All Beasts Together (The Commander) (44 page)

“Bring me one,” the Wandering Shade said.  Enkidu
opened the simple barrier, little more than a few wooden planks marking off the boundary of each pen, and brought one of the men forward.  The other slaves cowered against the wall, as far away as their pens permitted.

“This one’s named John.”  John was in his twenties, the most vigorous of the bunch.  Once he
got used to being a slave he hadn’t been a problem.  “You need to be careful with them, Master.  They’re fragile.”

John bowed at the Wandering Shade’s feet.
  He sported abundant purple-yellowish bruises and a huge fresh scar across his neck and down his chest, evidence of his reluctance to get used to slavery.

“No Law.”

“No, Master.  No Law, save the Law in me.  I’ve marked them.”

“I can
tell.  Élan marking, eh?”

“Like a territory marking, only afterwards, you clean as much of the élan off as you can.”

“You didn’t do anything special to get them to obey?  I’m surprised.”

“I was, too.  I thought I’d
need to leave them chained and watch over them, but once I mark them, they don’t run off.”

“How did you think of this, Enkidu?”

Enkidu turned away, abashed.  “I’d like to claim it as a big project or plan, Master, but it was all by accident.  I collected a normal to enslave a few weeks ago, but the Gals ripped him up.  So, I thought if I marked the slaves as mine they might pass inspection.  I marked my next slave, as a test.  The marking worked out fine, except the slave died of juice poisoning a few days later.  So, for my third slave, after I marked him, I cleaned off as much of the élan as I could, to leave as small as mark on him as possible.  Turned out the slave obeyed me, enslaved by the élan.”

“Hmm. 
These slaves might make a good army.”

“Yes, Master.
”  Enkidu would like an army, but as usual reality didn’t cooperate.  “Save for one problem.”

“What’s that?” the Wandering Shade said.

“Once I mark them, they’re sort of in my head.”

The Wandering Shade stopped his examination of the slave and looked up at Enkidu.  “In your head?”

“Yes, Master.”

“
What do you mean, ‘in your head’?”

“
Master, I can’t hold more slaves in my head than I own already.”

“You know this, without trying?”

Enkidu nodded.  “Yes, Master.”  Didn’t everything work that way?  He just knew how to take élan, knew how to keep the Gals alive after being properly marked by the Law, knew how to mark things as his, knew how to gather élan – and knew he couldn’t hold many of these slaves.

“I have a suggestion for later,” the Wandering Shade said.  “Practice with this
.  Attempt to train yourself to hold more slaves.”

“Yes, Master.”  Enkidu hated training.  Training was unnatural.  He was what he was and that was enough.  He
would do it anyway.  “I thought of another thing, Master.  I think, with this, and with the Law, I could enslave other Transforms.  Male Transforms.  I just don’t know how I would keep them alive.”

“Joshua
is already doing that,” the Wandering Shade said.

Enkidu growled.  He
had been hearing far too much about Joshua recently.  He didn’t like it.  Nor did he like what he was hearing about Odin.  He had taught both of them how to create Pack Alphas, and ever since they had been coming up with new ideas as well, especially Odin.  That annoyed him.  Enkidu came up with new ideas, no one else.  However, the Wandering Shade had altered the Law in all his Hunters, so they too considered the Law imperfect, needing to be improved.  Now everyone spent their time trying to improve the Law, because improving the Law was now part of the Law.  It made Enkidu’s head hurt at times, but it worked.

“Keep them alive?” Enkidu asked.

“No.  Enslave them.  He did it differently, by exchanging blood.”  Enkidu winced at the typical Joshua-ism.  “Joshua wants to exchange blood with a Focus and make her part of his pack.  What he calls a Pack Mistress.”

“What possible use
would a Pack Mistress Focus be?” Enkidu said.  Oh.  Right.  “They’d be able to keep male Transforms alive, wouldn’t they?”

