All Beasts Together (The Commander) Read online

  “I thought those healed before my escape,” Gilgamesh said.

  “So, you escaped? Tell me, please.”

  Gilgamesh took a deep breath and licked his lips. “I’ll trade the information for what’s going on with my legs.”

  “You have recovered!” Shadow said, with a boisterous laugh. “You’ve recovered quite well for only three weeks under my care.”

  “Three weeks!” Gilgamesh said. “So long?”

  Shadow nodded. “Last time I helped a Crow as traumatized as you, he took nearly two months before he was willing to talk to me.” He paused, then answered Gilgamesh’s question. “The way we Crows heal something like severed hamstrings is to grow a new set. In your rush to get out of Philadelphia you ruined the new set of hamstrings you were growing. That’s why your legs are so swollen: your body not only made you a new set of hamstrings, but is slowly reabsorbing the remains of the other two sets.”

  “Ah,” Gilgamesh said. “No wonder I’m so hungry.” He told Shadow about how the Skinner had freed him after Enkidu had been defeated and fled. He took another helping of eggs and refilled his glass of orange juice. After a few more bites he told Shadow what he remembered of the Skinner’s fight against Enkidu and Grendel, the attack on the Hera Focus and what little he knew about Tiamat’s fight with an unknown senior Major Transform. “Even after I sicked up on her, the Skinner was more interested in making friends with me than punishing me for my mistake. If we play things right, I’m sure we can do business with those Arms.” In some strange way, Gilgamesh realized he liked the Skinner, both a comforting and terrifying thought. His paradoxical emotions felt very Crow.

  Shadow snorted. “You and Sky may be the only Crows left with that opinion. After the Murder of Crows in Philadelphia, there aren’t any other Crows who want to be on the same continent as any of the predators, much less in the same city. Even I find myself a bit discommoded.”

  Gilgamesh shook his head and took the last piece of toast. He piled strawberry jam a half inch high and ate the concoction in four bites. Sky he had heard of but never met. He had read some of Sky’s letters to Shadow, as well as the other Crows’ jaundiced opinion of Sky. They called Sky an ‘adventurous Crow’, but Sky took the insult as a compliment and ran with it. He, Gilgamesh, found himself similarly labeled, but so far he attempted to ignore the issue. “‘Murder of Crows’? That sounds like Sinclair to me.” Complete with cheeky devious pun. “Where is he?”

  “Recovering, both from the events in Philadelphia and having to drive in Manhattan,” Shadow said, a small grin on his face. “You’re right, though: his name for what happened is a bit overblown. Perhaps we should call it the Philadelphia Massacre, given what happened to the Skinner, the Hera Focus, her Transforms and those poor wretches who attacked them.”

  Gilgamesh shrugged. “I hope you don’t mind, but I read some of those bound volumes of letters you store in your guest bedroom.” They were the only books in an entire bookshelf devoted to crow figurines and miniatures of far too many styles and shapes. Not something one could miss.

  Shadow smiled. “I don’t mind at all.” He took Gilgamesh’s plate and put it in the sink, then led Gilgamesh into his front room, and to a couch. “I keep those volumes in the back room to remind panicked Crows the world is not all bad, and to help them understand our Crow society. Did you learn anything from them?”

  Gilgamesh shrugged again. “I’m not a typical Crow, am I?” The only Crows referenced in Shadow’s letter collection who were anything like him were Sky, Midgard, and Occum. Sky did a great many things with normals and in general took more risks than even Gilgamesh did. The risks Occum took with Monsters and Beast Men were also far greater than Gilgamesh could imagine himself ever taking. Midgard took wandering to its logical extreme, depending on his reputation for trading information to cadge dross wherever he went, at least east of the Mississippi. Each of them, Gilgamesh included, was an atypical Crow. He wasn’t sure if this was a good or bad thing.

  Shadow’s front room overflowed with knickknacks and kitsch of all kinds, but lacked any sort of family pictures or portraits. Gilgamesh especially liked the intricate Black Forest Cuckoo clock, high on the wall above the chair where Shadow sat.

  “No, you’re not typical,” Shadow said. “I consider this a positive, even if many of the other senior Crows will not. All the Crows who gravitate to me tend to be flighty, but as I’d learned about myself years ago, to repeatedly handle risks requires a flighty Crow.”

