The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) (42 page)

Only, in this case, he had damn well better win this battle, or
the war
would be long and nasty.

Phobos walked out and took his place, cocky and sure of himself.  Gilgamesh walked out across the muddy field on his shaky legs.  Only at the last instant did he remember to acknowledge Thomas, which he did with a bow.

“Start!”  Thomas the Dreamer clapped his hands, and a barely visible red line sprang up around them.  Just a marker.  The responsibility to keep their dross effects inside the ring fell upon each of the duelists.

Illusions of Monsters walked toward Gilgamesh.  Fear of being eaten assailed him.  All induced by Phobos’s wizardry, Phobos, the Crow master of fear.

Gilgamesh golf bombed the Monsters, treating them as real.  Either way, they were going to be distracted.  At Phobos, he hurled a handful of marbles.

Two could play mind games, and Gilgamesh had studied the multi-Arm predator effect intensely.  Just in case Kali and her crew decided to pay him a visit.

Each marble represented an Arm.  Figuratively.

Phobos shrieked.

Gilgamesh fell to the ground, the club of a Beast Man close enough to his head to ruffle his hair.

Gilgamesh shrieked as well, and detonated his ‘many duplicate Gilgameshes’ golf bomb ground zero as he rolled.  Illusion?  Real?  Gilgamesh didn’t have time to think, just react.

This was going to be a long minute.

Tonya Biggioni:

She simultaneously existed in two worlds.  In one world, she inhabited the holy halls of the glorious Focus’s palace, and she was Acolyte Tonya, loyal Focus servant of Gloriana, the glorious Focus, the only Focus favored by God’s grace.  She held in her grasp the hideous dark one, the Keaton-Monster, now hers.

In another world, she was Tonya Biggioni, witch, Council Focus, and rebel.  She sat in a dingy corrugated metal warehouse, captured by her own personal nightmare, Focus Patterson, the leader of the first Focuses.  In her grasp was her old friend and recent enemy, Stacy Keaton, who looked like she had been tortured unmercifully, missing an eye, an ear, several fingers, and with three ribs open to the air.  Patterson’s goons had chained Keaton to one of the rusty I-beams that held up the dingy warehouse.

In both worlds, they had tagged each other.  Tonya’s will was her own, again, at least as much as ever.  She waved Danny away after telling him to get the rest of her people out of the line of fire.  Danny scurried off.

“Fucking Biggioni, what did you do to my head!  I know I’m chained to a wall in a rundown warehouse, not stuck in a goddamned fairy princess’s castle.”

“We tagged each other, Stacy.”  They sat on marble tiles, spackled with quartz crystals that glittered like stars.  Or maybe on a filthy concrete floor, layered with the refuse of decades.

“Well, let’s untag each other.”  Keaton lay heavy in Tonya’s arms, and her hard face was pale.  “What the fuck?  I suppose I can kill you to get free of this.”  She twitched, but moved no more.  “Okay, so I can’t kill you, either.  What the fuck did we do to each other?  Get out of my mind!”

“Focus your willpower on the illusion.  I can see both the illusion and the real,” Tonya said. “You should be able to, as well.”

Keaton’s eyes narrowed and she stared into the opposite wall for eight or nine seconds.  “Okay.  That worked.  Now what?  Let me guess.  You aren’t in here to rescue me, are you?”

“No.  Carol’s taken over.  Shucked your tag, even.”

“Bitch.”  Stacy sighed.  “She didn’t tag you, though, save with that piddly little thing.  Big mistake.”

“If you think I’m going to let you continue your idiotic plan, you’ve got another thing coming.”

“Oh, big fucking shit, how are you going to stop me?”

A sudden, flaming, unreasonable anger at Stacy’s challenge filled Tonya.  “Like this.”

Tonya leaned on her tag to Keaton, which provided an ‘in’ for her charisma.

“That’s called empathy, Stacy, and guess what?  You’re about to learn all you ever wanted to know about empathy.”  She pushed her face up against Keaton’s and sprayed the Arm with spittle, snarling and almost biting at her.

After just a few seconds, Keaton yelled “Stop, ma’am!”  Tears leaked from the corner of Keaton’s eyes.  “Please!  I’ll do anything!”