“Yes.  Exactly.  Only I’m not sure exchanging blood with a Focus will be enough to hold her,” the Wandering Shade said.  “As
a Major Transform, a Focus shouldn’t be so easily held.  They can heal themselves around such a minor marking.”

Enkidu closed his eyes and thought.  His slaves would work better if they had a Focus bitch to ensorcel them with charisma. 
Then
he might be able to stabilize an army of them!

“Master, Joshua’s an idiot.”

“You’ve said that before,” the Wandering Shade said.  “Have you figured out a way to hold on to a Focus?”

“Yes.  Master, it should be possible to mark a Focus with the Law.”

“The Law is for us, not for the worthless Focus bitches,” the Wandering Shade said.  His voice was tight with hate and vitriol.  “They’re not good enough.  Giving them the Law is too dangerous.”

“Not if you made them subservient
to us Hunters, as part of the Law you gave to the Focus.”  Enkidu almost gasped, realizing his error.  “Subservient to you as well.”

The Wandering Shade frowned
and paced, back and forth between the slave pens.  The slave backed nervously away, out of the path of Wandering Shade’s pacing.  “Focuses have tricks.”

“Some Focuses have tricks,” Enkidu said.  “Not many.  Most can’t do squat save move juice and smile prettily.”

“You may be right.  We may be able to enslave the weaker Focuses instead of having to kill them all.  Perhaps this is worth an experiment or two.”

“So,” Enkidu said.  “Have I paid enough? 
Have I won myself back into your beneficence?”

“Are you tired of being an experimental subject?”

“I want to be a free Hunter again.”

“If you’re volunteering, then I’ve got a job for you,” his Master said.  “Odin has been negotiating with Joshua about a plan of his:
he wants to hunt down the Talking Arm using both their packs and their trainees.  My price for reinstating you is your participation in this operation.”

“Master,
Odin’s plan won’t work,” Enkidu said.  “As soon as any of us Hunters gets into each other’s territory, we’re going to be fighting each other, not the Arm.”  He paused.  “But I have an idea on how to make this work.”

“Tell me,” Wandering Shade said.

“According to Odin, the Talking Arm hunts a much larger territory than she holds tight to her.  The three of us converge on her smaller home territory simultaneously, when we know she’s there.  She won’t be able to take on three mature Hunters, their packs and their trainees.”  Enkidu chuckled.  “We’ll fight…over her remains.”

“Very good, very good,” Wandering Shade said.  “I’ll propose this to Odin.  I’m sure he’ll accept, and I’m sure he can find something to trade to Joshua to get his acceptance.”  Wandering Shade smiled.  “I think we’re finally going to kill the Talking Arm.”

Enkidu smiled, echoing his Master’s expectations in his heart.  His pack howled, upstairs and in the yard, echoing his delight.

The slave man passed out in terror at Enkidu’s feet.  They always d
id that.

Carol Hancock: February 19, 1968

Bobby slept.  I sat cross-legged
at the end of the bed, watching him.  His face flickered as the warm air rising from the heater moved the curtain and interrupted the shadows from the rising sun.  He looked like a forest spirit sleeping an enchanted sleep.

H
is eyes opened.  The shifting of the bed had wakened him.  He watched me as if I held his life in my hands.  He didn’t cringe any more, his cringes replaced by a hopeless silence, always waiting on me.

“I never apologized for what I did to you,” I said. 
The words were hard to say, harder than they ever should have been.  He was supposed to be prey.

However,
I had done a lot of hard things in my life.  This was just one more.

His passive stillness shattered like a quiet pool
hit by a rock.

“Carol, I understand,” Bobby said, and smiled.  “Come here and give me a hug.”

Well, that’s how
my imagination told the story.

In reality, I got:

“Are you going to kill me now?” Bobby asked, depressed.

“No,” I said.  Uncannily, he hit the vulnerable spot inside me, the dark beast lusting to do what he feared.  “I screwed up before.  You can see what I’ve done since then.”

“You kill me in your nightmares.  The ones where you scream so.”

