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

by Randall Farmer

  Fifty paces farther on, she shivered, and relaxed a little. “I promised myself I wouldn’t whine.”

  “Go ahead, whine at me,” I said. Better than her cold silence.

  “Eleven Inferno people died, nine of them Transforms, in the Pittsburgh fight. I got sent out here before I could grieve. I didn’t even get to go to the funerals.” She turned to me, for once, and then shrieked, quite unlike her. “What the hell do you think I should feel like?”

  Nine Transforms. Losing one Transform for a Focus was the same sort of pain as losing a territory was for an Arm, and she had lost nine. Almost a quarter of her household.

  I wanted to put the whole mess on my shoulders. I let Bass trick me and later use the fruits of my weakness to turn Keaton into a traitor to herself. Only I couldn’t, as Keaton’s hubris, Bass’s hunger for the Transform apocalypse and Patterson’s murderous religious insanity far dwarfed my contribution to this disaster. Of the lot, only Bass remained as a problem. I held Keaton’s tag and I now led the Arms. The smart Focuses loved me and the rest kept their mouths shut. The Crows called me Tiamat Crow-rescuer and practically worshipped the ground I walked on. The Nobles would drop everything to fight by my side.

  Oh, and Patterson was dead.

  Being out here? Crazy stupid. Lori was eight months pregnant, and just lost a good portion of her household. I needed to be back home, solidifying my position as the boss Arm and leading the newly turned Transform Network. Sky needed to use his new Crow Guru status and start teaching.

  Yet, Anne-Marie said go, and so we went.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You should have said something, earlier. Do you feel the need to be punished?” Inferno was mine, too, and the loss of those people hurt, but they weren’t mine the way they were Lori’s.

  “Arms!” Sky said. Okay, I admit it, my approach on the subject is somewhat skewed. The way the loss of those people hurt me was that they represented a failure on my part. A small failure, but a failure nonetheless.

  I no longer had a boss to punish me for my transgressions. I thought this was a good thing, but, out here, my confidence in my belief waned.

  “Not this time,” Lori said. She understood what I asked. “I had those urges after the Battle in Detroit because I went into that situation too cocky for my own good, unable to believe that any of my people would die. That wasn’t the case for the Pittsburgh fight. After we realized what Patterson and Bass represented, everyone in Inferno who went in, myself included, understood we wouldn’t likely be coming back.” She shook her head. “The problem is that I’m just numb. We won, and some of us lived through the fight. I want so much to honor the fallen, to be proud of them, to be with the rest of Inferno when we honor them. But I can’t. I can’t even cry.”

  Of course Lori couldn’t cry. She never could, too caught up in her belief of the heroic individual. She would bury the pain inside her and let it eat until it tore her soul to pieces. We understood how to ease the pain of her losses, but doing so took Inferno, the testy, opinionated, and driven people who made up her household. They cared for her, they loved her, and they kept her sane.

  They weren’t here to care for her. This left Lori all alone, with nothing but her pain. And empathy and hugs weren’t exactly in my skill set.

  I turned to Sky. He shared Lori’s links to Inferno but while he was sad, he didn’t seem tormented.

  He shrugged at my unasked question. “I broke down after we found out Gilgamesh and Shadow won and I was now a Guru.” Ah, he grieved while the rest of us celebrated. Gilgamesh had been dueling to prove himself a Crow Guru when the rest of us had been fighting in Pittsburgh. Gilgamesh’s fight had spread to become a contest over the direction of all the Crows, and Shadow, Gilgamesh’s Mentor, also won his fight. The Crows were on our side now. All the Crows. Officially. “Lori, tell us about Terry Bishop,” Sky said.

  I raised an eyebrow at Sky, but he shook his head at me. I kept silent while we waited for Lori. Many long minutes passed, as we crunched through the half-lit snow, before she spoke.

  “Terry came to Inferno back in 1964. She wasn’t even a Transform.” Lori spoke with a soft voice, speaking with the classic TV news anchor generic accent. Only my enhanced hearing allowed me to hear her. “She was twenty-four and Gerald Freddie’s girlfriend. She came with him when he transferred into Inferno. It was funny. So many married couples couldn’t stay together after a transformation, but Terry wasn’t even married, and she stayed. She never did anything the way the rest of the world expected.”