Tonya stopped.  Keaton shivered in her arms.  “Good, because I’ve got something to ask you,” Tonya said.  Something strange oozed through her mind.  She felt like a damned predator herself, as if she had just challenged Stacy
as an Arm
, and won.  “If I fed you juice, could you rip free of this I-beam?”  Tonya didn’t understand what Patterson intended when she had sent Tonya to replay her memories, but Tonya doubted she wanted this.  Tonya tagging the Arm?  Yes.  Tonya letting Stacy tag her back?  Tonya picking up a dose of Arm aggression?  Not fucking likely.

“You don’t know how to fucking feed me juice,” Stacy said, her voice hoarse.  “Besides, what are we going to do, go up to Princess Fairytale and ask her politely to give up?  Unless you want to undo this empathy shit, because I’m not killing nobody with this crap in my head.”

“There’s a difference between killing enemies in self-defense, and killing and torturing innocents,” Tonya said.  “The world isn’t written in black and white.  Most of us live in the gray.  There are few innocents here.”

“Goddamned Focuses,” Stacy said.  “She’d better stand still, too, because the motherfuckers beat on my head with crowbars and I’m still dizzy.  I kept Patterson from grabbing my mind by hiding my will in my quiet pools, but that didn’t stop her goons from physically taking me apart.  I’m not sure I can even stand without help.”

“I’ll help you the old fashioned way,” Tonya said, wondering what in the bloody blue blazes a ‘quiet pool’ was.  She found a Transform not wearing a tag from the nearest Focuses.  She caught the Transform’s eye, and with charisma, carefully directed the woman Transform over to them.

“Milady?” the Transform said, with a curtsey.  She wore a long dress and head covering like something out of the middle ages.  “What service may I do for you?”

“Look the other way,” Tonya said. “Back toward us slowly.”  The Transform obeyed.

The Arm did her thing, as gunfire erupted near the door of the warehouse.  Tonya fed Keaton juice from her juice buffer, through a temporary tag on the hapless Transform.  Through Keaton, Tonya experienced the thrill of the kill, an emotion she hadn’t felt since she and her household had given up Monster hunting nearly a decade previous.  She smiled.  Killing was as good as she remembered.

“Couldn’t we find a way to save this idiot?” Keaton said, as she held the helpless woman in her arms and sucked juice.  The woman’s skirt turned gradually pink with Stacy’s blood.

The new link with Keaton affected the Arm as much as it affected Tonya.

The thunder of a thousand lions shook the walls.  Transforms scattered back toward Tonya and Stacy, except for Patterson, two other Focuses, a Crow and a baby Arm.

“Stay.  Out!” Patterson screamed, and waved her hands.  Patterson and her Focuses used a multi-Focus effect, something more obscure than a standard juice pattern.  It caused the same echoes in her mind as the trick Occum pulled when he had redirected the Noble Terror roars.  Horrific screams echoed into the warehouse from outside.

“What happened to you and your team?  How did
She
take you?” Tonya asked, her voice lost in the mayhem surrounding them.

“Treachery,” Keaton said.  The Arm lay back against Tonya with her eyes closed, processing the memories of her capture amid the bliss of the juice draw.  Tonya wondered if she noticed that she gently stroked the cheek of the dying Transform.  “We blew our way in, knocked out her minimal guards, and rushed her fucking warehouse.  We caught her with her knickers down, using a Dreaming trick to make her think we’d be attacking at sunrise, coming from the east.  Only…”  She paused.  “We got jumped by this pulsing yellow cloud thing that took out my merc army, froze Flo in place, and forced me to retreat into my quiet pools.”

“And Bass?”

“She froze as well, but only until Patterson showed up.  When Patterson freed her, Bass said ‘You’ve been improving St. Judith, Gloriana’ and ‘Keaton’s right there, invisible’, pointing at me.  I tried to shoot them all, but Patterson did something to me to make me think my weapons turned to dust when I touched them, so I ran.  I didn’t get ten paces before Bass activated some of her trick shit she had gotten into my body and caused one of my psychotic breaks.  I charged her, she treated it as a challenge fight, defeated me in my addled state, and forced a tag on me.”  She paused.  “That tag!  I couldn’t get rid of it, but it’s gone, now.  Whatever we did with the screwy tags we just did got rid of it.”  Another pause.  “I don’t remember much after Bass traded me to Patterson.  In return, Bass got one of Patterson’s hidden pet Arms and some élan-based upgrades Patterson had been apparently dangling in front of her for quite some time.”