  Gilgamesh nodded. Stoic Crows who took risks likely didn’t live through them.

  “You brought me dross,” Gilgamesh said, not wanting to dwell overly long on the subject of risks. “I thought you argued against dross gifts.”

  “I’m opposed to a practice whereby student Crows bring gifts of dross to their Gurus,” Shadow said, his frown sudden and his eyes alight in anger. For the first time, Gilgamesh metasensed Shadow’s glow. “What starts as a gift ends up quickly becoming a custom, then an accepted system of payment. The practice warps Crow society.”

  From the bound letters, Gilgamesh knew Shadow saw the world in patterns, the motions of the large currents of change as well as the small eddies of adjustment. He thought Transform Sickness had thrown humanity into the rapids, and because of Transform Sickness the world was becoming a much more dangerous place. He thought many of the things other Crows did were counterproductive. In that, Shadow agreed with his own Guru, Innocence, but he and Innocence disagreed mightily as to which things were counterproductive. Crow society and Transform society were fragile things, and Shadow feared anything threatening them might trivially shatter them. “About my relationship with Innocence I will not speak,” Shadow said. His statement didn’t surprise Gilgamesh, though he did wonder why Crow Gurus had Gurus themselves. “A Guru aiding a student with dross is a different thing entirely, one I’m not opposed to at all.”

  “I thank you, then.”

  “Where are you going to go when you leave here?”

  Gilgamesh shrugged. Nervous, he stood, paced across the room and back, and finally settled in a corner chair under an old weathered print of a flapper holding a fizzing soft drink bottle of something called Old Number Three.

  Shadow smiled slightly. “You’re going to follow Tiamat, aren’t you?” he said, more of a statement than a question. Gilgamesh didn’t answer immediately. Shadow waited.

  Finally, Gilgamesh looked away. “I’ve been following Tiamat since my transformation.” He missed her. A lot.

  Shadow nodded. “Only an Arm, or one of Occum’s stabilized Beast Men, are able to oppose a human intellect Beast Man such as Enkidu. He’s a brand new danger, but something us older Crows long feared.”

  Shadow was far too observant. He knew how badly Enkidu in particular and Beast Men in general terrified Gilgamesh.

  Gilgamesh shrugged again. The cuckoo clock struck eight and both Crows paused to let the bird chirp.

  “The events in Philadelphia made the world a more hazardous place and has driven the distrust between the Major Transforms to a higher point than ever before,” Shadow said. “A single Transform, Sadie Tucker – who you’ve met – serves as the sole point of contact between the Focuses and Crows. The Arms and Focuses are no longer working together. The Crows fear Occum is now a captive of his own Beast Men. We’re all alone now.”

  Gilgamesh nodded. From the bound letters he had learned the Crows had always thought of themselves as alone. Gilgamesh suspected their fears and worries were a mistake.

  “Don’t get careless, my friend,” Shadow said. “Don’t forget how dangerous an Arm can be.”

  “I doubt I’ll forget the danger,” Gilgamesh said, nodding. “They’re a lure that could easily become a trap.”

  “Also, don’t discount the Arm you call Tiamat just because she’s young. She’s the only one caught up in the Philadelphia Massacre who came out unscathed. She’s one to watch.”

  Gilgamesh smiled. Unscathed, eh? Gilgamesh patted his leg, where h
e now wore Tiamat’s knife. He had long suspected his goddess was something special.

  “I prepared something for you, for when you leave,” Shadow said, changing the subject. “I’ve been working on this ever since you showed up.”

  Gilgamesh raised an eyebrow in question. Shadow took a binder from the drawer of a Queen Anne table laden with ceramic mice and a shadowbox filled with wine corks, and put the binder on Gilgamesh’s lap. Gilgamesh opened up the binder. Inside were all the notes from those long conversations, the letters he and the other Philadelphia Crows had sent to each other, all neatly punched and ordered. The binder held the cumulative wisdom of Philadelphia, a priceless treasure as well as a dangerous collection of information. Any Transform researcher in the country would give his soul for the contents of the binder.

  “I meant these notes for you, to keep safe,” Gilgamesh said. He had taken them out of Philadelphia in a grimy box, stained and disorganized.