  Lori shook her head, and I thought I heard a hint of tears in her voice. Terry was one of the Inferno people Lori had allowed herself to love. True love, not just the amorphous love of a Focus for a member of her household. “Then Gerald died, in one of the early Monster hunts, back when we hunted like idiots. Terry stayed. Inferno felt like home, she said.”

  I remembered Terry, of course. She had been one of Lori’s favorite bodyguards, and someone who often dealt with me. She had been ornery, sharp, and more than a little eccentric. I liked people who were eccentric. Eccentricities gave a person character.

  “Did you know that she was the one who dragged the household into the Society for Creative Anachronism?” Lori said. “She was going to be an SCA knight if it killed her. I remember how appalled everyone was back then at the thought of a female knight, but she pushed it so hard that they eventually gave in. If she’d been male, she would have become a knight years earlier.”

  The tears were more than a hint now, and streamed down Lori’s cheeks, turning into ice just before they dripped off.

  “We met Sky at one of those medievalist tournaments. Do you remember what Inferno was like back then, Sky? We were all so happy. We had our cause, and got to chew on everyone’s slippers because we were all just puppies, and it was fun. Risky and risqué. Terry was as committed as anyone, and she…”

  Lori talked about Terry Bishop for four hours. She cried, she told stories, she waved her hands in the air. A few times, she screamed and cursed; at the world, at God, for taking Terry from her; at Inferno for their dangerous commitment to the Cause; at us, just because we walked with her. She even cursed Terry, for making Lori love her so much. Then she cried again. I slowly grew to understand how the Inferno Friday night sex orgies tied in to this. Terry had been one of Lori’s lovers, safer than most because she wasn’t a Transform and safe from any one-in-a-million chance of a slip-up with the juice.

  That night, we zipped our sleeping bags together and held each other tight, all three of us.

  “You can’t go back, can you? That’s what this is all about,” I said. I figured this out after a while, after spending far too much time thinking like a Focus. About half an hour into Lori’s talk, I realized something about Lori I hadn’t known, before: the distance she kept from her people was a defense mechanism. Inferno’s Cause was dangerous, hideously dangerous, and cost the lives of many of her people over the years. She couldn’t afford to love them, even as much as a Focus normally loved her own people. They all volunteered for death, and she wasn’t a strong enough person – or a wicked enough person – to love them as a Focus should love her people, and yet be able to sit back and coldly watch them die.

  Lori nodded, her dark hair brushing against my cheek. Outside, the snow still fell in its silent blanket, but the winter seemed more peaceful now. Something in me relaxed, here in the quiet in the arms of my loved ones. A little of the hot poison inside of me slipped away.

  “If I go back to Inferno, I either need to get rid of them all, or convince them to give up the Cause. I can’t see being able to convince them to give up the Cause, though.”

  “Get rid of them?” Sky said. “After all the work we’ve done?”

  “Staying with them would hurt too much,” Lori said. “I can’t risk them again. I can pick up new volunteers, and risk them. I can risk myself. I can start over. I just can’t risk the Inferno survivors, and that’s not right for them, nor is it right for me.”


  “Several of us think that Inferno is the most amazing thing ever created by any Transform, love,” I said. “Hank, for one. It would be criminal for you to disband them.”

  She sniffed and held me closer. “I’ll just leave them with Gail. She’s got dozens of household deaths to go before she’ll be overwhelmed.”

  Right. I couldn’t imagine how Gail would be able to cope with Inferno, even on a temporary basis. The Madonna had talked us into an amazing number of immensely stupid things. “You do what you need to do.”

  She nodded. “I should probably cut them loose now.”

  “Ah…” I said.

  Lori lifted her head and met my gaze. “Right. That would cause problems for you, wouldn’t it?”

  “Goodbye juice buffer, hello problems,” I said.

  Lori nodded. “Okay. I’ll wait for a while.” She settled back against my shoulder and reached her arm across me to hold Sky too. “I love you both. You know that, right?”

