The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) (3 page)

Gilgamesh turned away and winced.  He could just hear the argument in his head between the two Focuses: juice experimentation is too risky and might endanger the households, you never know what the juice is going to do, yak yak yak.  He could also hear Carol’s response if they asked the Arm her opinion: no way, never, nuh uh, no new juice crap when we’re all stuck in deep deep shit…

Yet, Gilgamesh knew of one example where Major Transforms of the same type coexisted within a single household.  He smiled, thinking about it, and Sky returned the smile.  Improbably, two white rats ran up Sky’s leg, leapt on Sky’s sleeve, and studied both of the Crows, noses twitching.  So, Dan Harper’s rats were out again, eh?  They had always seemed to be out whenever he and Sky held one of their tense confrontational conversations back in Inferno’s old Boston home.  However, the ten year old Inferno kid and his rats weren’t Gilgamesh’s problem anymore.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking, old friend?” Sky said.

“Noble households.”

“Yes.  They even call it a tag, these days.”

“So what do we do?” Gilgamesh said.  “Create this oversized Affinity bond, then what?  Get the households to tag each other?  These are Transforms, not Nobles.  How do we convince a household to create a tag?  Who would we talk to?  What is there to talk to?”

---

“You two are doing some large scale dross manipulation,” Connie said.  “I can sense it.  What are you two idiot Crows up to, anyway?”

“We’re trying to get your two households to work together better.  I assume you understand the dangers associated with last night’s problem?” Sky said.

Connie nodded, as did Sylvie, Helen and a still pale and shaken Van.  The two Crows had maneuvered them into the common laundry room, by way of manipulation and simple leverage of rank as household Major Transforms.  Connie stood at one end of the warm room, and the three people from Gail’s household stood at the other, with the two Crows between them. Three of the dryers and two of the washing machines provided a background ambience of thumping, sloshing, and whirring.

“What we did was only the first step,” Gilgamesh said.  “For the rest, we need your help.”

“What sort of help?” Connie said.  She set her jaw and crossed her arms, and Gilgamesh wished that he hadn’t gotten sucked into this particular problem.  There were far too many difficult women in his life already.

“The next step is for the households to tag each other,” Sky said, then spread his hands flamboyantly.  “Wait, wait, I
know
what you’re about to say.  You aren’t Major Transforms, you can’t tag anything.  Yet, you do direct the household as a group.”

“This isn’t making any sense to me, at all,” Sylvie said.  She shared Connie’s crossed arms and set jaw.  One washing machine finished its drain cycle with a clunk and began to spin, vibrating loudly.

“What you’re suggesting is that we get our household superorganisms to tag each other,” Connie said.  “What did you two do, anyway?  Technically speaking.”

“We tagged each other, as shamans, and did the same symbolic dross manipulation that a Crow shaman does to stabilize a Noble household,” Gilgamesh said.  “For the moment, at a low level, the households are one.”

“Although this is just an analogy, think of it as the households being one, now, at the dross level.  It’s up to you to build it up at the juice level.”

“It sounds like magic,” Helen said, radiating distrust.  Helen didn’t even need to cross her arms be forbidding.  ‘Forbidding’ came so naturally to her that all she needed to do was stand there.  A middle-aged holy terror with orange hair and blue eye shadow.  As the only woman in Gail’s household who hadn’t minded last night’s antics, the sexual charge from last night made her even more forceful than normal.  He suspected that if they pulled off this household merger she and her husband, Roger, would be angling for an invite to Inferno next Friday.

“Chemical magic, Helen,” Sky said.  “What Gilgamesh and I did was reduce the number of odor cues in the Branton telling you that Gail’s household and Inferno are hostile tribes.  Alas, this has a much bigger impact on a Noble than a Transform, but there is ample evidence – written up by Ann Chiron of Inferno – that Transforms react to a wide range of juice and dross based chemical cues, even if you can’t consciously smell them all.  Household tagging will get rid of even more of these hostility-inducing odor cues.”

“Do it,” Van said.  “If that’s what’s going on, you need to do this.”  There, finally, stood the one person who wasn’t hostile.

Connie nodded.  It was grudging, but it was a nod.  “Any idea
how
, Sky?”