“
She
set Bass free, afterwards,” Tonya said.  “Along with one of her pet Arms.  We’re considering her a traitor, now.”

Keaton smiled.  “Bass is dead.  We’re all going to be going after her.”  Pause.  “It’s done.” The juice-drained Transform fell to the side, dead.  The Arm stood, flexed her incredible muscles and yanked.  The chain didn’t come loose.

“Take ten points for yourself, Tonya.  You stuck me too far above my optimum, and I don’t have time to burn it off healing.”  Tonya took the ten points of juice back.  Stacy yanked again, and the stay, where the chain joined the I-beam, parted from the I-beam with a loud metal groan.

Tonya turned to glare at Patterson, her eyes narrowed, and a nasty smile slowly covered her face as she contemplated Patterson’s defenseless back.  Shirley turned to them, shock on her face…and hit them with a juice pattern that stopped both of their hearts.

Dolores Sokolnik:

“Don’t be bashful about your advice,” the Commander said, her words at odds with her ‘cheeky student Arms should keep their mouths shut’ expression when Del actually gave her advice.  “I can always ignore it.  That’s an order.”

“Ma’am,” Del said.  She wasn’t sure what the Commander used for punishment detail, but based on what happened to Arm Debardelaben, it was likely paperwork and touchy diplomatic missions.

Every minute inside Patterson’s compound weighed heavier on Del, as if the place itself wanted to flatten her into a pancake.  She hadn’t ever imagined a place so choked with illusions that she couldn’t tell with any certainty what was real and what was illusion.  She had a bad feeling nothing she could see or metasense was real.  For one thing, the gritty mundane reality she thought she saw was clearly an illusion, as at least half and perhaps three quarters of the devious bombs and traps the Hero and the Commander had them disarming didn’t exist.

They should be charging Patterson’s warehouse, but they waited, having drifted to the other side of the compound.  The Commander wanted to grab more people for a charge, and far too many were scattered, and at least one squad of attackers had fallen for Patterson’s tricks and attacked another squad in the Commander’s army.  They were all mostly behind Patterson’s front lines; Patterson’s numbers were caught up fighting group three, just as the Commander wanted.

Nothing else worked right.  Nobody cared, and they all chattered about various improvisations as they moved, grabbed stragglers and pulled them out of whatever strange mental headspace they had wandered into.  The worst was some Noble bipedal toad with a half dozen writhing sucker arms attached at each shoulder, who thought he was playing miniature golf.  When asked, he couldn’t remember his name.

“Status?  Anything?” the Commander said.  “Or should we go back and try again to convince Viscount Nash the warehouse is that-a-way?”  The Viscount was stuck going round and round a twenty foot wide circle, and without realizing, had partway changed into his giant anaconda combat form.

“I see the warehouse now,” the Hero said, and pointed.  The wrong way.

“For the fourth time,” the Commander said.  “I’m keeping count.”

The Hero rolled her eyes.  “Gather up group four and charge.  Our charge will draw everyone else to us, we don’t need to shake them out of these illusions individually.”

Del had never imagined anything like the Hancock – Haggerty team.  They talked over each other, stepped on each other’s toes, and did all the wrong things – and didn’t get into dominance problems.  The Commander was as heroic as the Hero, though even Del knew better than to say her observation out loud.  And Arm Haggerty, the supposed loner Hero, turned out to be an excellent battle tactician.  Neither bit of data had been in Ma’am Keaton’s books.

“Ma’am, ma’am, we’ve passed the warning point for lack of progress,” Del said, carrying out her official responsibility for keeping track of things.  Too much time had passed, and too many had fallen.

“We always do,” Haggerty said.  “Carol’s always too optimistic.”

“You’re one to talk,” the Commander said.  “You said we’d either be dancing on Patterson’s corpse or be dead by this point.”

“My feet are ready for the dancing.”

“I still think we need more dancing partners.”  She put her hands to her lips and whistled.  “Armenigar!  Here!”