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  “Always, ma chérie,” Sky said. “Always.”

  ---

  “We’re being stalked,” Sky said. That morning we reached the foothills of the Mackenzies and turned northwest, toward Beast. Goodbye lowland evergreen forests, hello mixed tundra and stunted alpine forests. I didn’t know what this place would be like outside of winter, but for now it remained a bleak hell.

  Picking Beast out with the Dreaming wasn’t a problem, not with him being the Progenitors’ chosen one. Trying to figure out the other local Transforms remained a big problem. Nothing made sense.

  I needed to do something about the Dreaming, and soon. The farther I got from civilization, the more I found myself touching the Dreaming every time I slept. I wasn’t sure what I connected to, other than the real Dreaming, for the first time. At night, I now experienced other peoples’ dreams.

  I would swear someone wanted to tell me something, but the details always faded before morning. Rough discipline, low juice pain, heated emotions, the works. A baby Arm, maybe? I heard voices as well, the voice of God, perhaps, though I doubted God was female and talked with a thick French accent. The Madonna of Montreal. Talking to her in person had juice-linked us, somehow. Probably a side effect of the way she sent us out here, I told myself, nothing to worry about long term. Some I blamed on the Progenitors, the Transform efflorescence that preceded ours by fifteen hundred years. Van Rickenbach-Schuber, Gail’s normal husband, told me, as I left, that he thought I was on a proving quest to be the Progenitors’ chosen Arm. At the time I gave him two upright middle fingers and promised to make him pay for his gibe, but the farther I got in this, the more I feared the son of a bitch had been correct.

  “Stalked? By Beast?”

  “No. Some other Transform skittering in and out of my range, behind us.”

  “Chimera or Crow?”

  “Neither.”

  “The Provocateur? He was in my mind yesterday, I think.”

  Lori smiled, noticing us for the first time. She had been lost in her thoughts. Earlier, she told us about Bill Fentress. Then she fell silent, cold and distant. Occasionally, she wept, reliving old memories. Good.

  “Not him, thank God,” Sky said.

  “What else could it be?”

  “Monster Arm,” Sky said. “I told you we’d run into Transforms like this.”

  “Skyyyyy,” Lori said. Back in Toronto, Sky had regaled us for hours with stories about the strange creatures of the Yukon, most of which were too bizarre to be physically possible. Such as merged two-brain Monsters. Lori and I had been about ready to strangle him for his whoppers.

  “Lori, love, now that we’re out here, I’m going to insist you confront the fact that your theories are full of horseshit,” Sky said. “The thing stalking us isn’t a standard Transform. It’s hostile, and hungry, quite inhuman, and if I’m right, we’re in its territory.”

  Lori growled, but I held up my hand. I nodded. “We’re in something’s territory. I can feel it, but damn if I know how.” I growled in disgust.

  “Carol, mademoiselle Arm, there’s a lot more to being a Major Transform than the few tricks we’re limited to using back home. We do have all sorts of funny senses and capabilities that are drowned out by cities, electromagnetic radiation, and by Transforms in numbers. Even if the goonies in the white lab coats won’t believe a word certain of us say about them.” Sky stuck his nose in the air and mock-pouted.

  “So, tell me,” I said. “What the hell is a Monster Arm, anyway? Are we talking a Monster who did some sort of secondary transformation into an Arm?”

  Sky shook his head. “No. If this is what I think she is, she’s an Arm who took too much élan from drawing from Monsters. Because of that, she’s got a juice structure that’s become élan dominated.” Only Chimeras are supposed to draw from Monsters, because only Chimeras are built to handle élan. If an Arm was low enough on juice, though, well, you do what you need to do.

  “Juice producer or consumer?” Monsters were normally juice producers.

  “Consumer. Feeds on grotesqueries.”

  I took a slow and deep breath. “What’s a grotesquerie?”