I turned away.  My nightmares kept getting worse.  I killed him in my nightmares, the eyes of the killer clown on my back.  I killed my children and my estranged husband, too, whenever they showed up inside the nightmare pinball game.  In my nightmare the pinballs turned into my friends.  They hunted me; I tried to kill them and failed.  I couldn’t talk to him about what I didn’t understand myself.

“Look, those are just bad dreams,” I said, more thoughtfully, after turning back to face him.
“I care for you.  I care for you a lot.  You’re right, though.  I can’t promise I’ll always care for you the way I do now.”  I had no idea why I loved him, and I had been shocked at the emotion.  I damned well couldn’t promise my emotions wouldn’t change again.

“So I
won’t make a promise I’m not sure of.  I can promise I’ll take care of you, though.” I made a hell of a commitment here.  I continued anyway. “If the time ever comes, I’ll set you up as best I can, with money and whatever else.  You promise never to speak a word of me to anyone else and I’ll let you go your way in peace.”  I couldn’t imagine ever letting Bobby out of my control.  He knew too much.  He would be a danger to me if he ever decided to speak.  In truth, it would be smarter to kill him than to let him go.

I would be smarter to kill him now.  I forced
my Arm instincts away.

Bobby relaxed a bit after I made my promise, believing me.  He leaned back against the headboard of the bed, pulling up the top blanket to wrap around himself to keep warm.  I shifted to allow him to pull the comforter out from under me.

“I never understand you,” he said. “Every once in a while I think I get you, and then you go and do something I can’t figure out at all.  You’re something different, and you’ve got some far out stuff going on inside of you.  But this’d be a lot easier if I could understand you at all.  Why you do what you do to people.”

I sighed.  Getting naked.  I
wanted to say my apology and be done with it, but nothing ever comes easy.

“Bobby, most of the people I claim want to be controlled.  Like Ernie.  Or Dick.”  Ernie Absoth was a real estate agent and had been decaying in the grip of alcoholism when I found him.  Dick Svetsrichen was missing something essential in his head.  He was a mailman and he just wanted someone, anyone, to tell him what to do.

I didn’t mention Bobby himself, of course, but he didn’t violate the rule.  Without a master, he lived by the mantra of ‘well enough is good enough’.  I wasn’t sure why, but his natural attitude bugged the crap out of me.

He turned away, unable to
meet my gaze.  “You enjoy making people do things for you.  Controlling them.”

I couldn’t disagree.
  I did enjoy it.  I enjoyed it a lot.  I loved the stalk and the hunt, the slow destruction of the will, if not the life, and the helpless quivering of the prey in my grip.  I could have taken people less painfully, but I enjoyed the pain I caused and I had no desire to cut it short.

“I enjoy it.”

Bobby shivered and still wouldn’t face me.

“Did you enjoy
doing that to me?” he asked.

Oh, Bobby.  “You really
don’t want me to answer that,” I said, whispering to him.

He turned back to me, finally, and looked me in the eyes.

“That’s part of what I’m apologizing for.”

Bobby shook his head after a long time, eyes on the far wall
again.  “I still don’t understand.  Why do you care for me?  What can an Amazon woman like you want from me at all?”

What did I want from him?  I
might have wanted many things, if I had been a normal woman.  Love, almost certainly.  A husband.  A protector.  A provider.

Arm Hancock
didn’t want those things at all.

“I want you to be mine,” I told him.
  Amazon woman, indeed.  All the stories I told Bobby had awakened his poetic muse; he had recently been writing poems about Gilgamesh, Focus Rizzari, Keaton and I as if we were superhuman fantastic creatures.  “I want your obedience and your loyalty.”  I lowered my voice to a whisper. “I want you in my power.”

Bobby shivered.  He knew all this, at the word level.  Now he started to understand at the gut level what our ‘I’m yours’ ‘You’re mine’ rituals
meant.  Normal human reflexes should have sent him running far away from me.  He had been under my control for months, though, and no longer knew what he felt about being owned.