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

by Randall Farmer

  Oh, and in her opinion, the only one of ‘us’ who truly loved me was Cindy. The one I fought with the most.

  Typical Freeman luck, that.

  “Fuck,” Amy said, banishing my woolgathering. She tossed to my feet one of the daggers she had been using to attempt to pry the rocks at the base from their icy shell. The dagger tip was gone and the dagger was twisted. “This isn’t going to work.”

  “We need a fire,” Nameless said.

  Nancy dragged me away from what would likely end up being a loud Nameless – Amy – Sir Kevin – Cindy argument about how much work would be required to hunt down the necessary firewood.

  “Look up,” she said.

  I did, and through the gaps in the clouds I followed the aurora above, the real aurora. For one reason or another, our location here on the western shore of Hudson Bay, a third of the way from its southern tip to its opening to the Arctic Ocean, was in the center of the auroral belt.

  The aurora flowed eastward tonight, if it flowed at all, but right at the zenith was a hole in the aurora, like a pole stuck in the sky that the aurora flowed around.

  “No way,” I said. This thing influenced the Earth’s real aurora dozens of miles above us? Unbelievable. Impossible. I kept looking and began to understand. It wasn’t a true hole in the aurora, but a subtle influence, a change in color or something. Still freaking unbelievable

  “Perhaps what we’re looking for is causing this,” Nancy said. “Or perhaps this is why they put it here.” I shivered. There were times, after Nancy’s rebirth, that she sounded like someone else. As if she acquired a piece of someone else’s personality when she died. Or something.

  Today, she sorta sounded like Focus Rickenbach.

  “Either way, it’s important. I think…” Nancy paused.

  Behind her, I spotted a set of distant eyes reflecting the auroral light. And another. Dozens of eyes.

  Monsters.

  “Don’t panic,” Nancy said. “They’re bringing us wood.”

  The Monsters crept no closer than a hundred and fifty yards. Each carried a piece of driftwood in her mouth. Each dropped her offering and scampered away.

  The intelligence of these Monsters unnerved me. If they turned on us, would they attack as a group? If there were as many Monsters around us as I thought, what then did they eat?

  We made a huge tent, from all our tent supplies, using the inuksuk as a central two-legged tentpole. We built the fire near the cairn and directed the smoke (and heat) up the tent’s center and past the inuksuk. We melted ice in our cooking pots (two, small) and when the water neared boiling, poured it on an icy rock that made up the inuksuk base, until we were able to pry the rock away.

  Lather, rinse, repeat.

  Alphabet, who didn’t fit in the tent, but who we couldn’t refuse, guided us. She knew which of the rocks to remove.

  The Monsters kept bringing us wood. One, who mimicked a moose, introduced herself to me as Elisabeth, and decided to join our crew. She carried too much Monster juice, and Sir Kevin removed the extra, no muss no fuss.

  What he did didn’t match the stories.

  “That’s because my draw didn’t take much élan,” Sir Kevin said. We talked as we relayed firewood from the drop point to the tent. The exercise warmed the aching cold in my bones. “Elisabeth is an old enough Monster to be going through, um, what us Nobles term ‘Monster menopause’.” The term embarrassed him. “When she finishes, um, she’ll end up as what we call an Old Monster. Old Monsters don’t overproduce élan the way the rest do.” He picked up a full load of donated driftwood and walked back toward our impromptu tent. I picked up a couple of sticks. Elisabeth followed, nuzzling Sir Kevin’s rear end. Yah, the Noble made it with Monsters. No, I wasn’t close to being over the shock of that.

  “How long does it take?”

  “Our best guess is 11 years,” Sir Kevin said.

  I turned to Elisabeth. “Damn, you’ve been out here a long time, haven’t you, Elisabeth.”

  She grunted and prodded my crotch. I shook my head, attempted to hide my disgust, and wondered how far down the path of depravity being a Transform would take me. I mean, wasn’t making love to an animal wrong? Or did the fact that the Monsters weren’t ‘dumb animals’ make this morally acceptable?

  Who was I trying to kid? How should I know how to judge this insanity?

  “If you got enough of these menopausal Monsters, you could get enough élan to survive and wouldn’t have to kill,” I said.