  Sky smiled, happy to have someone willing to listen to his tall tales. “A grotesquerie is an older Monster who’s been partially drawn by an Arm or Chimera or variant. Young Monsters die when you do that. Old ones don’t. They eventually recover, and come back different, imprinted by the shape and personality of the thing who drew their juice. They’re called grotesqueries because they possess shapes normally impossible for Monsters. I have no idea what’s really going on inside such a critter, of course. I’ll let you scientists figure that out.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said. Sky just stared at me. “Okay, it’s not that crazy. I even think I can see how that can happen for one of those old Monsters with a Monster metacampus.”

  Lori closed her eyes, and reached out with her metasense. “Yes,” she said. “I apologize, Sky. You were right.”

  “You picked that up with your metasense? At that range?”

  “Give it a shot, Carol,” Lori said, giving me one of her cute little charismatic grins. I wasn’t up to fighting her charisma today, so I opened myself up to my full metasense.

  Nothing.

  “Try not to think of it as seeing,” Lori said. “Disengage your eyesight.”

  I tried again, with my eyes closed. Firmly not thinking about ‘not seeing’.

  Then I understood. I didn’t gain a feel for distance, but I took several steps to the side, and found I could approximate how far away she was. The closest analogy I could come to this new sense was that I heard her heartbeat.

  “It’s going to take a lot of work to figure out how to pick out what I’m seeing,” I said. “Oops. Not seeing. Hearing?” Damn. Thinking in terms of eyesight? Way too easy. I would need to work on that.

  “Metahearing,” Sky said. “Only picks up Major Transforms and old Monsters.”

  “Creatures with metacampuses,” Lori said. “I’m guessing this is another electromagnetic sense. That fits with it being easily drowned out by our wonderful benefits of civilization.”

  Metaradio. The editorial cartoonists would love that.

  I basked in the warm glow of a juice draw. Lori snuggled beside me, her oversized belly warm against my side. All these years I had been waiting for this, from Lori, and her juice was as good as advertised. Someday, I would own a herd of Focuses, and I would love them all like this. Lori would never share with another Arm this way, but I didn’t hear any complaints from her on the subject. She was well and truly overwhelmed.

  Gilgamesh had been right about taste, I decided. He had ruined me with his Crow terminology, and now I could understand his insistence that juice (or, in his case, dross) from different sources tasted different. My normal prey, untagged Transforms, tasted of, well, sex. Gail’s juice had a fresh home-baked bread taste, right out of the oven, yeasty and wholesome. Lori’s juice was spicy, cayenne spicy, and unexpecte
d, like your first taste of an Indian curry. Edgy.

  Sky breathed in my ear, silent, motionless, waiting. Whatever he got from my juice draw overwhelmed him nearly as much as it overwhelmed the two of us women. I scented the overpowering odor of horny male, and felt his engorged male member pressed against my back. I didn’t respond, too over-stimulated for sex.

  I lay on top of our sleeping bags in the warm tent, waiting for my body to return to earth. Lori’s drowsing breath buzzed against my neck. Outside, our Monsterish Arm friend, who didn’t charge in to attack as I expected she would, instead crept up close, within my normal metasense range. Probably hers, as well. If Sky hadn’t told me what she was, I would have never guessed she was an Arm. She came through quite clearly now on my Monster-amulet enhanced metasense. She wasn’t a Monster, though. Her behavior didn’t fit. For one thing, she wept, at least emotionally. Angry, but not as angry as I would be about interlopers in my territory. I bet myself that would change if we approached whatever she considered her prey, though. Still, she kept a far greater hold on human thought patterns than any free Monster I had ever run into.

  I found no evidence of any Arm training on her. She remained weak willed, untrained, undisciplined, and fearful, likely driven more by Arm instincts than rational thoughts. Intelligent, though. Hungry, but not for juice. Going the Monster route took care of that problem – she possessed around a hundred and fifty points of supplemental juice, though ‘supplemental élan’ might be a better term. I normally couldn’t pick out details like this on any Arm more advanced than a student, and not all student Arms at that. This tidbit implied that us urban Arms developed natural metasense shields, though ours were nowhere near as good as the natural metasense shields the Crows developed.

  Without warning, Lori moaned and rubbed against me, as our juice cycling turned on. Ummm. Wonderful, on top of the after-effects of a juice draw. I turned to Sky, and met his eyes. Yes. Now.