a low juice count just to allow us to work in secret?

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to even think these thoughts.

  “There’s one big problem with your analysis and Amy’s hypothesis,” I said. The wind whipped the words from my mouth and I shifted to stand closer to Alphabet. “How can I be borrowing a Crow capability none of the Crows in our group possess?”

  “I never said you were borrowing a Crow capability,” Midgard said. He turned partially translucent as he said that, an involuntary fear reaction of his.

  I turned to Sir Kevin, and he peered down at me. “I was standing next to you,” he said. “I still think of what you did as Crow Master work, though. To me it makes sense, since I’m the work of Crow Masters.”

  “You’re talking magic?” I asked. My terrifying idea. I didn’t want there to be any magic.

  “No, biochemistry,” Amy said, ignoring the wind completely. The longest part of our journey today with Alphabet, so far, was the hour Amy spent convincing Alphabet that the Arm wasn’t going to juice suck her. Amy needed to admit that Alphabet was a person, not a Monster, before Alphabet would calm down at all. “Everything a Major Transform does involves chemistry, either directly by influencing a target with a chemical trick, or indirectly, by knowledge provided by our enhanced internal biochemistry. Crow Masters use active biochemical tricks. I can tell a Noble from a Beast Man or a Hunter simply by odor, based on the Crow Masters’ biochemical tricks. Alphabet now smells like us. You did this with biochemistry.”

  “But I didn’t do anything! At least that I know of.”

  “Do you think Nancy’s thinking of specific biochemical fractions when she strips the juice off someone?” Amy said. “Of course not, no more than you need to guide the chemical reactions in your eyes that allow you to see. You’re just doing what’s natural to you.”

  “This is utterly crazy,” I said. “I mean, a skill that…” I paused, as Alphabet stopped at the giant ice-rimed inuksuk. The cairn stood two feet taller than I did on its lonely outpost, a wind-swept rock shelf twenty feet above the level of Hudson Bay. The monument stood on a base of fist to head sized rounded rocks, with two large, vertical rocks above topped by a flat rock and more stones. It served a purpose, visible for miles in this almost flat and featureless terrain. The wind from the frozen bay, less than two thousand feet away, nearly lifted me off my feet as I stood. “Alphabet, why did you stop?”

  She whined and nosed the inuksuk. Oh.

  “This is it,” I said, turning to the questers. “She says this is it.”

  “But there’s nothing here,” Sir Kevin said. “Not to any of our metasenses.”

  Alphabet howled, loud. Distant Monsters echoed her howl, the Monsters we kn
ew were near but who would never approach. “It’s unanimous,” I said. The Monsters wanted us to finish and leave. “This is it.”

  “They must know,” Amy said, speaking about the First Peoples. We had spent five hours uncovering the inuksuk and the area around it, in the process finding far too many frozen offerings, including an artistically flattened Dr. Pepper can, scattered nearby. The day, such that it was, had brightened the clouds almost to twilight. “I would be interested in knowing what they think is here.”

  I didn’t respond, but I suspected my companions all knew my latest secret. Whatever Major Transform trick allowed my companions to see in the dark, I now possessed as well. For about three weeks. It had slowly come in, without announcing itself, until the lump that is my brain picked up on my new ability.

  “I just hope they don’t come raiding and attack us for desecrating this place,” Nancy said. She came over to me and cuddled. I let my gloved hands sink into her fur, and smiled. “You’re a proper Transform now, Dan. We’re all lawbreakers. We need to be.”

  Cindy and Nancy had had words over Nancy’s recent friendliness to me, her work helping me get over my reaction to the events at the rock of sacrifice. Nancy wasn’t hopping into the sack with me – I didn’t have Sir Kevin’s trick that made Nancy interested in physical intimacy (or at least not yet), but we had forged an emotional intimacy strong enough to rankle Cindy. They came to some agreement after deciding I was using a juice trick on both of them.

  Their decision bothered me. If I caught someone using a juice trick to seduce me, I would be horribly upset. They weren’t. I had asked Amy one night (or, rather, one sleep period) why, as we snuggled in her tent, and she said that most Major Transforms got inured to being yanked around by the juice. She suspected I would, too. Also, that if either Cindy or Nancy wanted to stop the effect of the juice trick on them, they could.