  “A harem. You can do that with the mature and younger Monsters, too, if you don’t mind the tendency for their minds to drift and their bodies to start to look like your beast form,” Sir Kevin said. “Note that I said beast form, not combat form. Natural harems are a Beast Man trick, though back when I was a Beast Man I never had any Monsters in my harem as old as either Elisabeth or Alphabet.” He snorted. “If I had, I might not have ever needed to become a Noble, so it’s a good thing I didn’t. I like having a mind.”

  Elisabeth nudged me in the chest, and then made a sign in the air with her head. I thought about it for a moment, and understood. “Your mind would have come back after a few years, when you fully mastered yourself,” I said.

  “Elisabeth just told you, didn’t she,” Sir Kevin said.

  I nodded.

  He gave me a stare I had been getting a lot from him, lately. A stare I interpreted as ‘whatever anyone else offers you for your services, I’ll beat their price.’

  I already knew the price I would be asking for – someone to take in Cindy and make her part of a household. She had been abused far too much in the past, forced from one place to another because of her differences and the sharp edges of her personality, and needed a permanent home. You would think the Transform community, slapped in the face every day by the fact they were different from normal humanity, would be more tolerant of Transform irregularities, but the opposite appeared to be the case. A defense mechanism against the normal world? Likely.

  This wasn’t selfless on my part. I fervently hoped that having a real home would make Cindy less cranky, vulnerable and temperamental. Easier for me to love, an important consideration as she was the one who had chosen me.

  “Let’s go see how the fire brigade is doing.”

  “There it is,” Amy said. She and Cindy had removed enough of the inuksuk’s stones to reveal a tiny piece of our target. All I could see was a piece of wood, traced by tiny lines of inlaid metal. The tent was almost warm, and I luxuriated in the ecstasy of not being cold.

  The inner stones weren’t as ice welded as the others, or the ice on them had already melted. In any event, Amy and Cindy were able to remove them faster, careful not to disturb the two legged inuksuk itself, and as they removed the stones, more of the object became revealed: a short spear, just over a yard long. With a stone tip. Despite its obvious age, the carved wood of the spear was still tight and unweathered.

  “Okay, now what?” I asked. I tried not to cough. Woodsmoke in the tent made air pollution look good by comparison. “Can you metasense anything?”

  “The more we uncover, the more it wakes up,” Nameless said. He and Midgard held back, as far from the spear as they could manage and still be in the tent. “It’s sucking up dross.”

  “So this is a Crow thing, as we expected?” Amy asked. “Cindy?”

  “Nothin. Justa hunka wood.”

  “Who among us is cleanest, Nameless?” Amy said. “Dan?”

  “He is, at that.”

  “You want me to pick it up? Take it?”

  “Take it. Befriend it. Pretend it’s a Monster.”

  Yes, ma’am. I bit my lip and took stock of myself. The tent was warm enough to thaw my frozen body parts, and I tried not to think about the dark frostbite spots and the fact I might end up losing more than a few toes out of this damned quest. The light from the fire hurt my eyes. Nothing from the spear, though. I relaxed, reached out, and grabbed the spear. No reaction. I slowly moved the spear toward me. />
  Outside of the inuksuk the spear sprang to life, glowing with auroral green. Translucent beings appeared around us and roared fear and terror. I dropped the spear and ran, as did everyone in the group.

  I stopped forty feet away, when I began to freeze.

  Back at the tent, the tent with all our supplies, well over a hundred Monster ghosts growled and howled at us. Their combined Monster Terror weapon overwhelmed me, freezing me in place as much as the arctic air did.

  “Clothing, blankets, anything!” Amy said, using her voice of command. “It’s over 30 below out here, and Dan’s not going to last more than a few minutes.”

  We had a problem. My questmates bundled me up in what little we kept outside the tent, and it wasn’t enough. “Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck!”

  The Monster ghosts roared at us and we backed off further.

  We had a big problem.