  Shadow nodded. “Of course. Don’t forget about the memory problems that come with lean times, though. I’d hate for you to forget the Philadelphia Massacre and what you and the others accomplished before then. I made copies of every page. You don’t need to worry about losing them.”

  Gilgamesh took the binder into his lap and paged through it. It contained about half of all the notes and letters they had written, all Gilgamesh had been able to recover.

  “I’ve added to the notes,” Shadow said. “If you look in the back, I appended a small section containing everything I could think of that would be worth knowing. The history of Crows that’s safe to know, the names of all the Crows I know, and my observations on Transform Sickness. Add to these notes as you talk to other Crows and send back to me anything you find out.”

  Gilgamesh flipped through to find the section in the back. Shadow’s small appendix was half again as large as the original notes. He closed the binder. “Thank you.”

  “I think I need to clear up a few misconceptions to help you understand what’s going on,” Shadow said, referring most likely to Gilgamesh’s personal additions to the document. “As you’ve heard, the Focuses did betray the Crows early on. The first Focuses, not the Focuses who transformed after the end of the Quarantine. I consider this distinction very important. Second, Chevalier does have a claim to the St. Louis Detention Center; he lived in the Center during the Quarantine, though he hasn’t personally used the place since the Quarantine years. His prickly nature is why the two of us don’t see eye to eye, but Chevalier isn’t a bad man just because he and I don’t get along. Echo, on the other hand…”

  “The warning letters?”

  “I get them too. I don’t know who’s behind them. I don’t believe Echo is.”

  “The intelligence of Arms and Beast Men?”

  “I once too believed them to be sub-human, but what you and the other Philadelphia Crows learned changed my mind.” Pause. “How many eggs did I flicker into existence behind you?” Shadow asked. A test. Just like Thomas the Dreamer, but Shadow dropped the test like a bomb into the middle of a conversation. Trickier, too: the ‘dross illusion eggs’ had only been ‘visible’ to Gilgamesh’s metasense for three seconds and they had been moving quickly at the time.

  “One hundred and seventeen.”

  “You’re improving,” Shadow said. He grinned widely. “As you mature further, this and your other talents will improve.” Gilgamesh nodded. He needed hope, in any form.

  “You need to know I’ve never met a young Crow like yourself,” Shadow said. Gilgamesh wasn’t sure of the proper response to Shadow’s statement, so he lowered his eyes and watched Shadow’s hands at work. The Guru grasped a pen in his hands from the end table beside him, but he didn’t write with it. Instead, he merely twisted it between his fingers, and as he did so, Gilgamesh faintly sensed Shadow’s hands manipulating tiny dross currents. Gilgamesh waited patiently through the long silence.

  “Did you know the Focuses are organizing again?” Shadow asked.

  Gilgamesh shook his head.

  “The younger Focuses are pushing the Council and succeeding, though I’m not happy with the method the troublemakers used to depose the West Region representative last March,” Shadow said. “Each year there are more Transforms. We now have two Arms. Beast Men abound. Crows gather in flocks for the first time in a half decade, in Boston, Portland and San Francisco. I fear the same events that overcame the Philadelphia flock may strike at them, as well.”

  Gilgamesh shivered.

  “When you add everything together, the sum is frightful. The Transform community is no longer stable,” Shadow said, sounding formal, and twisted his pen again. “The old order, in place since the early days of the Kennedy administration, has no place for Beast Men or Arms. Things must change, and we Crows find ourselves in the center of the conflict. How are we to survive something like this?”

  Shadow wasn’t a comforting person to listen to. He noticed far more troubles than Gilgamesh did and Gilgamesh saw plenty on his own. He suddenly felt profoundly young and inexperienced, despite his forty some odd years.

  “What do I do, sir?”

  Shadow shrugged. “I can’t tell you what to do because you’re something new. The Arm you follow made you into something different. The older Crows know several advancement pathways. I can teach you them when you get older, but only if you want. You might come up with something unique, something we need to add to the Crow repertoire.”

  Gilgamesh sat motionless, embarrassed. At the edge of his metasense, he found he could almost make sense of the complex dross patterns surrounding Shadow. Shadow’s dross patterns were like the dross art, but intricate, potent, useful in some way the dross art wasn’t useful, and quite specifically hidden.