“Nobles, when they create a Barony, make pledges to defend each other to the death and then hug each other.  In the presence of a Crow shaman keeping a particular mental image of oneness and the Noble household in his head.  With a Noble, it’s always at the household level.”

“You two aren’t Crow shamans, are you?” Sylvie said.

Gilgamesh smiled.  “Remind me to tell you about a recent long trip I took with Duke Hoskins, Sylvie.  Sky and I both know the basics and can do them, and this is real basic stuff, compared to manipulating the Great Enabler.”

“All right, I’m willing to give it a try,” Sylvie said.  “It’s damned clear we need to do
something
.”

Sky and Gilgamesh stood and faced each other, about a yard apart.  “Go give each other a hug, and proclaim the households as one,” Gilgamesh said.

Connie and Sylvie grimaced, and they both moved slowly, but they hugged.  One of the dryers celebrated the occasion by completing its cycle, making the laundry room quieter by a minute amount.

The juice moved.

“So, are you going to tell us what’s going on, or do we need to force it out of you?” Lori said.  She was almost a foot shorter than Gail, a gymnast pixie with black hair and brown eyes.  She and Gail faced the two Crows across the same meeting room table Gilgamesh and Sky used earlier to hatch their plots.  With two hostile Focuses present, the tiny room seemed even smaller.  Gilgamesh had the urge to go hide somewhere, as Lori’s glare was hot enough to boil water, but he forced the panic down.  This was necessary.  The household Affinity bond remained feeble and unfinished.  The two Focuses needed to join, as well.

“We’re trying to bring the households together,” Sky said.  “You two need to tag each other.”

“You can’t be serious,” Lori said.  Both he and Sky nodded.  “Okay, why?”

“It’s the next step.  We’ve already gotten the households to tag each other,” Sky said.  He pushed a piece of paper across the table to Lori and Gail, outlining all the steps they had gone through so far.

Gail nodded, her attitude softening as she read.  “Neat!” she said.  “I was hoping someone would come up with something to deal with the problem.  I wasn’t looking forward to living at Littleside every Friday night.  How’s it working so far?”

“So far so good,” Sky said.  “Unfortunately, it’s incomplete and inadequate.”

Lori closed her eyes, and thought.  “You’re missing a big step in your plan,” she said.  “The households need to be able to tag their Focuses, as well.”

“That sounds quite intriguing, especially coming from a Focus.  There’s only one big problem, outside of the psychological, emotional and political – how, dearest Lori, would you propose that happen?  Technically speaking and all that, eh?”

“I don’t know.  The Inferno household superorganism can’t do anything like that.  Yet.  All I know is that what you have here isn’t the final solution.  I’m willing to give this partial cure a go, though.”

Gilgamesh understood.  No household had ever tagged their Focus before, and Transform Sickness was always cruel to the pioneers.  The risks they had already taken terrified him.  Lori was right, though.  Having a household tag their own Focus was a much bigger step, and necessary.  Eventually.  Everything else was just a twist on what the Noble baronies already did.  “How much can a household superorganism do?” he asked.  Typical Lori.  Sitting in front of today’s solution, she wanted to think and talk about tomorrow’s problems.

“Theoretically, anything that any of the member Transforms inside the household can do.  Practically, well, although we’ve been working on this problem for years, the answer is ‘not much’.  Communication, mostly.  Triggering juice patterns that a Focus sets up specifically to be used that way.  We’re missing something big, Gilgamesh.  We’ve been able to come up with only a few practical uses, enough so that we occasionally wonder if we’ve flubbed our basic theory behind the superorganisms.”

“How do we do this
today
, though?” Gail said, reminding everyone of the real problem.  “When Lori tagged me on Tuesday night that was about the most disgusting thing I’d ever experienced.”

Lori nodded.  “The standard Focus-Focus tag is foul.  I think we need to go a different direction.”

“You have an idea?”

“Yes.”  Lori paused.  “It involves a bedroom and the creation of the deep Affinity link.  I think that will be close enough to a tag to count.”