  ---

  “On three, Dan!” Amy pointed at me and I ran to the right, ignoring the pain of the cold. I should have never taken off my parka and hat, back in the tent. Darkness closed in on me, my only illumination in this now overcast night the enemy Monster ghosts. A gust of wind flipped me off my feet and I fell, scraping my mostly numb and partly frozen skin on the icy ground. My blood froze as I bled.

  Amy and Sir Kevin yelled a challenge and charged the ghosts. The ghosts did their thing, what Sir Kevin called ‘tuned Terror’. Amy howled Chimera Terror back at them, an impressive trick for an Arm and one she was loathe to reveal. Sir Kevin did as well. The Monster ghosts roared back, and advanced on them. Amy and Sir Kevin gave ground.

  I waited until the expected gaps appeared in the ghost array and charged the tent. I got howled at, but moving at peak adrenaline speed anyway, the Terror didn’t do a thing to me. Nameless’s guess, that I would be more immune alone than with the rest of the questers, proved to be true.

  Inside the tent I grabbed my boots, the rest of my clothing, and tried to grab the spear. My hand went right through it.

  Shit!

  I grabbed more clothes and slipped on my coat and hat, purposefully ignoring my latest wounds. And my earlier gunshot wound, still unhealed and still a little infected.

  From ‘Nam, I understood my mental state: walking dead. I wouldn’t escape this mess alive. Our biggest lack as a group was any Major Transforms who could heal others. The best of the group at this, Midgard, knew only one healing trick, and that was to stop major wound bleeding. Not heal the wound, just stop the blood from gushing.

  I was already a frostbitten mess before this started. Now, I couldn’t even catalog all my problems. My right eye was the worst. My right hand wasn’t so good either. Where I fell and scraped my right shoulder let in too much cold, and…

  Fuck. Too much thinking. I tried to grab the spear again. Again my hand passed through it. I felt around for the spear and found nothing.

  I wasn’t worthy. I hadn’t passed my test. The spear rejected me.

  Two of the ghosts stuck their heads in the tent and bellowed at me, startling me enough to make me scamper. One bit at me and I flinched more. The ghost-bite hurt! I bled from the bite!

  This didn’t make sense. Said Monster ghost should have bitten me in half if it was a truly physical bite. This was more like a half dozen shallow stab wounds.

  Blood was blood, though, and I was losing too much of it now. I exited the tent, back the way I came, the world blurring and fading faster with each step I took.

  The last I remembered was my last step, or at least attempting my last step, while already face down on the icy ground.

  ---

  “Dan? Dan? We need you awake.” I opened an eye, my left eye. My right eye wouldn’t open. I felt both better and worse. Better, in as much as I no longer had frozen flesh, and I didn’t smell the expected putrefaction that would occur after I thawed. Worse, as I was starving. I also had a new, undefinable hunger. As if I was an addict and needed a fix. Which didn’t make sense, as I went through the I-need-a-drink shakes months and months ago.

  Oh.

  I was low on juice.

  This was juice hunger. Wasn’t I supposed to be immune to that?

  I looked up at Cindy, the person who awakened me. She looked in shit shape as well, her face and hands, the only thing I could see, a mass of scars. Her left hand trembled, and she was missing three of her fingers on her right hand.

  “Awake,” I said. My voice sounded off, unused. I tried to sit up, but couldn’t. My muscles were too weak. “How long?”

  “Eleven days.”

  Healing trance. I had been in a healing trance, as if I was a Major Transform. I couldn’t move my right arm or right hand, but with my left I patted myself up and down, and didn’t find anything missing. My right arm still showed a few black frostbite marks, though.

  Well, that explained that. I might be able to fake a healing trance, but I couldn’t fake juice. I had just spent eleven days in the world’s most pathetic healing trance.

  “Food,” I said.

  “We’re out,” Cindy said. From the look in her eyes, she had to be starving as well. “Can’t hunt. Not here in the middle of the densest Monster territory in North America.”

  Here. Right. “Help me sit.” I wanted to see something more than tent and the wounds of a woman I loved enough to want to protect.

  Cindy helped me up to a sitting position. My questmates had retrieved the tent and their supplies, but we weren’t where we had been before. The side of the enclosed area, to my left, was a rock wall. The tent bulged down between driftwood supports. Snow. I looked around and didn’t see Sir Kevin or our Monsters, Elisabeth or Alphabet. The rest – Amy, Nancy, Nameless and Midgard – stared at me, and they all nursed wounds, madness or worse.