  “What I’ll ask of you is that you follow your heart. We need you and whatever new talents you discover. Keep in contact with me. What you learn, and share, I can teach. Because the Transform society is changing, we’re going to need to find new paths to survive. I think you’ve found a new road to walk. Keep on it.”

  Gilgamesh smiled and began to plan his search for Tiamat. Shadow opened the small drawer in the end table and pulled out a business card. He gave it to Gilgamesh. Anthony Peloquin, it said, in an elegant cursive script, certainly a false identity, along with the stationery shop’s address.

  “And don’t forget to write!” Shadow said, a big smile on his face.

  Chapter 2

  Air. Food and water. Shelter. Juice. Transforms might put juice, the substance in them that defines them as Transforms, third on that list. The cannier among them, including most Arms, put it second.

  “Inventing Our Future”

  Carol Hancock: September 23, 1967

  After two days of hunting I hit the jackpot in the Quad Cities, a frail forty-ish woman living alone, on the verge of going Monster and of course high on juice. She laid curled up in her bed in her apartment, surrounded by her collection of ceramic cats and four live Maine Coons. I staked her out for about two hours, figuring out the particulars. As far as hunts went, they didn’t come any cleaner than this.

  I took her as she slept. My chosen method of body disposal was simply to crack her bones until she folded up small and carry the body out in a duffle bag. With my strength, I would make the bag seem light and no one would suspect a body. She would vanish into thin air. People vanished all the time. With only two Arms in the country, police didn’t think of Arms first when they thought up perps.

  I took her juice and I fell beside her, enjoying the spectacular ecstasy of the kill, even nicer because of the huge load of juice in a woman so close to going Monster, and because I didn’t have to worry about discovery.

  She was a normal kill. Perfectly normal. I had no reason to suspect anything unusual might occur. None at all.

  My name is Carol Hancock and I’m an Arm. You might have already guessed that.

  My dark rap sheet includes about 70 kills, 40 of them men, 30 or so women, and three kids. I wasn’t happy about the kids.
They never get Transform Sickness. Like all Arms I’m a predator who preys on Transforms, human survivors of a disease, Transform Sickness. The Shakes. I made my transformation about a year ago, in September of 1966. Armenigar’s Syndrome was the official name of my condition.

  Back in the third quarter of 1967, Transform Sickness was still new and uncommon, like the hippies, the counterculture and the societal effects of the baby boomer generation, and the latter topics rated the front pages of the newsweeklies, not the Shakes. Still, the number of cases increased every year. People who paid attention to such things were terrified. The researchers had no idea why the numbers kept climbing. The pundits called the Shakes everything from a mad plot by the Russians to the next step in human evolution. Everybody else watched the Carol Burnett Show.

  When people contracted Transform Sickness, some lived, and some died. Of the approximately 85% who lived through their transformations, the vast majority made normal transformations. Most of those new Transforms didn’t recognize the change until too late and they died. Unfortunately, Transforms can’t live without help from a special woman Transform termed a Focus.

  The few who did recognize their transformation, however, could survive quite nicely if they managed to hook up with a Focus. If they did, they would live to a long, healthy old age. Even back in 1967, studies showed that Transforms, if they survived the initial onset of the disease and found a juice jockey, were actually healthier than normal humans.

  In addition, in about one in every hundred transformations, some genetic trigger gets tweaked and the Transform grows a lump on her hippocampus termed a metacampus. If she survives the initial coma and the transition period afterwards, she becomes a Major Transform. Common wisdom said the only Major Transforms were women, Focuses and Arms like me. Common wisdom was wrong, and the male version of the Arm, the Chimera, was plain nasty.

  Fortunately for humanity Arms and Chimeras were rare. In late 1967, in the entire United States, only eight known Arms had transformed and six of them had died. Of the two survivors, the oldest was Stacy Keaton. The other was me. As an Arm I had acquired a full set of predator’s instincts with my transformation, along with a large helping of some nasty sadistic tendencies, over a hundred pounds of extra muscles, a Major Transform’s metasense, and an extremely small chance of surviving. I spent my first three months as an Arm as a human lab rat for the researchers, and the next six months trapped in brutal captivity that was part apprenticeship and part slavery.