All Beasts Together (The Commander) (2 page)

And terrifying
.  All things cost, and the Law was no different, despite its benefits. Because of the Law, Enkidu had lost his wild animal abandon, the passion driving him away from humanity.  The most chilling loss Enkidu discovered was that he had forgotten the concept of
money
. Even now, after weeks relearning it, he still struggled with the concept.

The Law
had weakened the wild part of him, but America was no jungle.  The Law allowed him to retain his understanding of modern society, and Enkidu knew he was far more powerful as a whole because of the Law.

What had his Master lost?

“I am now the Law,” Wandering Shade said.  The afternoon sun illuminated his face like the glory of an angel.  “Now I understand.  Now I share your responsibility.  I am now perfection incarnate and I finally know the way forward: my flocks of Beasts, the Hunters and the others, are going to multiply until we are strong enough to fight the Transform leaders.  Then we shall fight, and then we shall win.  All shall have the Law and be content.  All who take on the Law shall be allies.  All who spurn the Law shall be our enemies.”

His words were formal and hummed with power. 
Enkidu smiled.

“I have a present for you, Enkidu,
as an example of my power,” the Wandering Shade said.  “I brought this nameless wretch of a Beast Man all the way back to near humanity with but one potent Legalization.  I have named him Horace.”

His Master’s tone implied an in-joke, but Enkidu didn’t understand. 
A bipedal armored bear appeared beside his Master, between the pantry and the non-functioning stove.  The Beast hadn’t been there a second before.

Wandering Shade had indeed become all
-powerful.

“I am Horace, and I am to be your trainee,” the bear said
, in Law-driven formality.  He bowed to Enkidu.  “I abase myself to you, and humble myself to you, so that you can train me well.”  Horace, like Grendel, was far older and stronger as a Beast-Man than Enkidu, but he had lost his mind in the process.  Now, under the Law, he had regained enough mind to be able to speak, and kept much of his former strength.

“I accept the responsibility,” Enkidu said, guided by the Law.

Things were looking up, he decided.

Gilgamesh: September 20, 1967

Gilgamesh got up in the morning refreshed
, without pain, and nearly full up on dross.  He didn’t remember where he was for several heartbeats, until the memories all came flooding back to him.  If he could trust his memories, this was Shadow’s spare room, in Shadow’s apartment above his stationery shop.  Gilgamesh had nested here for an unknown number of days, resting and recovering from his panic and injuries.  He had left the room only to go to the bathroom across the hallway.  In the beginning, he had crawled to the bathroom at night, panicked even by the idea of leaving his tiny sanctuary.  In his time here, he hadn’t had to deal with anyone at all.

He
poked his head into the hallway and smelled bacon, eggs, orange juice and toast.  On the opposite wall was an oval mirror ringed in tarnished brass.  Below hung a fake birdbath filled with tiny ceramic robins.  Gilgamesh looked at his reflection and barely recognized himself: thin, emaciated and far too youthful for his own comfort.

“Come on over here,” Shadow said, calmingly cheerful, from the dinette attached to his tiny kitchenette.  Gilgamesh startled for only a second before he
padded down the hall, hungry.

“Have some breakfast,” Shadow said
, placing a plate at the seat nearest Gilgamesh.  Shadow sat at the other seat at the small two-person table.  “Dig in.  I had an inkling you might come out today.”

“Thank you,” Gilgamesh said, and sat.  He ate a rasher of bacon and sipped from a cat-inscribed glass of orange juice.

“How much do you remember?” Shadow asked.  Gilgamesh shrugged.  “Do you remember your name?  Do you remember you’re a Crow?”

Gilgamesh nodded.  He ate some scrambled eggs and nibbled on a slice of toast.  “I remember Philadelphia,” he said.  Shadow sat up straighter.  “I remember the attack by the two Beast Men.  I remember Wire and Tolstoy’s deaths.  I don’t remember
many details.”

“I’
m glad you remember.  Crows often forget everything after such a horrific set of experiences.”

“Even that they were Crows?” Gilgamesh asked.

Shadow nodded.

He remembered Shadow’s meals, large ones, left waiting by his door after Shadow had gone to bed at night.  He
didn’t understand his current hunger.

“Stressed Crows don’t eat much,” Shadow said, easily picking Gilgamesh’s question out of his mind.  Typical senior Crow behavior, but to Gilgamesh’s surprise, the mind-reading no longer bothered him.  “Panicked Crows don’t eat anything, even when they
are suffering from grievous wounds.”

Gilgamesh flashed back to Enkidu’s initial attack.  He
had slashed Gilgamesh’s hamstrings.  He stopped eating for a moment and felt the backs of his thighs.  They were still tender to the touch, bloated and swollen.

“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 th
e 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 metasense
d 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.”