Gilgamesh took a step back, trying to get his head around the idea of Gail and Lori making love to each other.  The idea seemed wrong to him, and he wasn’t sure if it was his Crow instincts or a bit of his former pre-Transform life creeping back into his mind.  He expected Gail to explode, but instead of losing her temper or shouting ‘no way’ or something Gailish, she shrugged.

Lori walked up to Gail and stroked her left arm.  “You’re thinking of something.  Something you’ve seen or metasensed.”

“Uh huh.”  Gail frowned.  “Something or someone’s trying to keep me from remembering something, though.”

“Let me help,” Lori said.  She gave Gail a hug, resting her head between Gail’s breasts, and doing something tricky with the juice.

“Oh!”  Gail reddened.  “When we fought the White Witch Tuesday night, in the Dreaming, she tagged me, and it wasn’t awful.  Well, it was awful, because I didn’t want that monster tagging me, but the tag itself wasn’t awful.”

Lori turned, grabbed Gail’s shoulders, and kissed her like a lover.  “That’s it!  Patterson puts her households together in the Dreaming.  That explains a lot of things I’ve experienced in my espionage work over the years.”  Gilgamesh wasn’t sure what Lori was talking about, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.  “I’m willing to give this a try if you are,” she said.  She turned to Sky and then to Gilgamesh.  “Do your crazy Crow poo and block us off from both reality and our metasenses.  Gail and I need to get to the Dreaming, and she’s going to teach me how to move juice there.”

Gilgamesh and Sky did so, and then waited and watched as Lori and Gail entered the Dreaming together, huddled in each other’s arms.  An hour and twenty minutes later, he metasensed the juice move.  When Gail and Lori returned to normal consciousness, they were happy with the tags, and not disgusted.

---

“Okay,” Tiamat said, across the table from Gilgamesh, Sky, Lori and Gail, six feet of blonde hair, bad temper, and muscled predator.  “What the fuck did you do to my mind
this time!
  I want to screw the lot of you, and I know I didn’t feel that way until I came into the Branton.  Didn’t we just do this last night?”  Tiamat ate her late supper in the Branton dining room, at Gilgamesh’s suggestion, a larger late supper than normal.  Tiamat was much more tolerant with a huge meal in front of her.  With a little help from the Focuses, the room was empty except for the Major Transforms.  The late night Inferno kitchen crew had left as soon as they served Tiamat.

“We’re getting the households to tag each other,” Sky said, wrinkling his nose again at the carnivore dinner spread in front of him.  He wasn’t eating.  Gilgamesh was, not willing to turn down better quality food than Gail’s household served.

“Hell,” Tiamat said, and cut herself another slice of the roast.  “You and Lori haven’t even tagged each other, yet.  Why are you rushing into this?”

“To reduce household friction,” Gilgamesh said.  “Having two Focus households coexist in a single building has been a painful procedure.  I’m not sure you need to do anything but not say ‘no’.”

His comment earned him a glare from Tiamat.  Perhaps he was trying to be a little too slick.

“Hey, I thought last night was fun,” she said, now more Carol than Tiamat.

Sky shook his head.  “Perhaps we should ask if your partner from last night shares your opinion on this subject.”  Pause.  “Oh, we can’t, because she’s still curled up in a ball in her bedroom, reliving the experience.”

“A mere tactical issue,” Carol said, grinning.  “It would help if I tagged everyone in Inferno, individually, the same way I tagged everyone in Gail’s household.  Give me more people to play with on Friday nights.”  She paused and sighed.  “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, though.  My reaction was a bit extreme when I tagged Gail’s household, and I’m not sure I can afford that, right now, not with a potentially dangerous visit to Keaton coming up on Thursday.”

“Tag Connie,” Lori said.  She and Gail had been walking around, hand in hand, their eyes glazed and their emotions reeking of exhaustion and satiation ever since they returned from the Dreaming.  Neither he nor Sky had mustered up enough nerve to ask the obvious question about what the two of them did in the Dreaming to build the tag.  “Visualize her as the embodiment of Inferno.”  Gail nodded.  She and Lori sat together, opposite Tiamat, still hand in hand and now radiating the peace of the Buddha, something he thought well beyond Gail’s abilities.  He wouldn’t want to push either of the two Focuses now, as their combined charisma felt unstoppable.