  “Water?”

  The tent’s fire, along the rock wall, vented at the top. Driftwood from the Hudson Bay shoreline, burning slowly, with a pan on top. Water. Cindy filled at tin cup and I drank. Hell. The water was still cold, with ice in it.

  “Where’s Sir Kevin and the Monsters?”

  My audience visibly relaxed. My mind wasn’t gone, as they suspected.

  “They’re out hunting,” Amy said. Her usually melodious voice sounded hoarse. “Right now, food is our number one priority. Juice, too, but we’re not sure how to find a Monster the local Monsters consider fair game for us. We can’t afford to lose their good will.”

  Good will paid for with firewood. The Monsters knew exactly what they were doing.

  “Why’d you wake me?” My own voice sounded like someone had sandpapered the back of my throat while I slept.

  “We’ve run into an impasse,” Amy said. She squatted three feet from me, with her elbows on her knees. A nasty scar ran from her left temple across her face and chest, and disappeared under her ripped jacket. Blood seeped from a gouge on her right leg, and her left hand was blackened and swollen with bruises. “First, a couple of questions, Dan. When you went into the tent, before you passed out in a healing trance, could you see and touch the Eskimo spear?”

  The unnamed target of our quest had acquired a name. Rah rah rah. “Yes to the first, no to the second.”

  “Did you happen to spot the emergency radio?”

  “Huh?” I blinked at Amy, not sure where this question came from. She leaned toward me and tried to predator me into snapping to attention, but I ignored her. “We cached it, remember? So we wouldn’t get it wet when we were melting the ice off the inuksuk rocks.” Blank looks all around. Hell. “The Monster ghosts are playing with your minds and memories.”

  “We know,” Amy said, furious at me for stating the obvious. Her predatory anger came out in a tiny dribble. No, I hadn’t developed some new resistance. She was just beat to crap. Probably low on juice, too. “Where’s the radio?”

  I told her the location of the cache, which also held some meat, canned applesauce, bottles of vitamins, some navigation equipment, and other random crap. “Let me,” Midgard said. Of the crew, he looked to be the healthiest.


  “Your wounds are from the Monster ghosts?” I asked Amy, after Midgard left. She nodded.

  “We can’t get to the spear any more,” Amy said. “Some of us – Nancy, Nameless and myself – can still see and touch the Eskimo spear, but we can’t get close enough to pick it up. The Monster ghosts are too strong.”

  “They get their strength from us,” I said. She nodded.

  “You and Sir Kevin can see the spear, but can’t touch it,” Amy said.

  “The Progenitors decided you, Nancy and Nameless passed their tests, and Sir Kevin and I didn’t.” I couldn’t even figure out which one was Sir Kevin’s test. The Progenitors were just too different for us to understand, at a logical level. “What about Cindy and Midgard?” The two the black rock wanted sacrificed.

  “They can’t even see the Eskimo spear.”

  “Uh huh,” Cindy said. “We’re the official abominations.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Fucking shit.” She wanted to punch something.

  “I’m the only one who was able to try twice,” Amy said. “They nearly took me apart, even after I boosted my case by taking on another juice pledge, something Polly suggested I should do after I finished this quest.”

  “So what’s with the radio?”

  “My idea,” Nameless said. His voice sounded raw, and like he spoke out of the bottom of a very large barrel. “We aren’t strong or unified enough to be worthy of the Eskimo spear. I think I understand the problem: we only represent the Cause, and the Cause is but a small minority movement in the Transform community.” I nodded, having heard enough about the Cause in my two months with this group to know it was the right thing to be working on, and with. “We’re not leaders, though. We need the true leader of the Cause.”

  “Lady Death,” I said. “It won’t work. She hasn’t earned the right.”

  Amy nodded.

  “We earned the right for her,” Nameless said. “In part. The Progenitors will make Lady Death earn her chance.”

  Two months of work, to get all the way to the spear, and then not be able to claim it, sucked. Not strong enough? Bullshit.